Tag Archives: tea parties

Random Election Night News and Thoughts

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There’s been a lot of analysis around the blogosphere today regarding the Republican beatdown of the Democrats last night.  You’ve likely read them already, so I’m just going to touch on a few random thoughts and bits of news I’ve yet to see, or bears repeating.  Random, because I can’t very well go about being organized on this blog.  It would be too rational.

  1. Republican Dan Benishek, the man running to replace that useless turd Stupak, won in his Congressional race.  I hope Benishek enjoys his victory, and Stupak spends the rest of his life realizing that he destroyed his career to damage his country when he caved on Obamacare.  Not that a Democrat would likely care.
  2. The Tea Parties were most effective at the state and Representative levels.  Statehouses, Governorships, and Congressional Representative seat pickups gained the most benefit from their efforts.  The Republicans gained Senate seats, but not with such regularity and we had to endure the frustrating Angle loss to Reid in Nevada.  However, the Tea Parties get two years to vet candidates now, as opposed to having to form from scratch and then scramble this time around.  That can only improve vetting and coordination on top of their current solid performance.
  3. Nancy Pelosi lost the gavel yesterday.  She did an interview with ABC where she’s spinning the same old “We took the tough votes to do good things” crap we’ll likely hear more of in the coming days as the shock settles on the other side.  However, she’s as much a martyr doing good works as I am a monkey’s uncle.  No good was done by her or her caucus during her tenure as Speaker, and we’ll be cleaning up her damage for years, if we can manage it at all.  Every Democrat who lost their jobs over Pelosi’s “good works” deserved it.  May they be forced to live with the rest of us in the mess they helped to create.
  4. California was a wipe.  The establishment candidates, those moderates running for governor and Senate that were supposedly perfect self-funding candidates had their rears handed to them, and the voters there also removed the 2/3 majority required to pass a budget, effectively rendering Republicans moot in the state.  Their collapse is on their own heads.
  5. In the special elections to replace vacated seats, Kirk won in Illinois by virtue of the fact his opponent self-destructed.  He’s the only Republican Senator that will be seated immediately.  Whether or not he is a Republican pick-up or Democrat retention by virtue of his voting habits yet remains to be seen.  Democrats Coons in Delaware and Manchin in West Virginia won their special elections and will also be seated in the lame duck session.
  6. 2012 starts now.  That includes finding candidates to remove RINO losers (though Snowe already has an opponent) and ensuring we don’t repeat the McCain Epic Presidential Fail of 2008.  Plus, the Republicans will have to be watched constantly, as they are prone to capitulate.  Should that happen, 2012 will be the start of Obama’s second term, and America will not be the country we once knew.

We’re off to a good start, but there’s work to do yet.  Don’t drop your guard or let up.

Rolling the Videotape On This Year’s Primaries

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We’re about to come to the end of primary season.  The O’Donnell-Castle match-up in Delaware should just about do it, and then it’s off to the general.  That race isn’t turning out to be very pretty either, but in terms of primaries, it’s time to think ahead to 2012.

Yes, 2012.  Entrenched incumbent RINOs are going to take some time and advance preparation to remove, so those of you with RINO infestations should think ahead.  But not before you sit down in the political locker room, run the videotape on this year’s primaries, and get a plan for improving the three things that need it.

1.)  Vetting candidates:  There’s a bit of trouble with O’Donnell in the Delaware race.  If Castle wins the primary, a Democrat will win in the general.  The only question will be proper labeling or the RINO brand.

If you want to hunt RINOs, check out the candidates first.  You don’t wind up trying to put someone who’s going to make your life extremely difficult over the finish line.  Catching trouble early can save you grief.

2.)  Predetermination:  The problem here is simple:  one unpopular RINO, multiple conservative challengers.  Unfortunately, all states can’t be blessed with a primary system like Utah’s, which forces a one-on-one contest between two candidates by weeding out the rest of them out prior to having one (see Bob Bennett as an example).  The solution is predetermination.

The state’s Tea Parties will ultimately have to decide which candidate to back before the primary begins.  However, to have a chance at getting rid of an entrenched RINO, there can be no plural candidates.  Choose a candidate before a primary starts, and it will decrease the chances that an incumbent RINO wins a plurality victory against a split opposition vote.

Doing this may seem a bit cold, especially if the multiple opposition candidates are all decent people with solid conservative track records.  But the alternative is a loss and being stuck with a RINO again.

3.)  Getting candidates ready for the big show:  Sharron Angle is an example of this.  She made it through the primary, and then Reid went to work on her in the general.  Due to some early gaffes from which she has not yet completely recovered, she’s running tied with a man so unpopular in his state that his son won’t mention his last name.

This can be avoided by helping candidates early in getting ready for the big show, which is the general election in November.

If a candidate is going to be facing an incumbent Democrat, one thing is certain:  The Democrat will be very good at retaining their job.  If your candidate isn’t ready, the Democrat will be retaining their job again that November.  That means having some idea of the game plan in place prior to the end of the primary, or getting one if the Democrat is already on the attack.  This also means letting your candidate know early on if they need to fix a gaffe problem, or finding out in a vetting process if there’s a problem that will have to be overcome (or disqualifies them).

Granted, I’m a blogger in a very tiny corner of the blogosphere churning out ideas at a keyboard.  However, I’m presenting them as food for thought and suggestions that could help your state win in its next RINO hunt.  Learn from the missteps and mistakes, and come the next round of primaries in 2012, your Tea Party group or grassroots candidate support could be that much more effective.

Perhaps We Should Have Named It “The Water Party”

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Granted, it wouldn’t have made much sense, but the t-shirt would have been a whole lot funnier.  Yes, the t-shirt.  Falling under the “now tell us how you really feel” category is the latest in anti-Tea Party gear:  f*ck tea. In convenient downer gray color.

I suppose if I was a liberal, I might not be happy either.  The Tea Party came along and started fighting back against them without the Republicans.  Keeping the Republican leadership as cowed as possible was supposed to eliminate the opposition.  Those pesky conservatives weren’t supposed to unite without a leader and do something about it on their own.

And then to get their sorts of candidates nominated in spite of the resistance from the squish RINO establishment?  The grassroots are driving the agenda?!  And all attempts to demonize them out of existence aren’t getting any traction?!  OH, THE HUMANITY!

It also makes you wonder if perhaps, had we gotten the liberals to hate something more practical, we could have just screwed with them all the more.  In retrospect, we could have named it “The Water Party” or “The Oxygen Party.”  They hate everything else, and it’s not like they act as if they get enough oxygen to the brain anyway.  Would it have been such a stretch for “f*ck oxygen.”  Would the Breathing Strikes by protesters dressed as Oxygen molecules have been fun to watch, albeit briefly?  Screw you O2<gasp><breathe><curse><hold breath again>!

On a less demented note, this also means the Tea Parties are a force.  If this election goes as expected, they will have had a lot to do with removing the Democrats from DC.  And this t-shirt is just a display of impending liberal defeat.

The McCain Hypothetical of the Day

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Given a very realistic possible outcome of the Hayworth-McCain race in Arizona, this is an appropriate hypothetical for today:

What would have happened if McCain lost his Senate seat to a Democrat in 1998?

All other things remain equal.  We’ll say McCain still tried to get the Presidential nod in 2000 and lost.  We’ll also presume that the hypothetical Democrat who beat him retains that seat to this day.

First the down side:  no Sarah Palin.  He would not have been around to run in 2008, and thus would not have introduced us to someone who will hopefully be a far more serious Republican presidential nominee than he was come 2012.  Granted, he only recruited her to save his own posterior, but there’s no complaining about the outcome.

Up side?

  1. No McCain-Feingold.  Feingold may well have introduced the bill without him, but there would be no militant RINO driving it hard from the other side of the aisle to make his media friends happy.  Bush wouldn’t have signed it before cowering under his desk, and that whole mess likely would never have happened.
  2. Every McCain-Democrat bill ever introduced in the Bush terms would have lost its cover of bipartisanship.  McCain has been involved with some massively bad bills (amnesty, cap-and-trade, the aforementioned “campaign finance reform”) that would not have had the same drive without him.
  3. Lindsey Graham might still be around as a RINO squish, but not a militant RINO pretending to leadership.  He certainly wouldn’t be telling his constituents that he’s voting for Kagan because Jesus said so.  That magnitude of pomposity, arrogance, and moral vanity in him might not have been but for his contact with McCain.
  4. The Gangs of Fail would not have existed.  No Gang of 14, and no Gang of 10 in 2008 to help deflect Pence’s energy initiative.  No, McCain wasn’t involved in the Gang of 10, but a lot of Senators inspired by him were.  Some squishes would still have folded every now and again, but nothing so in your face as a Senate gang.
  5. 2006 and 2008.  They probably would have occurred anyway, but to what degree?  Bush led the Republicans to ruin, but it was exacerbated by the grandstanding, media-centric undermining of “maverick” John McCain.  Furthermore, how many fewer people would have stayed home and at least helped blunt the hit to Republicans in Congress if the top of the Republican ticket hadn’t been so utterly revolting?  Yes, the Republicans would still have been in the minority, but politically irrelevant?  No.

Why bring this up at all?  Because we get to make the decision again in November of 2010 should the unfortunate happen and McCain makes it to the general election.  We already know that this year alone, he’s campaigned for RINOs in the primaries, and there was that whole mess with the Dorgan-McCain vitamin supplement fiasco.  It’s safe to say he hasn’t changed anything but his rhetoric, and we can expect the same sorts of behavior from him we saw under Bush once he’s safely back in the Senate.

What then, and why would the Democrat be the lesser evil in that race?

  1. Remember Lindsey Graham?  Well, McCain mentored him in 2002 to the Senator he is today.  Once he’s back in the Senate, he can “mentor” all the new Tea Party candidates on “how things actually work” in Washington.  In other words, break out the maverick cookie cutter and see how many more Grahams he can create.  The Democrat can’t do that.
  2. McCain is a militant RINO WITH MASSIVE SENIORITY.  If anyone can and will short-circuit Tea Party gains in the Republican party by running roughshod over them after the election cycle, he can and will.  His love of conservatism is strictly the stuff of campaign spin.
  3. Yes, the Democrat will back Obama, but only McCain can hamstring resistance to the Obama agenda from the inside.  He can browbeat junior Republicans, organize moderates, and grant the cover of bipartisanship where a Democrat cannot.  That’s more damage than a junior Democrat can do as an honest opponent.
  4. The Democrat can’t run around the country recruiting liberal Republicans.  They could try, but it would only be good for a laugh track.  McCain can and has, though fortunately he’s lacked much success.  So far, Fiorina’s and Kirk’s nominations have kept it from being a total recruiting wipeout for him, but it’s safe to assume he didn’t back them for their rock-ribbed conservatism.
  5. Now let’s say Sarah Palin wins the Presidency in 2012.  Given McCain’s behavior towards Bush for defeating him in the 2000 presidential primary, how is he going to react to the 4-year long constant reminder of exactly who the drag was on the McCain-Palin ticket?  Or proof that he’s been politically outdone in every conceivable measure by a VP candidate he never intended get this far?  Presuming his ego and sense of entitlement don’t outright detonate, it will make what he did under Bush seem a blessing by comparison.

It won’t be an inspiring general election if McCain is involved.  More like a choice between taking a punch to the gut or a Louisville Slugger to the knees.  But think back to 1998 before you reflexively support The Danged Maverick.

P.S.:  I honestly hope Hayworth renders all of this hypothesizing moot.  There’s still time before the 24th to help him.

Addendum, 8/7/2010:  Added point #5, second list.