(Jeff Danziger’s website)
.
Remember “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line”? Well, Jillian Rayfield at Salon reports that the new, improved GOP isn’t living up to that old saw:
Former Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., announced Tuesday that he is forming a super PAC “to support freedom-loving conservative alternatives” and to fight back against a Karl Rove initiative to keep unelectable Tea Partyers from winning primaries…
Walsh was responding to the launch of the Conservative Victory Project, a new initiative by the Karl Rove-linked super PAC American Crossroads. The idea is to enlist GOP billionaires to crush efforts by the Tea Party to pick off establishment incumbents and/or field far-right conservatives in the primaries that have no hope of winning a general election…
Tea Party groups were not happy about it. Matt Kibbe, the head of Freedomworks, called the move “Orwellian” and rather dramatically said in a statement that “The Empire is striking back.”
“All events point to a fundamental clash between the old guard Republican establishment dictating outdated ideas from the top-down, versus a tech-savvy younger generation of activists driving their agenda from the bottom-up,” Kibbe wrote. “These blatant acts of hostility are typical behavior of an entrenched political establishment, circling the wagons around incumbents, regardless of job performance in office.”
“I dare say any candidate who gets this group’s support should be targeted for destruction by the conservative movement,” wrote Erick Erickson on RedState.com.
Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, wrote in a statement that Rove is part of “the consultant class” that “has been on the wrong side of history.” And Amy Kremer, head of the Tea Party Express, warned: “If the establishment’s large donors want to see a complete electoral catastrophe, then all they need to do is push Tea Party conservatives into supporting alternative third candidates.”…
Steven Law, the American Crossroads president who had initially spoken with the Times, agreed on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown”: “It’s not because we’re necessarily nominating candidates who are too conservative. We’re just nominating candidates who don’t have the discipline or the fundraising drive or a lot of other things that they need to be able to effectively compete against very good Democratic candidates.”
It can be hard for us outsiders to separate the pure grifters (like Kibbe) from the true believers (Martin, AFAICT) from those who actually believe that President Obama is the Antichrist and that they’re entitled to make bank off their fellows (Walsh, Erickson). But I will admit it’s fun to watch today’s Repubs act like the DLC-era Democrats.
What’s on the agenda for the day?
Open Thread: Let’s Compromise – We’ll Do It My WayPost + Comments (71)