Lindsey Graham: Standing in the Way of Victory

GOP Moderates Still Don't Get It.
by Brian Johnson  November 4, 2010
Brian's Right Perspective



There is much talk of a civil war brewing inside the ranks of the Republican Party.  Lindsey Graham, who never met an unprincipled compromise he didn't like, complained in Politico that the GOP "left a few on the table" Tuesday night when the GOP failed to take the Senate.  He, and others are blaming the Tea Party for,  what in his pea-sized brain, was a poor showing. We need more "moderate" candidates.  I assume he means like John McCain, Bob Dole, and Gerald Ford.  Yeah, those worked out real well.

The GOP gained 63(!) House seats, possibly 8 Senate Seats, and gained numerous Governors.  Republicans now have majority control of Governor's mansions.  This is significant in that those Governors will oversee redistricting in those states in a year.

But, Lindsey Graham, Karl Rove, Trent Lott, and some GOP strategist named Julie Wadler, are going after Jim Demint and the Tea Party. Jim DeMint was the first to identify and get behind Marco Rubio in Florida. Not only did Rubio win going away, he did it with a solidly conservative message of smaller constitutional government, lower taxes, personal responsibility, and fiscal responsibility.  So controversial.  So much so, that the Florida voters elected him overwhelmingly over former governor Charlie Crist, who when faced with defeat in the primary, dropped out and ran as an independent.  Real Party loyalty there Crist.  Crist who changed his mind on positions more than Eliot Spitzer.  And yet, it was Lindsey Graham and John McCain who came out and endorsed Crist early on.

Want more party loyalty.  How about the "Gang of 14" with Lindsey Graham, McCain, and the other usual suspects, undermining then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and the Party leadership on everything from immigration to judicial nominees, including blocking a Constitutionally sound Miguel Estrada from the D.C. Court of Appeals, which was seen by the Democrats as a stepping stone to the Supreme Court.  The Dems couldn't allow the GOP to place the first Latino on the Court as this might hurt their standing with Latino voters.  So Graham, and the rest of these pieces of human debris, ensured that he would be blocked (and smeared in the process).  Instead we get Sonja Sotamayor, a true intellectual lightweight (by her own law school colleagues admission) as the first Latina Supreme Court Justice.  Real "teamwork" by the moderate statists in the GOP.

If there were any seats "left on the table", which is pure conjecture to stir up controversy, maybe it was because we have guys like Karl Rove going out and savaging Christine O'Donnell the night of her primary victory on the Sean Hannity show.  He wanted Mike Castle, the neo-statist, to run against the bearded Marxist,  Chris Coons.  This was a race that could have been won, against a candidate that admittedly has Marxist leanings, if the elite GOP establishment, and Rove in particular, hadn't shot the horse before it got out of the gate!

There were other winnable races around the country which the GOP establishment abandoned or underfunded because they weren't the "right kind of candidates".  In other words, they were conservative. Trent Lott said, “We did not nominate our strongest candidates.”  What he meant to say was, "the voters were to stupid to know who to vote for."

There is going to be a war in the Republican Party.  I welcome it.  The Graham's, McCain's, Murkowski's, Snowe's, Collins', and others need to be defeated and sent packing in upcoming elections. They need to be taken out in the Primaries, and replaced with candidates who are grounded in the Constitution, and who can articulate that message.  Chris Christie ran as an unabashed conservative in New Jersey, a dark blue state, and won handily, shocking(!), I'm sure, the moderates.

A political war in the GOP? You betcha!  Fix your bayonets!

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• GOP senators fight over failure (politico.com)
• DeMint to new senators: Fight GOP establishment (politico.com)