(By
American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on, loan from Ari Goldstein.)
Right about now on Capitol Hill, if politicians are true to form,
they're silently removing Eric Cantor's number from their Rolodexes and
contact lists. Paul Ryan's curling bar bells in a gym somewhere trying
to think of a way to plausibly deny he ever met Cantor and John Boehner
has already gotten an early start on his day's drinking.
That's what politicians on both sides of the aisle do when one of their
own is suddenly in the white hot sodium lights of a juicy scandal or
abruptly lose an election or, in Eric Cantor's case,
his party's primary.
Congress critters are suddenly unavailable, you have to leave messages
or get sent straight to voice mail and, politically, you're a leper.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary last night in
Virginia's 7th district to a Teabagger named Dave Brat, a political
virgin with a war chest of just $200,000 whom Cantor had outspent 12-1
and outraised 26-1 (Cantor spent more at steak houses than Brat did in
his entire campaign). According to an internal poll, Cantor was supposed
to beat Brat by 34 points but wound up losing by 11 (55.5-44.5%),
meaning Cantor's peoples' projection was nearly 50% off (One wonders,
considering the skewed math, if the pollsters were Karl Rove, Dick
Morris and William Kristol). In losing the Republican primary, Cantor
because the first House Majority Leader since 1899 to lose a primary (It
ought to be remembered the position
wasn't created until 1899, meaning Cantor's the first to fall in a primary).
Technically, it isn't over, yet. Cantor
could run as an independent like Joe Lieberman when he lost the Democratic Senate primary to Ned Lamont in 2006 or
legally change his name to Cesar Chavez or
pose as a black man
like one Republican had the chutzpah to do in a black voting district
(and won). Of course, running under any other banner in Virginia's
notoriously insane 7th district would fly about as well as him running
on a New Black Panther ticket under the name Willie Horton.
So, for all intents and purposes, Eric Cantor has the unfortunate
distinction of being the man who coined the term "lame duck House
Majority Leader." And, as proof of what a political nonentity Dave Brat
is, the news isn't so much that he won but that Eric Cantor, against all
political reason, against all the math and against all historical
precedent, lost. Corporate cash once again (As Mitt Romney, Newt
Gingrich, Linda McMahon, Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman had learned) lost
big. And we're all left asking ourselves, "Who the hell is Dave Brat?"
Putting the "Riot" in "Patriot."
The former future House Speaker, who until last night was licking his
chops and rubbing his hands at the thought of Speaker John Boehner
retiring this year or being forced into rehab, suffered possibly the
most stinging loss in American political history and without even a
Macaca moment on Youtube.
Eric Ivan Cantor thought he was doing all the right things good
Republicans were supposed to do: He voted against embassy security
funds, questioned Hillary Clinton when she said doing so would hurt US
security, he voted to shut down the government, refused to deal in good
faith with the President in 2011 and personally scuttled a debt ceiling
compromise that would've avoided a downgrade to our credit rating.
In short, Cantor was like a hit man you see in independent B movies,
someone who'd faithfully done his damnedest to destroy lives only to
find his employers had put a hit on him because he'd just become a
liability. Cantor's mistake, in retrospect, was to give some tepid
support to the Grand Bargain Obama had struck with the House leadership
regarding immigration only to
turn his back on it
and vote against anything with even the slightest whiff of amnesty. In
other words, the man who had done more damage to America, including
indirectly getting four Americans killed in Benghazi, than his
predecessor Tom DeLay, was essentially voted out of office last night
for being too
liberal.
By the final leg of the primary cycle, both Cantor and Brat, an
economics professor, were accusing each other of being liberal stooges
and all that was needed was for both men to propose chaining an anchor
to every one of our nation's 11,000,000 undocumented immigrants and to
drop them down the
Mariana Trench.
But that long-established history of Republican buttfuckery wasn't good
enough to the good patriots of Virginia's 7th district. Cantor's
pretense of briefly supporting immigration amnesty made him so reviled
among the teabaggers that, if Dave Brat hadn't run, they still would've
elected a potato with a picture of Ronald Reagan thumb-tacked to it.
But Dave Brat had stepped into the breach, a David with a tricorner hat
taking on Goliath in some Quixotic quest, tilting at wind farms and
spouting free market principles that cannot possibly be beneficial in
any way, shape and form in even the slightest degree to the largely
working class people who make up any Tea Party chapter. Essentially, it
was a case of, Anyone's better than you, the same mindset that let a
professional chair-warmer like Robert Gates effortlessly slip into the
Pentagon in the wake of Rumsfeld's resignation.
And Dave Brat, the very definition of a political nonentity, will be
just another freshman teabagger in the House. Someone else will be
elected House Majority Leader, perhaps even someone not as
conspiratorial and harmful to the national interests as Cantor had been.
The Tea Party had made mistakes before: Witness Allen West and Joe
Walsh, who both got thrown out of office last year after snarling at
anyone and everyone for two short years.
Dave Brat will likely suffer the same fate at the hands of infamously
unforgiving and nonconciliatory Teabaggers whose memories, fears,
paranoia and hatred for anything fair and democratic (such as their
handing the primary to one of their own in a fair and democratic
process) is longer than their actual knowledge of the issues and who
really stands to lose when Teabaggers get elected to Congress.
"Dominion Theology or Dominionism is the idea that Christians should work toward either a nation governed by Christians or one governed by a conservative Christian understanding of biblical law. At least under this name, it exists primarily among Protestants in the United States. It is a form of theocracy and is related to theonomy, though it does not necessarily advocate Mosaic law as the basis of government. Prominent adherents of Dominion Theology are otherwise theologically diverse, including the Calvinist Christian Reconstructionism and the charismatic/Pentecostal Kingdom Now theology and New Apostolic Reformation."
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