Posted by
flagwaver on Wednesday, November 10, 2010 11:46:32 AM
When does the time come when the establishment GOP decides that
they should stop their sniping at their right flank and fall in
line with the will of the electorate? And when will some
conservative writers start to realize that it is not the Tea Party
that is waging an internecine GOP war, but the Establishment? I have read time and again conservative writers claiming that the TPM is somehow doing wrong to oppose Establishment Republicans, and I have grown tired of that new canard.
The Tea Party fought it's war against the Establishment exactly
where it should have been fought...in the primaries. Battles were
won at the primary level against entrenched Establishment types all
across the country, and when those battles were over the TPM assumed that all of the GOP would then turn their guns on
the Democrats to defeat them in the general election. Boy, were we
wrong!
Instead, the GOP decided that it was more important to protect
the Establishment than to wrest control of the government back from
the Democrats. They immediately launched attacks against "unapproved" candidates such as Christine O'Donnell, Sharon Angle, and Joe Miller, and don't forget that they also attacked both Rand Paul and Marco Rubio right up until it was obvious that those two were not going to be denied nominations in their respective states. The GOP was more than willing to savage their own candidates and weaken them in the general elections, and even worse they were, and are, willing to withhold campaign funding from candidates that they don't like. If you don't believe it, I'll use one example from
my home state of North Carolina as an illustration.
Renee Ellmers won the GOP primary for District 2 and ran against
Democrat incumbent Bob Etheridge, defeating him in the general
election. A few days after the election tally came in, there
suddenly appeared uncounted ballots from election night that some
how went uncounted. And wonder of wonders, most of them were
Democratic votes that suddenly reduced the Ellmers victory to a
position where a recount was needed.
Now, Ms. Ellmers didn't have the money needed to effectively
wage the recount fight and the NRCC initially refused to help defray
here costs, because way back in the primaries they had decided that
her candidacy was "not ready for prime time"...mainly because she
beat their preferred candidate. The Establishment was ready to
possibly lose control of this seat in the House primarily because
it was not won by their preferred candidate! The only reason that they have kicked any money into the fight now is the same reason they eventually gave Christine O'Donnell a relative pittance in her race; the conservative new media picked up on it, broadcast it, and basically shamed the GOP into offering some support to their own candidates. But we are to believe that the TPM is at war with the GOP? Really?!?
Just the other day I wrote that failures in the next two years by the GOP will not mean the end of the Party, and I stand by that assessment. The GOP is too ingrained in the American political psyche to simply dry up and blow away, even on these particular winds of change. However, I do believe that the grassroots of the Party are more than willing to sweep out the "leadership" cabal of the GOP that are the personification of the Establishment mindset. The people do not want to hear Orrin Hatch looking to retreat from a fight over health care reform before one shot has been fired, or to see Mitch McConnell trying to derail Jim DeMint's non-binding resolution calling on the Senate Republicans to refrain from taking earmarks in the new Congress. We are tired of business as usual, which is why so many Democrats and entrenched "moderate" Republicans and their staffers are about to be officially out of work.
And if this is truly an internecine war for the soul of the GOP, then even if the Tea Party didn't start it, we conservatives better damned well have the will and fortitude to end it!