SiubhanDuinne recommends the new Dana Milbank column, where he bristles at the comparison between the Donner party and Republicans, because Republicans are eating uncooked flesh of Lisa Murkowski and Charlie Crist. (Doesn’t that make them zombies?)
Compare that to the way Republicans have been treating their kin lately, tearing them limb from limb and devouring them without so much as a burp of regret. They eat flesh not out of desperation, but out of tribalism; their partisan bloodlust has overpowered them and turned them on each other.
While it’s nice to see Republicans get a little bad PR from a Kaplan opinion columnist, I don’t agree with Milbank. When a politician raises money as a party member, then switches party affiliation in order to run as an independent, the party is well within its rights to push back. These indy runs tend to split the party’s vote in the general election and make an opening for the other party, which is just bad party politics. Demonizing parties for simply acting in their own best interests in elections is the kind of unrealistic analysis that we’ve all come to loathe when it’s applied to Democrats, so the less of it the better.
And let’s not kid ourselves — the “punishments” that Crist and Murkowski received were small potatoes. Murkowski lost her leadership post in the Republican caucus (how could she not?), but she kept her ranking member seat on the Energy Committee. Crist has been threatened with a lawsuit. If either wins their race, the Republicans can welcome either back into the fold (if they want to come back) because no lasting damage has been done.
Finally, the whole column is full of Jim DeMint talking smack and generally running his big mouth. If this guy really wants to run the Republican side of the Senate, he’s not endearing himself to two potential votes for Majority Leader.
Wendy
I just have to love someone who quotes Patti Smith.
Napoleon
Milbank is just running interference for others tied to the inside the beltway crowd.
Mnemosyne
I may be an incurable optimist, but I find that potentially telling. Looks like the Republicans aren’t quite as confident of an overwhelming win in November as they claim to be and are hedging their bets to make sure Murkowski and Crist stay on board and don’t decide to caucus with the Democrats.
Kryptik
See, mistermix, I somewhat agree with the sentiment, but not for the reasons Milbank might be proposing. I object to the whole way they’re eating themselves alive, precisely because it’s the continued right wing…hell, you can’t even call it a tilt, more like a dead spiral…that this is emblematic of, and the way the press treats it as a whole, it essentially drags the whole discourse wide right. I want a principled, sane, opposition, and the fact that we’re getting an opposition that’s not only doubling down on the crazy, but seems to be getting lauded for its crazy is scary shit.
Carol
I think some of them are genuinely scared of a teabagger win. Many of the bagger candidates seem really unhinged and undisciplined. This could easily lead to the kind of things that get a member forced out early due to scandal or embarrassment. Nor are they beholden to the establishment, which means they could easily turn on their own caucus as well. So they are secretly hoping that the independent runs succeed in spite of all odds.
jacy
Dana Milbank is descended from cannibals? There must a joke in there somewhere, but I’m too lazy to find it.
I for one am happy to sit back and watch the Republicans devour one another, for whatever reason, in whatever fashion. I’ll even send them some BBQ sauce.
Peter J
I was going to argue that Tim Kaine reads my comments on balloon-juice, but then I saw that he made the “eating moderates Donner party” comment at least one day before me. So that’s a bit of FAIL from me.
So now I’m going to argue that the Democrats are actually in possession of a time machine.
In retrospective, this comment makes it look like I steal my ideas from Tim Kaine and then refuse to acknowledge that.
Mike in NC
DeMint wants to run the country. I suspect he’ll have a shot at the GOP nomination in 2016, being that he’s an odious and deranged asshole and by then we might be ready for a religious-tinged right wing dictatorship.
Kyle
She would not if she were Joe Lieberman (Likud-Jerusalem), who shit on his party after losing a primary and was asked nicely if they could please let him keep all his seniority leadership positions by the gutless Dem establishment.
Onkel Bob
I respectfully disagree that less is better. They are not being “demonized,” i.e., being cast as something they are not; they are being rightfully and deservedly being criticized for the criminals they are.
I would prefer that both parties implode, that their leadership be indicted, tried, and imprisoned under RICO (for the gangsters they are), and that the entire 2 party system (heck the party system) be abolished in favor of solely independent candidates. However, I recognize that the perfect as the enemy of the good leads to the failure of us all, so I will accept just seeing the RICO statutes being applied.
That and public executions.
SiubhanDuinne
Wow! I think this is the first time a frontpager has cited one of my comments (well, except for that time I asked for restaurant recommendations in Nashville). So thanks for that. (It’s not quite like a shout-out from TNC or Nick Kristof, but it’s a start, it’s a start.)
Re Milbank: my mentioning his column earlier wasn’t meant to suggest that suddenly Dana Milbank has written the most profound and insightful column EVAH, but simply that (to me, and I think to a few others around here) he is showing welcome signs of reasonableness and a refreshing lack of knee-jerkitude that I wouldn’t have predicted a year ago. Whenever someone is an enormous dick for a long time and then, at some point, starts acting or writing less dickishly, I welcome it as a sign that we as a species really *can* change, and for the better.
Besides, his “unfair to cannibals” line made me laugh.
eemom
The thing about Milbank is, he IS capable of producing an insightful, scathingingly humorous column that calls a spade a spade, and occasionally he does do so.
At heart however, he is just as much of a smug, overfed, head-up-the-ass Beltway hack as Broder, Brooks, and all the rest of them.
DonBoy
I believe that by the classical definition, eating the flesh of the dead makes you a ghoul; the fact that modern zombies are generally also flesh-eaters is happenstance.
Sloegin
Teabaggers running in Republican primaries. Huh.
Maybe Greens should grab a clue and run in Dem primaries instead of as their own party.
WereBear
I see nothing but LOSE in the current Republican scenario; perhaps Milbank does, too.
It’s one thing to fool people about arcane foreign policy scenarios they don’t know much about; it’s another thing to sell these latest TeaParty candidates, who are this close to wearing a hedgehog as a hat.
John Bird
Well, I hate Dana Milbank, but I think the comparison is apt – as long as we realize that the cannibalistic infection comes from the Tea Party candidates and the Republican primary voters who elected them as candidates.
They declared they would seize the party and its message; now they have.
debbie
@ Mike in NC:
I think DeMint’s been the most influential Republican these past two years. After all, he’s the one who proclaimed that health care reform would be Obama’s Waterloo. True or not, I don’t think Obama could back off from his determination to get a bill passed after that. Maybe that’s why he was willing to waste so much time on it and do nothing while the Democrats got mired down.