“He has become a dictator,” said Joni Ernst, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, last January at a Montgomery County Republican forum. Of course, calling our president a dictator is nothing new. Every time that word is slung around, the quote from Carl Sagan comes to mind: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Indeed, all such statements — made in malice or folly — deserve heightened criticism from the electorate.

In a weekly Republican address, Ernst reminisced about her college days when she traveled on an agricultural exchange to the Soviet Union, where she “saw with her own eyes what a nation without freedom looks like” and “what happens to people when they lose their liberty.” While this experience is used to explain why Ernst decided to join the military, it also raises suggestive undertones that play to the credulity of her base. Perhaps she’s equating liberals to communists.

At first glance, you won’t notice the connection, but later in her address, Ernst claims, “The problem in America today is that Washington is full of liberals who think government is the solution to every problem.” To Ernst, our government has become too intrusive and the liberals are lauding its expanse. An unwary voter who wouldn’t know better would perceive liberals as communist-like. Ernst’s dictator comment confirms the subtle weaving of words.

As the Senate hopeful said of our current legislators, “They’re not speaking out against the president when he oversteps his bounds, when he makes those appointments, when he’s appointing czars, when he is producing executive orders in a threat to a Congress that won’t do as he wishes. So he has become a dictator.”

What “czars” is she speaking of? Yes, if you’re wondering, there is a word for the fear of everything Russian: Russophobia. Poor Tolstoy.

I have my criticisms of the black cowled Russia, but equating Democrats to that villain is certainly a plunge into the deep end.

Of course, one need not read Orwell or Solzhenitsyn to oppose government intrusiveness in our lives — that sentiment is natural and universal and the right does not have a monopoly over it. Ernst perpetuates the same old mischaracterizations of the left.

Ernst has since backtracked her statements about Obama’s “regime” and the call for his impeachment. But her backtracking isn’t sincere enough, and it seems that she really does think Obama should be impeached under the facade of her campaign. Her relations with the infamous opportunist and political huckster Sarah Palin — who is at least honest about her desire for an impeachment — perhaps undermines the attempt of her campaign to brush over the statement.

The language Ernst uses, such as “we need to get the government out of our way,” is an attempt to gain favor with the little guy in a united front against a heavily bureaucratic establishment, one that for the most part, doesn’t really exist. The fearmongering suggests we’ve arrived at some sort of Kafkaesque point. It’s the same old tea party drumbeat.

It’d be too easy to reference Orwell’s essay on the use of political language and how it is employed against our better reasoning to design a pseudo-crisis in need of a hero; the overuse of the words “freedom” and “liberty” is surely dubious. What we should examine is the substance of Ernst’s policy suggestions. She thinks there should be a budget amendment, the Environmental Protection Agency should be abolished and the Department of Education should be dismantled.

Her support of a balanced budget amendment suggests that she knows nothing about deficit spending and how to counteract the effects of recessions. Many on the right agree that legislators need access to funds to address economic emergencies. Even Adam Smith, in some respects, recognized this.

Ernst thinks that we need to “force Washington to stop spending more than it takes in,” further saying “that is how we run our households, and we should expect nothing less from Washington.” Indeed nothing less, but only because the federal government’s budgetary process isn’t like how you run your household. Why do people continue attempts to square these two completely different spheres? It’s maddening to any serious macroeconomist.

Furthermore, abolishing both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education, instead of improving both, is simply irresponsible. Both agencies greatly improve our communities and our competitiveness, despite the shortfalls they may have from time to time.

Joni Ernst has tried to walk back her statements in response to the backlash. Unlike Rep. Bruce Braley’s gaffes, her lengthy diatribes seem genuinely a part of her ideology. Braley’s gaffes are certainly silly, but we know of his tenure as an effective legislator. Iowans know those slight blemishes misrepresent his otherwise bright and wholesome political career.

Ernst’s are much more revelatory. They touch upon deep ideological roots which have only been confirmed by her affiliations with people of similar and more extreme principles. It would be good of Iowans to recognize the distinction between word vomit and the actual expression of radical and irresponsible convictions.