I hold no brief for Peter “The Mucker” King, but now Politico is trying to tell me that he’s on President Obama’s side for once:
New York Rep. Peter King slammed Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Sunday for praising NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
“When you have Rand Paul actually comparing Snowden to Martin Luther King or Henry David Thoreau, this is madness, this is the anti-war Democrats in the 1960s that destroyed their party for almost 15 years,” King said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I don’t want that happening to our party.”
King also blasted other Republicans for voting to defund the National Security Administration last week, calling the move “disgraceful.”
“I thought it was absolutely disgraceful that so many Republicans voted to defund the NSA program, which has done so much to protect our country,” King said….
Of course it is not true that King is agreeing with the President, he’s just disagreeing with the faddish new “populist libertarian”, i.e. “anti-neocon”, splittist faction within the GOP. He’s got the Old Bull party-machine take on the late-1960s Democratic implosion — if only those DFH kids had had the common decency to know their place and wait their turn rather than insisting on all those anti-war, pro-Negro, womens-libber pieties! — and sees a political advantage for Peter King in warning the other GOP Old Bulls against wrongthought deviationism. Which is why I can, with a clean conscience, pray for injuries (or a small, targeted meteorite) in this intraparty scuffle.
But then, despite his public flirtation last week, Peter King is never going to be a serious presidential candidate — he’s just stroking the egos of his Lung Guylint constituents when he suggests he could win as many as three electoral votes. On the other hand, barring some particularly exotic scandal, this guy…
… Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who was a vocal and at times caustic critic of Rand Paul’s father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, during the 2012 primaries, called it a welcome development that “people are starting to push back.”
“There was a lot of talk, particularly during the Republican primary last year, of, ‘Well, we don’t want to alienate these voters,” Santorum said, recalling that he’d been criticized as “too bellicose” and “too warlike. “I can tell you, the Paulistas who were active on the state level in 2012 were not interested in the Republican Party as it now exists. They are interested in a very different kind of model.”…
… is arguably 2016’s man of the ever-GOP-popular “It’s His Turn” coalition. So maybe we Democrats will have the excitement of watching the GOP’s long-awaited implosion after all?
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