Self-Immolation

By Carl

 

OK, it looks like 2012 will be the year of overreaching. The hemmorhoids in the asshole of progress, the Teabaggers, are painting bullseyes. Again. Already.

Leaders of more than 70 Tea Party groups in Indiana gathered last weekend to sign a proclamation saying they would all support one candidate — as yet undetermined — in a primary challenge to Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Republican who has represented the state since 1977.

They are organizing early, they say, to prevent what happened last year, when several Tea Party candidates split the vote in Republican Senate primaries, allowing the most establishment of the candidates to win with less than 40 percent. [...]

In Maine, there is already one candidate running on a Tea Party platform against Senator Olympia J. Snowe. Supporters there are seeking others to run, declaring that they, too, will back the person they view as the strongest candidate to avoid splitting their vote. In Utah, the same people who ousted Senator Robert F. Bennett at the state’s Republican convention last spring are now looking at a challenge to Senator Orrin G. Hatch.

First, Orrin Hatch? Really? Granted, you can't get much more establishment than Orrin Hatch, but it's not like he's given the Democrats a leg up on a legislative agenda, and you might want to consider that he's got some credibility in the Senate. But I digress...

The intriguing bit in this clip is that the Teabaggers missed the point of the 2010 election cycle. It wasn't that Teabaggers failed in the Senate primaries, it was that they were soundly rejected in the Senate general elections, and many of the mainstream Republicans who did go on to win actually looked moderate by comparison.

Americans have long loved the dichotomy of a feisty and rancorous House (which is why Teabaggers succeeded there) and a deliberative Senate. As George Washington famously observed, the Senate was where legislation went to cool off, to make it less burny and more palatable to the American people.

The lessons of history are apparently lost on the Teabaggers. You can alter history, it's true, but you cannot reverse human nature, only amend it (or else the racism we see now on the right would be long gone), and there will always be an element of this dichotomy in Congress.

Now, admittedly, the Teabagger movement started after Republicans dropped their ball during the Bush administration....I mean, hell, it only took these assclowns thirty years to catch up to the fact that the Republicans were paying lip service to the whole "tax cuts are good" mantra, rewarding only the uberwealthy and protecting their interests at the expense of the middle and working classes. Four legs bad, two legs good, you see.

 

And it's conceivable we're seeing the start of the downfall of the GOP. The one thing we are not seeing, and will not see, is the rise of the Teabaggers as anything more than a bloated blockage of do-nothings intent on screwing the country more quickly.

 

Unless they grow up. Of course. But then they'd be....Republicans!

 

(crossposted to Simply Left Behind)