Wednesday, May 09, 2012

Lugar we hardly knew ye...

Richard Lugar just got tea-partei'd in his bid to be renominated to the US Senate on the GOP ticket.
A lot of copy has been and will generated about the ineffable decline of the Moderate Middle in the US Senate.
This is ironic, because Lugar himself was pretty much an orthodox Indiana conservative with a foreign policy focus...his word though, was good.
And that in turn ran afoul of modern post 2008 conservatism's obsession with childish rejectionism that and his age (eighty yipes!) and Lugar was run out of town on a rail, sad end for a guy who started out with serious wingnut bona fides as "Richard Nixon's Favorite Mayor".
But...lets face it, the "moderate middle" (the very Erewhon of Brian McGrory's imagination) is naught but a place of negotiation between actors (ideological and otherwise) who are willing to negotiate.
If one side simply rejects...well that is it, game over.
I've said it before, "moderation is sick because conservatism is sick", right now the tea partei fever has burned so hot out there that the afflicted are mad to destroy anyone even remotely associated with Barack Obama.
And so down goes Lugar., who did what? Shake the President's hand once? Give his word and keep it?
Awful mortal sins for today's tea partei.

Ah but wait for it, the inevitable columns crowning Scott Brown that boodling chiseling pension grubbing hack, the new Moderate Messiah on Horseback...wait for it, a laff riot in the making.

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