Elephant Dung #19: The Tea Party prefers Charlie Sheen to John Boehner

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

Poor Johnny B.

Try as he might, he just can't win -- that is, win over the Tea Party that is now so much an integral part of the GOP. And the radical rightists are placing him squarely in Palin's crosshairs:

A national tea party group is in revolt against House Speaker John Boehner and wants to see him defeated in a 2012 primary, arguing that he looks "like a fool" in the debate over spending cuts and makes less sense than actor Charlie Sheen.

"You look like a fool," Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips wrote in a post on the group's website, directing his message at the Ohio Republican. "Charlie Sheen is now making more sense than John Boehner."

Ouch. That's like saying you have less musical talent than J-Lo. (Yes, American Idol reference. I went there. I'm not watching this year -- why, without Simon? -- but I did catch her new video on last night's show. "This is the worst song ever," said The Reactionette. Hyperbole, to be sure, but only slight. "That was terrible. Just awful." Agreed.)

Boehner "did not get the message" from the tea party movement demanding big cuts to federal spending, Phillips said, and "the honeymoon is over." The movement should respond, he said, by finding "a candidate to run against John Boehner in 2012 and should set as a goal, to defeat in a primary, the sitting Speaker of the House of Representatives."

Right, because Boehner is all-powerful and can therefore make it all happen, even with a Democratic Senate and president. Not that I wish to defend him, but he's reasonable and sane compared to the Tea Party, which largely sits on the sidelines spouting ideological extremism, and attacking sinners while seeking to cleanse the Republican Party of the ideologically inadequate, while legislators like Boehner are forced to work within the parameters of a democratically-elected legislature, that is, to seek compromise to get anything done.

The Tea Party completely misunderstood last year's midterm election results, just as it misunderstands politics generally, and expected right-wing revolution right away. But revolution was never to be, and not just because of Boehner. It's not just extremism but delusional ignorance that drives the Tea Party.

The Republican right, the party's new mainstream, has taken over. It's pulling the party further and further to the right, away from its former establishment, and it's purging the party ranks of those who aren't sufficiently right-wing, who aren't ideologically acceptable to the new Bolsheviks. Among its many targets are some of the most reputable members of the party, including those with long careers advancing conservative causes, like Orrin Hatch and Richard Lugar. We can now add Boehner to the list, a long-time loyal partisan who's been speaker for just two months.

And Democrats, of course, are salivating.

Newt preaches to the lemmings

By J. Kingston Pierce

I didn’t actually think it was possible for me to develop any less respect for disgraced former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich. But then this week he counseled his fellow Republican’ts to follow his disastrous lead and shut down the federal government again “if the alternative is compromising on their budget-cutting promises.”

Did Gingrich learn nothing from his 1990s failures?

Apparently not, because he’s also urging the GOP to race right off another cliff by impeaching President Barack Obama over the administration’s conscientious decision to cease defending the Defense of Marriage Act in court, because it’s clearly unconstitutional. Keep in mind, the president did not instruct the Justice Department to stop enforcing that repugnant 1996 law, which defines marriage as “a legal union between one man and one woman”; he and Attorney General Eric Holder have made it quite clear to everybody that DOMA will “continue to be enforced by the Executive Branch.” They’ve left it up to Congress to actually overturn that law. All the administration said this week is that it will no longer submit briefs supporting DOMA against repeal efforts in the courts.

Nonetheless, Gingrich and other right-wing fire-breathers--convinced that their conservative base either isn’t intelligent enough to notice such logical nuances or won’t give a tinker’s damn about them--are now hinting (if not yet outright saying) that Obama should be removed from office, contending that he’s failing to obey his oath to support the laws of the land. This is patently ridiculous, but Newt has never been known to adhere to reason. He’s testing the waters for a 2012 presidential run, and has seen that the kookier and more intolerant a Republican’t is this year (case in point: Minnesota ex-governor Tim Pawlenty), the more publicity he’s likely to generate.

What Gingrich fails to acknowledge, of course, is that the president’s decision to cease defending DOMA is nothing new. As Think Progress points out, “In 1990, then-acting Solicitor General [and now Chief Justice John] Roberts refused to defend a federal affirmative-action law after he successfully convinced the George H.W. Bush administration that the law was unconstitutional. He failed to convince the Supreme Court, however, and the law was upheld. By declining to defend DOMA, the Obama administration is following the exact same approach embraced by Roberts.”

Considering Gingrich’s own abysmal support of marriage as an institution, his campaign to protect DOMA is more than a tad ironic. Whether it will convince his fellow Republican’ts to jump off the same cliff he and the GOP did back in 1996, when they tried to impeach then President Bill Clinton, is a mystery at this point. Republican’ts are anxious to turn the United States backwards and undo all social, economic, and political  progress made during the last century. Are they also anxious to relive the 1990s by launching another coup against a moderate Democratic president, with the likelihood that they will lose public support the same way Gingrich and his right-wing troops did 15 years ago?

Time (and, no doubt, polls) will tell.

READ MORE: “ With One Week to Go Before the Shutdown Deadline,” by Steve Benen (The Washington Monthly).

(Cross-posted in Limbo.) 

Lugar faces the Tea Party music

By Michael J.W. Stickings

A couple of weeks ago, R.K. Barry wrote an Elephant Dung post on how the Indiana Tea Party is going after long-time and highly-respected Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, planning a 2012 challenge that could ultimately bring down one of the few remaining sensible Republicans on Capitol Hill. Well, it ain't lookin' good for Lugar:

Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock will launch his primary challenge to Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) on Tuesday with the support of a majority of both the state's 92 Republican county chairmen and its state party executive committee, he told the Fix in a recent interview.

"I feel bad that he's going to be humiliated by this list," Mourdock said.

Mourdock added that he believes Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) and Rep. Mike Pence (R), the party's two leading figures in the Hoosier State, are going to stay neutral in the primary -- though Daniels, who was Lugar's campaign manager three different times, has already committed to voting for the senator.

That such a large contingent of the party establishment should come out against or withhold support from an incumbent senator is highly unusual and reflects the difficult path ahead for Lugar in advance of the May 8, 2012, primary fight. It also suggests there is a clear path to victory for Mourdock.

From what I can tell, Mourdock isn't just another Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell, or John Raese. While he's to the right of Lugar, he would appear to be a competent figure who could well win a general election in what is already a red-leaning state. And he's not a full-on Teabagger:

Mourdock is clear on one thing: he is not running as a tea party candidate. While he welcomes the support of tea party groups and says he expects them to coalesce around his campaign, he recognizes the limitations of being defined as a tea party candidate.

"Mr. Lugar will try to paint me that way, because he's speaking very demeaningly about the tea party right now," Mourdock said. "I think he's doing it that way to set it up and say, 'Mourdock is some wild-eyed extremist.'"

Well, an extremist he is, if well within the mainstream of today's GOP, but Lugar will likely have a hard time making his case stick, what with so much of the state party likely to line up behind Mourdock. (Although an endorsement from Daniels would help.)

What's interesting, though, as we continue to track the GOP's civil war, is that Lugar is hardly a moderate. As R.K. put it:

It seems that Lugar's sin is that he voted to confirm a couple of liberal Supreme Court justices and voted for the START treaty to reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. It's not like he voted for health-care reform or the economic stimulus package, offenses that would likely have gotten him beheaded before they threw him out of office. No, just a couple of votes on the Supremes and a missile treaty seems to be enough to incur the wrath of the radical right.

Never mind that based on so many other indicators he's a fairly conservative fellow, which is born out by the fact that he's always been pro-life and pro-business, and an advocate for lower taxes and smaller government.

He's a solid conservative, in other words, and a loyal Republican -- not that either is good enough these days, not with the Tea Party demanding absolutism on a broad core of policy positions. And even compromising on a couple of issues (which pretty much everyone in Congress has to do over the course of a long career), even showing a breadth of understanding beyond narrow ideological parochialism (which Lugar, a foreign policy expert, certainly has done), can bring about one's downfall at the hands of the Republican Bolsheviks.

R.K. notes that Lugar is "just too damn strong and viewed as unbeatable by the political establishment," and hence that a Tea Party challenge would be "a colossal waste of time," but this isn't just about the Tea Party anymore. Rather, it's about a broader conservative challenge to Lugar, including from within the state party establishment. It's hard to imagine Lugar losing, but it's easier now than ever before, what with the Tea Party and the Republican establishment making nice all across the country, endangering not just Lugar but even the likes of Orrin Hatch in Utah, hardly anything other than a hardcore conservative.

This says a lot about the state of the Republican Party today as it looks ahead to 2012, a party of increasing extremism that, with the Tea Party pushing its buttons, is trying -- often successfully -- to purge its ranks of "sinners," of those who have deviated from the far-right line.

And I'm all for it, because it just makes Republicans even more unelectable. They won the House last year because of a bad economy and low voter turnout (and successful propaganda), but things will be different next year, with Obama rebounding, the economy (hopefully) improving, and enthusiasm among Democrats returning (if not quite to '08 levels). Moving further and further to the right while dismissing even the likes of Richard Lugar would just make their chances even worse.

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Elephant Dung #14: Tea Party goes after Republican Senate icon Richard Lugar

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By R.K. Barry

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

Long-time Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana is up for re-election in 2012 and, it seems, he just isn't conservative enough for the local Tea Party contingent. But who is? Really. I wouldn't be the first to claim that the sainted Ronald Reagan would be hard-pressed to pass muster with this gang, given his penchant for tax increases and signing missile treaties with those darn Ruskies. Imagine anyone calling Ronald Reagan a RINO (Republican in Name Only).

It seems that Lugar's sin is that he voted to confirm a couple of liberal Supreme Court justices and voted for the START treaty to reduce the stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. It's not like he voted for health-care reform or the economic stimulus package, offenses that would likely have gotten him beheaded before they threw him out of office. No, just a couple of votes on the Supremes and a missile treaty seems to be enough to incur the wrath of the radical right.

Never mind that based on so many other indicators he's a fairly conservative fellow, which is born out by the fact that he's always been pro-life and pro-business, and an advocate for lower taxes and smaller government.

As David Weigel points out at Slate, the challenge probably won't mean very much. He writes:

Indiana's going to be complicated. If Mike Pence runs for governor, as everyone expects him to, does he throw his senior senator under the bus? Doubtful. If the GOP race for president drags on a bit, it will drag on to Indiana, driving higher turnout -- and Tea Party coups have not been won with high turnout, but with voter enthusiasm in sleepy late primaries. 

Add to that the fact that Lugar is just too damn strong and viewed as unbeatable by the political establishment and you have a colossal waste of time in the making. But that won't stop them.

 As one Tea Party activist remarked:

[We're saying to Lugar] thank you for what you've done. We respect you greatly as a person and for what you've done in the past. But to go forward, we feel it's going to need to be a different candidate.

Yeah, I'll bet that made him crap his pants.

You have to admit that these Tea Partiers are not shy. In any case, there seem to be a couple of candidates available more to their liking, though it appears doubtful that either will have much traction.

One of the things that comes through consistently with Tea Partiers is their utter lack of practical political sense. They are true believers. Fail their purity test, which is probably inevitable for any politician who has been in D.C. for more than a weekend, and expect to hear about it -- in a big way.

That may make them all feel good and noble but it won't do much for their electoral chances. Someone really should explain that to them, but I'm not going to be the one to do it. It'll be more fun if they figure it out for themselves. 

Makes you wonder what other Republican heavyweights they're going to go after next.

********** 

Update (by MJWS): Lugar, for his part, is being gracious, though you can tell he's rather annoyed. Take this brilliant comeback, for example:

"I've been working systematically for 20 years going to Russia trying to help direct a situation in which we're taking warheads off of missiles every day, destroying missiles that were aimed at us; destroying submarines that carried misslies up and down our coast," said Lugar. "I've got to say 'Get real'. I hear Tea Party or other people talking about they were against START. I said 'Well, now, hang on here.'"

Lugar continued, "If you want to get into START, let's talk about it, but realistically as Americans, not as some Republican renegade. [I'm] trying to take warheads of Russia [out of circulation] so they won't hit Indiana."

Lugar's an admirable guy, I say from across the partisan divide, but there's no way the Tea Party is about to "get real."

Elephant Dung #12: Republican organization targets Scott Brown

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

Woe is Scott Brown.

Once a huge Republican star, back when he won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat and for a brief moment turned Massachusetts a little bit red, back when Republicans spun his win as a referendum defeat for Obama, back when it looked like his election would derail health-care reform, Brown is now in the party's "crosshairs," as Republicans like to say, a target of the right's purification campaign to rid the party of anyone and everything not sufficiently conservative (in a rigid, ideological, far-right way).

And even some of those who were once firmly behind him have now turned on him:

A Republican organization that backed Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) with independent expenditures and fundraising assistance says it will work to defeat Brown in a Republican primary next year in order to protect the party's brand.

Scott Wheeler, who heads the National Republican Trust PAC, said the group never expected Brown to toe a consistently conservative line, given his home state. But Brown's vote for the New START Treaty with Russia in late 2010 was a bridge too far, Wheeler said.

Now, to keep this in perspective, the NRT PAC isn't a huge organization with vast resources. Still, turning on Brown could lead to others doing the same:

[T]he PAC has a national network of donors, and Wheeler promised he would use the committee's resources against Brown.

"We're going to finance a primary opponent," he said. "I might even ask him to give our money back."

To Brown's credit -- even if he knows that he has to be somewhat moderate to play well back home -- he has been one of the few Republicans to break from the party's intransigent obstructionism. He may once have voted against Red Cross volunteers, but he did, as senator, vote with the Democrats to move a jobs bill forward, as well as against a Republican filibuster of an unemployment benefits and tax credits bill. And then he voted not just for New START but for DADT repeal as well. That's not a bad record for a Republican...

Unless you're a Republican and your party is turning against you because -- how dare you! -- you voted with Obama and the Democrats on something and aren't as extremist as most of the rest of the GOP.

Brown is quite popular in Massachusetts and may well defeat any right-wing challenger. Indeed, he may just win re-election. At the very least, Republicans would be stupid not to pick him, as he's their only chance for victory. (And Massachusetts isn't, say, Utah, so the right, including the Tea Party, may not prevail even in a primary vote that generally rewards right-wing turnout and grassroots campaigning.)

But it's a sign of the times, and a sign of where the Republican Party is (and is heading), that a popular and, in Massachusetts, electable moderate (relatively speaking) is being targeted by some in his own party. (I suspect that the national and state party establishments will stand by him.) He's just not Republican enough, you see -- not enough of what the likes of Limbaugh and Palin want.

Better to be "right" than to win, it would seem, even if so many Republicans crazily think that the best way to win is to move further and further to the right. And that's fine for Democrats, who should be able to pick up a Senate seat in Massachusetts if the Republicans are stupid enough to purify success out of the party.

So, absolutely, let's hope Republicans really do see Scott Brown as a pro-Obama liberal who will vote with the Democrats. (That's what he is, isn't he? Isn't he one of us? Yes, Republicans, you can trust us!)

And let's hope Brown gets the primary challenger he deserves.

Elephant Dung #11: The Tea Party prepares for 2012 takeover of GOP

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

To an extent, the Republican Party and the Tea Party are the same thing.

The latter isn't politically independent, even if a small minority of its members are, it's solidly Republican. And the Tea Party has become such a major part of the Republican Party that it's hard to tell the two apart.

To be sure, there are a number of Republicans, mostly in what has been the party "establishment," who aren't Teabaggers, but that number, and their power, appears to be in decline.

To put it another way, the Republican Party and the Tea Party (which, again, is mostly Republican anyway) have embraced each other. Now, another word for "embrace," in this context, is "co-opt," as each sees the other as its vehicle for electoral success. The Tea Party needs the Republican Party, and vice versa.

But, hugging notwithstanding, the relationship is not always amicable, not least with the Tea Party trying not just to co-opt the Republican Party but to take it over and control it. The Tea Party doesn't just want to be one of the Republican Party's main components but its dominant force. It doesn't want the Republican Party to be an umbrella party (like the Democratic Party) with multiple perspectives and policy positions within it, but a rigid ideological party of Tea Party dogma.

It wants the Republican Party, that is, to be the party of Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell, and the rest of the Teabaggers who ran last year to varying success. And, to that end, and drunk on delusion, it's gearing up for 2012:

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.

The meeting in Sharpsville was hardly the exception. Just three months after the midterm elections, Tea Party organizers are preparing to challenge some of the longest-serving Republican incumbents in 2012.

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.

The early moves suggest that the pattern of the last elections, in which primaries were more fiercely contested than the general election in several states, may be repeated.

They also show how much the Tea Party has changed the definition of who qualifies as a conservative. While Ms. Snowe is widely considered a moderate Republican, Mr. Hatch is not. Mr. Lugar, similarly, defines himself as a conservative.

Ah, but that's not good enough anymore.

You can't just be a "conservative," you have to be a Tea Party conservative, a right-wing extremist like Rand, Angle, and O'Donnell, predominantly on economic issues (where the insane views of Ayn Rand are standard fare) but also on social ones (the Tea Party may be known best for its views on "limited" government, but it's extremely conservative, if not generally theocratic, on social issues as well, even allowing for hyper-libertarian exceptions like Rand).

And if even an Orrin Hatch isn't good enough, well, you know just how far to the right the Tea Party is -- and would like the Republican Party to be.

So are we headed for an ugly, internally divisive Republican primary season, with Teabaggers challenging any and all Republicans who don't meet their far-right standards, including established conservatives like Hatch?

Hopefully. Let's see what these Teabaggers are made off -- and let's watch the Republican Party reap what it has sown. 

Bring it on.

All out of Joementum: Lieberman announces he won't run in 2012

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Perhaps it was inevitable, but now it's official -- or will be soon enough.

Joe Lieberman, once a major player in the Democratic Party (a veep candidate, no less!) and now a quasi-Democratic independent senator from Connecticut, will not seek re-election next year.

He will make the announcement later today.

Why inevitable? Because the writing was on the wall. There was no way he was going to win. In fact, he never would have gotten out of the Democratic primary.

He's unpopular with everyone, but especially with Democrats, and of course Connecticut is a heavily blue state.

And it's not like Republicans would have backed him given his return to the Democratic fold post-2008 (even if Democrats should have given him the boot), with votes for health-care reform and DADT repeal. And there certainly aren't enough genuine independents to propel him to victory -- and, regardless, they don't much care for him either.

Perhaps we haven't heard the last of him. Perhaps Obama, always eager to reach out (and to irritate the left), will appoint him to some cushy post. Perhaps he'll continue to make the talk-show rounds as an "independent." Even if voters don't like him, the news media do, just as they liked McCain for so long, until he lost his marbles.

It's always been about him, and about his shameless career-minded opportunism, but he's managed to convince many in the media, and many in Washington, that he's a go-to spokesman for bipartisanship. This is ridiculous, of course, but it will allow him to remain a visible public figure spinning his self-aggrandizing nonsense should he choose to go that route.

Either way, at least he realizes that his time in the Senate is up.

**********

So... good riddance, Joe.

I once wrote that the Democratic Party should be a big enough tent to include the likes of you, but you did all you could to be a thorn in Democrats' sides, including being a (pro-Bush) Republican for all intents and purposes, culminating in your despicable pro-McCain smear campaign against Obama in 2008, and perhaps you realize now that the Republican Party, moving further and further to the right, certainly has no place for you, nor even for your pal McCain.

And your retirement means that your seat will be easier for the Democrats to win, and to win with a far more progressive candidate than you ever were.

As I joked back in 2009, when you were trying to position yourself as a bipartisan deal-maker on health-care reform (as long as it didn't include a public option and was generally Romney-style Republican), borrowing a hilarious joke from Stewie Griffin (originally directed at Meg):

In an attic somewhere, there's a portrait of Joe Lieberman getting prettier.

That likely won't change, even in retirement.

Au revoir, Joe. 

(photo 1, photo 2)