Vichy GOP Irritates Dan Riehl. Unwise.

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by Smitty

Over at Breitbart, “Did the NRSC’s Josh Holmes Just Cost Mitch McConnell His Primary?”

Sorry, Mitch. I honestly had considered using my little platform here to try and encourage friends and fans to give you a pass, while shifting more time and money over to taking out Landrieu in LA. Thanks to your hand-picked would-be henchman at the NRSC, Holmes, that’s now an impossible position for me to take and defend. If the many phone calls I’ve had both to and from other activists in the last two days are any indication, all Holmes did was energize and incentivize the very movement against you, which you so shortsightedly dispatched him to the NRSC to try and quash.

Sending Josh Holmes to the NYT to pronounce a fatwah against associates of the Senate Conservatives Fund helps to pull the Tea Party/GOP struggle into focus.

I myself had been a part of the Silent Majority for years, and only got dragged into blogging after seeing the Google Reader touted on Slashdot, picking up Instapundit as subscription, who linked a certain Revanchist, Seditious Madman, who apparently liked my gags enough to rope me in. That was a couple of centuries back, in internet years.

Still longer ago, I had voted for Ross Perot in 1992. Still don’t regret it. At all. So the social media/blogging scene was exciting, and CPAC a rush when I attended in 2009, and got into blogging proper. Blogging a substantial number of big events on the Mall in DC (even having a hand in Hating Breitbart) was cool. I’ll look to tell my son, as we huddle about the fire for warmth, that I did try to avert the disaster. Because despite a wave election in 2010, the GOP has proven about as effective as a modern feminist in the Duggar family’s neighborhood. We saw no major event activity in 2011. I figured it was a breather from the pace of the previous year, and a gathering of steam for 2012.

After watching the lengthy series of 2012 GOP debates, which could have refined the conservative message and articulated an alternative to the course of Holy Progress currently destroying our economy, we watched the GOP nominate a milquetoast with a deep commitment to offering a spirited, principled near-victory. Which genuinely nice guy is currently endorsing Chris Christie (a sop for Double Down(?)), while Chuck Schumer has endorsed Hillary. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over? Has the DNC already delivered the 2016 concession speech to the Vichy GOP HQ there in Suckville, OH?

As Riehl notes in the quoted Breitbart posting, it’s getting really hard to defend the GOP. I’ve always fallen within the camp that says that reforming the GOP from within, returning it to its anti-establishment roots, has the highest probability of success. There are plenty of other fringe parties afoot in the U.S.; adding a Tea Party to those ranks will succeed in widening the fringe, while simultaneously making the Democrat’s mopping-up operations easier.

And that position’s irrefutable, as we watch the elected Tea Party reformers like Cruz, Paul, Lee in the Senate do two things (1) inspire the base, and (2) receive fatwahs from the elite. One watches the debacle of the shutdown/debt ceiling fight and stands puzzled as to how how these ancient buzzards swear that oath jazz about defending the Constitution as easily as eating pizza, without their tongues shattering in their grizzled gourds.

Let’s step back and address this: a century after Wilson, our Constitution is substantially collapsed. Progress’s job of providing cover for scuttling the Enlightenment and restoring aristocracy is mostly complete. The Vichy GOP seem more interested in protecting the shadowy status quo than the document which they swear to support at the start of a Congress. It is as though the GOP has quaffed the Progressive kool-aid, and really supports some super-Constitutional Great Truth:

There are petty lies and there are Great Truths. It’s ok to tell a lie to advance a great cause. A sign of nobility even. It’s ok to lie about sex, prior membership in the Communist party, and the deficits of the ACA. A too scrupulous regard for truth in these matters just reveals how petty and heartless the questioner is.

I think an idea such as a super-Constitutional Great Truth may be far-fetched. It would be truly a lie from the pit if it existed. Yet a theory of such does have a great deal of explanatory power for why the GOP refuses to capitalize on opportunities to limit federal government overreach in any useful way.

And so we find ourselves waking up in a country in Anno Baracki 5 that purports not to have an aristocracy, goes through seemingly endless, dirty rituals on a biennial basis to hold elections, and yet mostly retains the same louts in office.

This is the challenge of the Information Age and social media: to redistribute power, not wealth. To view coldly the events of the last century from a political vantage, good and bad, and confess “Yes, they were mostly bad.” To commit to ideas like Levin’s Liberty Amendments and get back to the kind of Republic that Franklin hoped we would keep. To convince the old warhorses like McConnell that they had better not tread on us. Ultimately, to

74 comments

  1. While I’m on board with desquishifying the GOP, I’m not on board with prioritizing a purge of squishes from the Republican party over a purge of Democrats from the Senate.

    I find myself deeper and deeper into Let It Burn territory, but I guess I’m not that far yet.

  3. Politics is not about reform.

    Politics is about control.

    Politics is never about reform, even when the politicos say that is is.

    By definition, reform can’t come from within. It almost always splits off into a new thing.

    At this point, I don’t think anyone can stop the collapse. Nor do I think that’s bad. There are how many laws on the books? How many regulations in the Federal Register? We’ve been conditioned to depend on government to help us. Cut spending, but not national defense. Cut spending, but not aid to Israel or Saudi Arabia. Cut spending, but not Social Security. And some banks and unions are Too Big To Fail.

    We’ve been taught that government is supposed to govern and control the other guy.

    That’s the guy who is the problem.

    Not us. Never us, It’s not our fault.

    As long as the “system” perpetuates that, it should fail. Some of the rot goes back to Reconstruction. As long as people believe that things can be fixed so their lives won’t be upended

  4. This type of tone-deaf asshattery is nothing new. Take a look at the book Primary Mistake to see how the NRSC went to the mat to defend noted RINO – now Democrat – Lincoln Chafee when conservative Steve Laffey challenged him to a primary in 2006.

    These establishment pukes have made me so angry that I’m about ready to burn my Republican voter card. And so help me, if I get another fundraising request from them, I’ll tape the postage-paid envelope to a cinder block and send it back with a big old “F%$# You!”

  5. Purge of squishes vs purge of Democrats – six of one, half a dozen of the other. When the elected R’s go along with the D’s on everything of importance, is there really a difference between them?

  6. But that’s just it. They don’t go along with “everything of importance.” Too much, yes. Sorry, but saying “there’s no difference!” just makes you sound like you don’t know what you’re talking about. I often say similar things as hyperbole, but not as a serious statement.

    There is a difference, even if it’s just a slower descent into whatever we’re descending into. We can disagree on the importance of that, but I don’t think it’s something you can simply deny.

    Party discipline means that numbers matter for all sorts of things. I don’t see a realistic way to get anything like a majority of Lees, Pauls and Cruzes, but I’d still trade a McConnell for a Reid any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

  9. “Still longer ago, I had voted for Ross Perot in 1992.” Well, as another one who failed to vote for Bush41 that time around, I hope both of us have learned that lesson.

    As to the larger point, if we have enough R “squishes” in office to hold the majority in either house then the travesty by which Obama is knowingly killing Americans would not have been passed. So, those who would choose to go after Mitch and leave a D in office are accessories to murder.

  10. Hey Smitty: The “Read More” link at the end of the article on the front page is no good. I had to click the comments link to get the rest.

  11. By many accounts, Addison Mitchell McConnell has a net worth in eight digits after 45 years as a public official. Bouncing him out of office should not be a sectarian cause.

    The circular firing squad behavior on the part of his minion is deplorable. Unless there is some esoteric reason incorporated within campaign finance law to maintain them, the congressional campaign committees should be dissolved. The means of electing the Republican National Committee and its Chairman should also be reformed so that it is not a catspaw of the hopeless congressional caucus leadership.

  12. After watching the lengthy series of 2012 GOP debates, which could have
    refined the conservative message and articulated an alternative to the
    course of Holy Progress currently destroying our economy, we watched the
    GOP nominate a milquetoast with a deep commitment to offering a
    spirited, principled near-victory.

    Mr. Romney is a capable man, and quite decent in his mundane life. The trouble is that the reasons he entered political life are opaque.

    If you want better choices, the choices have to run. Your alternatives to Mr. Romney turned out to be Ron Paul (a principled man without executive experience, and a conceited goof), Richard Santorum (a principled man without executive experience and a truncated pre-political career), and Dr. Newton LeRoy Gingrich (an intelligent man with good and needed skills in forensics and marketing but without executive experience and with an embarrassing domestic history).

    The notable candidate among those to run in the last 20 years who was most appropriate for the President’s chair was Gov. Huckabee (who tends to be regarded with disrespect by establishment Republicans and TEA partiers alike). Oh well.

  13. The problems you have with McConnell and his minions and with Romney are indicative of two things:

    1. The screens in place which keep people out of Congress and the enticements for them to run are out of whack.

    2. The Presidential nomination process is ghastly. Popular election may have to go if we are ever to have someone worthwhile in that office.

  14. Sorry, but saying that they don’t go along on the important stuff means there is little difference between them and the Dimocraps. You may not like putting it in such stark terms, but it really is hard to avoid. If in your mind it makes it seem that such people don’t know what they are talking about, that says more about you then it does the rest who disagree with you.
    people like McCain, Graham and McConnell must go if we are to win the battles before us because, effectively, they are Dimocraps.

  16. If “Mitch” were a back bencher it would be one thing. However, he isn’t and has betrayed us consistently. leaving him alone is akin to leaving a Dimocrap alone. McConnell is in am position to do us grave harm, as is McCain, Graham, Cornyn, Alexander and others. They must go because they are traitors.
    The left is where they are because they do not tolerate traitors. Until we stop doing so, we will get no where and you might as well just go home and stay because you will accomplish exactly nothing.

  17. The RNC is elected by the state organization, and they are owned by the GOP establishment. It’s why the RNC is so lame and does so little to support us.

  18. Huckabee was, and still is, a squish who talks down to the TEA Party types. He may have executive experience, but telling the base they are stupid is not something a rational person does when they need to people they diss to climb higher.

  19. What? I’m saying they don’t go along with the Democrats. And that the marginal value of replacing a D with an R is bigger than getting a less squishy R. And if we get rid of the people you named (which, yes, lets!) at the expense of replacing the Landrieus of the Senate…it’s not going to work.

  20. So remove him from GOP leadership. Otherwise, targeting McConnell is indicative of poor IFF. The Ds are the appropriate targets. Anything else is aiding and abetting the Murderer in Chief.

  21. So it’s a “fatwah” to inform an ad agency that if they create ads attacking our members, they won’t get any of our business? Compare this to the things said about NRSC members even in this post and comments.

    Seems like some people love to dish it out but wet their frilly little panties when there is return fire. Same thing with Cruz supporters – it was fine that he took out ads attacking 25 of his GOP Senate colleagues in their home states without so much as a heads-up it was coming, but criticism of Cruz is horrible! horrible!

    Man up, sissy boys.

    Oh, and Dan Riehl will have ZERO effect on the Kentucky primary, as I am sure Mitch McConnell would tell you – if he had ever heard of Dan Who? And hey, how are all those years of threats against Lindsey Graham working out for y’all? Last quarterly report, Graham had $7,000,000 cash on hand, Nancy Mace $17,000, and the other two hadn’t raised enough to file a report.

    Yeah, y’all some scary peeps, all right! BWAHAHAHA!

  22. Unless I misunderstood, the NRSC is not just withholding its own business, but attempting to extort co-operation with an orchestrated boycott of this particular agency.

    It was once against the law in New York for a political party secretariat to spend party funds in support of or opposition to a candidate in a primary. I imagine it still is. I think there might even be federal laws which require the same abstention in intramural union elections. It is the presupposition of such laws that all members of an organization are legitimate competitors for positions within it and that it is against the public interest for organizations such as unions and political parties to decay into private fiefdoms (most particularly given the legal privileges accorded both unions and political parties).

    I do not know that you could attempt to proscribe this and not cause more trouble than you solve, but I think the situation is analogous. YMMV.

  23. I do not recollect to what you are referring re talking down to the base.

    And ‘squish’ is a misnomer. A legislator easily rolled on one set of issues or another or a vocational temporizer might be called a ‘squish’. Gov. Daniels on social questions is squishy, as was most of the Senate Republican caucus ca. 1970.

    Someone who has a coherent set of views which does not map exceptionally well to certain conventional combinations of views is not a ‘squish’, he is an eccentric of sorts.

  24. Unless I had a granular knowledge of parliamentary procedure, I would be disinclined to make too many categorical statements of that type. Truth be told, the institutional set up is so wretched I am not sure that anyone would do a smashing job.

    Trent Lott once gave up to the opposition a mess of lifetime judicial appointments in return for some seats on regulatory commissions. A defender of Lott said he does this because he is fixated on Senate business getting done, details optional. That is what you would expect from a man whose entire adult life was spent on the payroll of the U.S. Congress.

    A proper reason to unload AMM is that there is a prima facie case to be made that he is on the take. We do not need that in Congress or anywhere else. Ditto re Harry Reid, net worth $6.7 million.

  25. I suspect the problem is not so much ‘squishy’ people like Olympia Snowe (that’s just her perspective and someone has to be in the tail of the bell curve) but people overly steeped in Beltway favor trading and rent-seeking. This is a problem in both parties, though more among Democrats because their raison d’etre is cross-subsidies for clientele. From this vantage point, the worst of the Republicans is Hal Rogers.

  26. That is why the GOPe is the Democratic Party lite, doing the same thing as the Democratic Party but in a lighter form.

  29. If we (Tea Partiers) get the majority in both the House and the Senate, even w/ a democrat as Pres., we could push our agenda of less government, reduction and elimination of the fed deficit and Sarah Palin’s core principle of fighting the legal corruption (or as Sarah said nicely, crony capitalism) to fruition because we could just override his veto.
    If there is a GOPe as Pres.. the same scenario could happen. The rest (transformation of the GOPe to the GTP (Grand Tea Party) should just take care of itself.

  31. Nope, Romney does not want to have anything to do with the Tea Party that is why he lost. He even tried to believe that the Tea Party does not exist.
    One of the right things that Obama did during his convention coronation is to invite Bill Clinton to appease the Clintonite wing of the Democratic Party.

  32. Ach! yourself. What are you, a Scotchman?

    Huck physically destroyed the hard drives of government-owned computers when he left office, not the act of a man with a clear conscience. Took or attempted to take furnishings from the governor’s mansion. Upon leaving office set up registries so his cronies and friends could reward him for his service. (Service to whom, we must ask.) Worst of all, lied about how he managed to lose weight, thereby misleading fat folks around the world.

    Which of these was corrupt, which dishonest, which merely tasteless we may individually decide. But he’s on the verge of being a pro-tax, anti-death penalty RINO in any case, so why support him?

    Our best (though certainly not perfect) candidate would have been Santorum, but he botched the last debate by following his wife’s advice, just as he had Romney on the ropes. Too bad, or else we would have had a more exciting presidential race

  33. I had a telemarketer call on behalf of the NRSC, and I let them talk me into a $50 donation. However, I insisted, I would send them a check (I hate giving my credit card number to a person who called me, and I don’t know them), so send me a letter. They were pissy about it, but agreed.

    I had planned to write a letter to the NRSC, complaining about their treatment of conservatives versus squishes, and telling them “No more until you stop!” An expensive letter, but I figured it was worth it to try and get their attention.

    Until I read Dan Riehl’s article. Which I then printed out, and wrote a note to the effect of “I changed my mind. No more cash until this crap stops. Stop contacting me!”, scratched out the donation form, and mailed the letter back in their self-addressed, postage paid envelope.

  34. Personally, I do not find Mother Jones, which says they requested a mess of records from the Governor’s office and were told by Gov. Beebe they were on destroyed harddrives, a reliable source of information (and the request was clearly a fishing expedition. As for the gift registry, the complaint offered by the Governor was that it was set up by his wife’s friends for a housewarming party they were running.

    Now, I do not know whether the Governor followed public records law properly or not, nor whether it actually was a project of his wife’s friends. I do know there is not much reason to credit Mother Jones or professional gadflies, nor would I unless I were biased against the governor for some other reason.

    But he’s on the verge of being a pro-tax, anti-death penalty RINO in any case, so why support him?

    Sorry to be repetitive, but the RINO discourse is stupid and people should stop it. It is commonly deployed against John McCain. When you are the Republican presidential nominee, you get to define what an authentic Republican is, not some combox denizen. The same applies if you are a Republican governor of more than a decade standing and garner over 20% of the Republican ballots in a Presidential primary donnybrook.

  35. Generally, I think why people win or lose elections has a multi-causal explanation and any one of a number of factors might be decisive.

    IIRC, Romney ran ahead of Richard Mourdock and some others, so I would tend to be skeptical that any posited insufficiency of enthusiasm for the TEA party was a decisive factor.

  36. Actually, Richard Cash had over a quarter million before the others even got in the race against Graham. And Graham’s popularity in SC has been steadily going down.

    If ol’ “Light in the Loafers” Lindsey thinks it’s going to be a cakewalk to retain his senate seat, well, he can think what he wants.

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