Not With a Bag

Bagger candidate Chris McDaniel is refusing to concede to incumbent Thad Cochran, who narrowly won the Senate primary in Mississippi yesterday. McDaniel supporters are considering legal challenges to the election as well as a write-in campaign.

I don’t think we know for certain that Democrats voting in the Republican primary (which is legal in Mississippi, as long as they hadn’t voted in the Dem primary) gave Cochran the victory, although many appear to assume it did. If it did, we may learn that African Americans were incentivized to vote more by news of teabagger poll watchers than any love for Cochran. One suspects such voters will abandon Cochran in November.

Conservative public intellectuals such as Sarah Palin and Erick Erickson have sads. Palin asks why there is a Republican Party at all, if Cochran could win an election by acting “like a Democrat.” Studmuffin Erickson writes,

… this becomes a longer term problem for the Republican Party. Its core activists hate its leadership more and more. But its leadership are dependent more and more on large check writers to keep their power. Those large check writers are further and further removed from the interests of both the base of the party and Main Street. So to keep power, the GOP focuses more and more on a smaller and smaller band of puppeteers to keep their marionettes upright. At some point there will be more people with knives out to cut the strings than there will be puppeteers with checkbooks. And at some point those people with knives become more intent on cutting the strings than taking the place of the marionettes.

Wow, you might assume Erick Son of Erick was a big supporter of campaign finance reform. I suspect you’d be wrong, though. He continues,

Unfortunately for the Republican Party the fight continues. And as grassroots activists feel further and further removed and alienated from the party, it will become harder and harder to win. The slaughter the GOP will inflict on the Democrats in November will be a bandaid of built in momentum. When the GOP inevitably caves on repealing Obamacare, opting instead to reform it in favor of their donors’ interests, we may just see an irreparable split. Then, and even worse, if party leaders and party base voters cannot reconcile themselves to a common candidate in 2016, God help us.

I continue to oppose a third party. I’m just not sure what the Republican Party really stands for any more other than telling Obama no and telling our own corporate interests yes. That’s not much of a platform.

That last paragraph is likely to earn Erickson a visit from Men in Black to persuade him that what he really saw was the planet Venus.

See also an explanation of what the hell is the difference between the baggers and the GOP, considering their stated positions line up pretty neatly. Also, too, Dave Weigel.

11 thoughts on “Not With a Bag

  1. Conservative public intellectuals such as Sarah Palin and Erick Erickson..

    That made me laugh. You mean “public fabulists trying to get others to buy into their fantasy world”.

    A root beef is that Mississippi has an open primary, where people can cross party lines. OT, Harold Myerson has an interesting piece in the LAT about about how this helps elect Republicans in blue state California. In a sentence: too many Democrats run, versus a couple Republicans, and so the fewer Republican candidates win the majority of votes, and they proceed to the general election. I agree with Myerson, open primaries are a bad idea.

    The rest of is just accepting the fact that large swaths of the public isn’t interested in tea party extremism. Tough if these “conservative public intellectuals [choke] can’t accept simple reality. Typical whining from children.

  2. “Conservative public intellectuals…”

    More like, Conservative public pin-head-tellectuals.

    Let me ask the same question I did on the last post:
    I frequently wonder why the remaining old-school Republicans don’t accuse the Teabaggers of being the real RINO’s?

    Thad Cochrane is an old-school Republican – as was Dick Luger.

    And sure, they did everything to try to stop President Obama, but not to the extent that these new sociopathic Nihilists are trying to damage the country where they live – all because of some conservative ideology, ostensibly based on Christianity.

  3. Erik and Sarah are confusing a few things, surprisingly. One, the rank-and-file and Tbagger nation are not interchangeable words. There are run-of-the-mill, even moderate, republicans that vote against Tbagger candidates. Two, Tbagger candidates would not exist if there was any kind of campaign finance restrictions. The Kochs and their ilk created Tbaggerness and it would fall apart without that money. They can stuff their complaints about K-street and Washington money; they’ve figured out another way to fund their campaigns from big,big money. Three, African American voters voting for Cochran instead of the white supremacist makes perfect sense. Though Cochran has done nothing for his AA constituents, why allow the KKK member a position of authority.

  4. Well, maybe not a scientific assessment, but I think Palin endorsing a candidate is the equivalent to giving them a political kiss of death. She’s earned her bona fides as a certified hack, and right minded people know to stay away from any candidate she considers worthwhile.
    Birds of a feather flock together.

  5. “Conservative public intellectuals such as Sarah Palin and Erick Erickson have sads”

    That’s too bad poor Sarah, you know President Obama should convince Sarah to endorse ISIS or ISIL whatever it is, that way they would be left powerless within weeks!

  6. Has anyone forgotten recent history in the Wisconsin recall election?

    “By now, it’s pretty clear that Wisconsin Republicans will run multiple “spoiler” candidates in recall elections set for July 12. Because of the peculiar rules of the recall, these spoiler candidates, basically Republican operatives, would run as Democrats, creating a Democratic primary election on July 12 against the official Democratic challenger. “

    Now, can anyone can point me at the howls of indignation from the Tea Party when the GOP was running dirty tricks to foul the recall in WI? The defense, when democrats protested, was that it was legal and politics is a rough game.

    This is a serious question – can anyone think of dirty tricks run by democrats in an attempt to game the electoral system? Maybe we do it too, but I can’t think of an example of the party or state organization trying to win by unethical methods. Yes, I’m sure individuals in the heat of a campaign (in both parties) exercise bad judgement, but where has the democratic party endorsed what is becoming SOP for the GOP?

  7. Talk about “gaming the system”, nothing holds a candle to the presidential election in 2000, when Katherine Harris scrubbed the votes, throwing the state towards dubya, and the supreme court handed the election to dfw. Tell me about democracy again, George.
    As far as my opinion of ms. Palin, she is Satan’s fluffer. That’s it.

  8. “you may be on to something”

    Right, maybe, I wish President Obama would do something anything to expose these political hypocrits. Why doesn’t he ask why the Benghazi select committee hasn’t started, what are they waiting on the fall election season? It would be a shame if the republican controlled house would pervert the halls of government for political gain. What about this lawsuit by the Boner, Obama should say see you in court and lets get on with it, your not waiting on the fall election season are you, it would be a shame to exploit the courts for partisan political gain? Cone on Obama start kicking some ass, your political career is almost over!

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