Ron Johnson: The "Ayn Rand-loving" candidate

Via Scott Lemieux, this excerpt from a review of Jennifer Burns's 2009 biography of Ayn Rand, Goddess of the Market (Ayn Rand is the author of Ron Johnson's "foundational book," Atlas Shrugged):

Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins all her later writings.* The newspapers were filled for months with stories about [a] serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. ... Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy," shimmering with "immense, explicit egotism." Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample society under [his] feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough."

And for admirers of Fox News/Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Ron Johnson, that "Ayn Rand-loving" is attached as a compliment.

Ugh.

* e.g., Atlas Shrugged.