Note to Michael Steele: It’s time.

The “values” types who own the Rushpubliscum Party aren’t going to accept you, ever. I’m sure that rejection of you and your darkness was in part behind all of the “values” organizations that lined up behind Doug Hoffman. They have succeeded in what they intended to do, which was drive out moderate centrist female Rushpubliscum candidate Dede Scozzafava.  The message they sent her was unmistakable, and that message resonates for you as well; the Minutemen, Family Research Council (purchasers of the Ku Klux Klan mailing list,) Caribou Barbie, Steve Forbes, and most of the rest of the remains of the Rushpubliscum Party do not have room for any reasonable-sounding person anymore.

Scozzafava did the only thing she could really do. By not backing the “Conservative” (who is a stooge who knows little or nothing about the issues of his Congressional district; he was absolutely recruited for the sole purpose of knocking off the moderate bitch,) Scozzafava is at least trying to keep a moderate voice in Congress. Since you backed Scozzafava, one can assume that you also want to see moderates in Congress.

You ain’t gonna get them by continuing to serve as the Rushpubliscum Party’s window dressing. It’s time to walk away. It’s time for all people of conscience to walk away, and let the Rushpubliscums finish destroying themselves.

One day after she dropped out of the congressional race for New York’s 23rd congressional district, Republican Dede Scozzafava lobbed a grenade at Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson, and the rest of her critics.

She endorsed a Democrat.

To Ms. Palin and the others, that will come as no surprise. The former Alaska governor had campaigned for Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman – instead of Ms. Scozzafava – because Scozzafava was already a Democrat in all but name, she and others said.

She supports gay rights and abortion rights, for example.

In some respects, it was merely a lesson in political geography. Scozzafava was at the far left fringes of the Republican Party, and New York’s 23rd congressional district leans solidly to the right. It has never elected a Democrat.

Over time, the mismatch simply became clearer.

Yet in her letter endorsing Democrat Bill Owens, Scozzafava tapped into a deep uncertainty within the Republican Party: Does the party’s increasing insistence on ideological purity undermine its ability to compete with the Democrats nationally?

“In Bill Owens, I see a sense of duty and integrity that will guide him beyond political partisanship,” she wrote. “He will be an independent voice devoted to doing what is right for New York.”

Democrats in large part built their majorities in the US House and Senate by winning seats in what have traditionally been Republican districts.

This “big tent” strategy – welcoming conservatives into the party in an effort to win elections – has its own political costs. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeatedly stressed her desire to pass a healthcare reform bill with a “robust” government run public option for health insurance. In the end, however, she was forced to water down the public option to placate Democrats from conservative districts.

Yet, in all likelihood, she will still have the votes to pass sweeping healthcare reform. By contrast, Republicans are barely even at the political table in Washington.

This comes as the political landscape nationwide would seem to be shifting in Republicans’ favor. Some 40 percent of Americans describe themselves as conservative, while only 20 percent consider themselves liberal, according to a recent Gallup poll.

The question for Republicans, however, is in what “conservative” means.

For Palin, the decision to back Mr. Hoffman’s ideology over Scozzafava’s affiliation is part of an effort to cleanse liberal ideals from the party platform – appealing to these small government “conservatives” more plainly.

“In the short run there’s clear energy here in the small government/antigovernment argument,” said Ronald Brownstein, a political analyst for the National Journal, on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday.

But Mr. Brownstein suggested that, in the longer term, the trend would make it hard for Republicans to make significant gains on the Democrats: “I do wonder about whether Republicans are going to have the freedom to maneuver they’ll need to recover in some of those [liberal-leaning] blue states where they’ve significantly eroded.”

First of all, Gallup is not exactly a decent measure of the American pulse, as a review of their many 2008 polls makes clear. They seem to have an agenda, and we have to weight whatever they say thus. Secondly, the Caribou Barbie notion of “Conservative” might come as anathema to some of those poll respondents; Caribou Barbie’s brand of “conservatism” would mandate that women are completely controlled by their husbands, fringe Christian religion would be in the schools, and science would be tossed out a window. I know, as I think most people know, that there is no way in hell 40% of this country sees things that way; the number is about 25%, or roughly the percentage of people who still thought Chimpy was a swell guy upon his exit.

Thirdly, and most importantly, they aren’t going to make anymore inroads in some of their former bastions, just as Gingrich believes. Their chance for a majority in Congress is gone, and it is quite probably gone for many cycles. With tricks like the one playing itself out here, it may be generations before the Rushpubliscums can sway a majority again.

Actually, they will own their own bastion down south in less than a generation. The rest of us will be living in a different country by then. The days of people like Scozzafava, or Shays, or Snowe, or even Ahnold holding office as Republicans is over. The Rushpubliscums are all that is left, and that’s all there’s gonna be. They will have their Dixie bastion, and maybe some enclaves in the mountain west, but they’ll never be a true national force again.

I believe they’ll agitate for secession, rather than ever try to get along with the majority nationwide. Their time for that will be here within 5 years.

Tags: doug hoffman, intolerance, palin, rushpubliscums, Scozzafava

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 8:12 pm and is filed under Jolly Roger, Republican'ts!, Unstable Wingnuts of the Radical Right. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.