Hot Frankenstein

For the first time in my life, I'm ashamed to be a Republican AND a conservative.

***It's like being about to win the Indy 500, and just as you're going into the final lap, all the lugnuts go flying off all your wheels at once, right as the engine drops right out of the block, just as your gas tank explodes:

Christine O'Donnell's former campaign manager has recorded an Election Day robocall for the Delaware Republican Party meant to shred the tea party-backed candidate's conservative credentials as voters head to the polls.

The last-minute move appears to be the grand finale of what's been a fusillade of orchestrated attacks on O'Donnell originating from GOP headquarters on behalf of her primary opponent, nine-term moderate Rep. Mike Castle.

The call features the voice of Kristin Murray, who ran O'Donnell's 2008 Senate campaign against then-Senator Joe Biden, and who charges that her old boss "is no conservative."

"I got into politics because I believe in conservative values and wanted to make a difference. But I was shocked to learn that O’Donnell is no conservative," says Murray, according to a script obtained by POLITICO.

"This is her third Senate race in five years. As O’Donnell’s manager, I found out she was living on campaign donations – using them for rent and personal expenses, while leaving her workers unpaid and piling up thousands in debt," she says.

Perhaps the most biting line in the call delivered by Murray: "She wasn't concerned about conservative causes. O’Donnell just wanted to make a buck."

You know what?  I have no problem believing it.  I've said before that my problem with this bimbo's purported "true conservatism" is that her life doesn't seem to reflect that she lives out the beliefs she claims.  She's a serial failure, blames others for those failures, up to and including a frivilous lawsuit against a stalwart conservative publisher citing grievances that would make a trial lawyer blush, and the closest thing to a career she's had is as a professional (failed) candidate.  That doesn't sound like "walking the talk" to me, which I would think would make her look like the biggest fraud to her own supporters more than anybody.

Maybe if this little nugget, which gets at the heart of the character issue, had been floated weeks or months ago, there'd have been time for O'Donnelloids to draw the logical conclusion and quietly drift away before she could scam her way into nomination contention.  That Mike Castle and the Delaware GOP waited until the morning of the primary suggests to me incompetent complacency, a lack of genuine concern for what a cynical mercenary this reveals O'Donnell to be, and that they had nothing else to say, a condition that has held ever since he announced his Senate candidacy.  Mike Castle doesn't have a reason to seek that U.S. Senate seat other than as a career gold watch.  You can't expect to inspire even moderate voters with a slogan like, "Mike Castle for U.S. Senate - it's the only Delaware office he hasn't held yet".

Tactically, it's an even bigger mistake for Cap'n Electable.  Not that O'Donnelloids would have been very likely to be anything other than sore losers if Castle does hold her off - recall her write-in candidacy in 2004 - but this guarantees it.  Moreover, it makes Team Castle absolutely stink with anticipatory defeat.  Confident campaigns don't shoot off all their ammo at the last minute like the end of a Fourth of July fireworks show; competent campaigns don't have to, because they've been using it all along.  One more thing that Team Castle and the Murk have in common.

***Of course, it's not like Team COD has been a model of accusatory continence either.  To say nothing of paragons of genuousness:

The madness continues, as activists who support Christine O'Donnell in the Delaware Senate primary have stepped up their attacks on Mike Castle by alleging that he voted to impeach President Bush. That will come as a surprise to those who wonder how they missed such a vote, but Dan Riehl assures us that it is true. Not only that, he explicitly ties this claim to radio talk show host Mark Levin's attack on us; he titles his post "Paging Powerline." He says that he would "like to hear from Powerline as to why they are supporting someone who signed on to such 'moonbattery' and did such damage to our country."

First of all, Riehl's claim--which he says may have originated with Mark Levin--is absurd on its face. The House of Representatives never voted on whether to impeach President Bush. The vote that Riehl and other anti-Castle pundits refer to is this one, to refer Dennis Kucinich's impeachment resolution to the House Judiciary Committee. That motion passed; obviously it was not an impeachment resolution, or we would have had an impeachment trial. Castle was one of twenty-four Republicans who voted for the referral resolution, along with conservative stalwarts like Peter King, Kevin Brady, Ralph Hall, and others.

This should lead, logically, to the question of why such "true conservatives" - and Mike Castle - voted to send the Kucinich resolution to House Judiciary.  O'Donnelloids' hatred of Public RINO #1 makes them leap to the conclusion that for Castle, at least, it was because he was right there with his pal Dennis the Menace, manning the barricades of anti-Bushitler revolution, trying to bring down the chimp tyrant.

The truth is more - oh, what's the word? - SANE:

It is a reasonable supposition that the Republicans who voted for HRes 1258 did so in order that Kucinich's impeachment drive could die "a slow death."

Is that what Congressman Castle had in mind? Yes, it was. This left-wing web site sounded out Delaware's representatives on their position on impeachment. The site's author was bitterly disappointed by Congressman Castle's response:

First I called Senator Carper and was told that they would not support Impeachment at this time. I also called Congressman Castle's office and was completely shocked. I was told that the Congressman would not support Impeachment because they believed there weren't any crimes committed by the Bush Administration.

There you have it. Mike Castle never voted to impeach President Bush; no such vote ever occurred on the floor of the House. He did vote to commit goofball Congressman Dennis Kucinich's impeachment resolution to the Judiciary Committee, where it died, as intended, a slow death. And Castle's office said that it opposed impeachment because "they believed there weren't any crimes committed by the Bush Administration."

As yours truly wrote at the time:

What say you, Hard Starboard nation?  A full-blown star chamber show trial push to put Dubya into the same club of infamy as Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton?  Or has Pelosi tossed Kucinich a symbolic but empty bone and simply chosen a different place to bury this unrequited nutroot wet dream?

My guess is the latter, seeing as how even the most expedited impeachment inquiry reasonably possible would dominate the general election campaign - thus incensing the GOP base, turning off independents, and jeopardizing the vast gains the Dems stand to make - and probably wouldn't be concluded until after Election Day at the earliest.  Not to mention that I cannot believe any lefty wants to run the slightest even hypothetical risk of putting Dick Cheney in the Oval Office for any length of time.

Seriously, if Crazy Nancy had wanted to impeach Dubya, she'd have kicked off that effort from day one of her speakership.  But even before that she declared impeachment "off the table".  It sure as shinola wasn't gonna happen four months before Election Day.

But why let facts get in the way of another crazy anti-Castle smear to go along with "He's having a queer affair," "he voted for Hogzilla," and "he voted for ObamaCare"?  My God, isn't it enough that he really did vote for cripple & tax?  At least that one's actually true.

***Which brings us to the thing about this primary that I just don't understand: What is it about Christine O'Donnell that has turned her into the second coming of Sarah Palin in the eyes of TPers everywhere?  What is there about her that inspires such rabid loyalty?  That is so galvanizingly inspiring as to split the Right itself more or less down the middle and turn the half that turned to the Dark Side into hatemongering character assassins with less regard for truth, fairness, and integrity than a Chicago community organizer?

The last couple of weeks I've done something I haven't indulged in in years: message board combat.  And over this single issue.  And let me tell you folks, the experience was shockingly reminscent of the early Clinton-era days on CompuServe.  Just as you couldn't (and still can't) hold a genuine, substantive debate with any of the lefty flying monkey brigades, and every thread would degenerate quickly into an ad hominem-fest, so it has been with O'Donnelloids now.  You make reasonable, logical arguments about Castle's electability and O'Donnell's toxicity in such a "blue" state, and half a loaf being better than none, and the Senate majority being within reach, and what you get in response is, "Fuck RINOs!!!!!"  It took a toe-curlingly high profile when O'Donnelloid Jeff Lord of the American Spectator and voice of reason Jim Geraghty of National Review came to bludgeoning each other with tire irons last week, all over the latter's calm, rational marshalling of inconvenient facts that CODers are insanely unwilling to hear.

It's like all of a sudden some tighty-righties have become morbidly clingy to powerlessness as proof of purity, as if the lesson of the last Republican run on top on Capitol Hill is that power corrupts absolutely and we should never run the risk of ever again subjecting our party to that sort of temptation, all the while deluding themselves that the, um, shining path to power with virtue is to let the Democrats retain power long enough to so completely destroy the country that the voters will be forced to elect "true conservatives" to all 535 Beltway legislative billets.  Assuming we're still allowed to vote.  Assuming there's still a country left to vote in.  Assuming we're even still alive.

It's like a political hostage situation.  "Elect 'true conservatives' or we'll make sure you get "true liberals" for-evah!"

Here's a happy thought: As the RINO scalp case fills up, there's bound to be burgeoning establishment resentment - can you say "Murkowski write-in campaign"? - but the one thing keeping a lid on that has been the quality of the TP candidates that have come forward and fought the good fight for what's right.  You can't, in other words, argue with success.  Now here comes Christine O'Donnell, she of the tattered, fluttering, largely empty resume, dubious background, and execrable campaign tactics against a fellow Republican, who has exploited the Tea Party movement to leech vitality into her own long-term political moribundity.  And yet "true conservatives" have, perplexingly, gone to fanatical lengths to try to push her into a general election contest that'll already be over the moment Castle concedes.

Question: Just exactly why should RINOs, or any Republicans who have, directly or by group association, been sneered same, show up on Election Day out of Party loyalty that their bitter, obnoxious vanquishers have gone out of their way to lack, or out of the patriotic duty to cashier the ruling Dems when tighty-righties went all out to forfeit a Senate seat, and possibly Senate control along with it, that had been in the bag?  Why should Team COD expect the Delaware GOP or even the NRSC to get behind her in the event she wins when it's established fact that they will never recupricate if she doesn't?

I ask again: Whatever happened to Ronald Reagan's Eleventh Commandment?  And shouldn't "true conservatives" know and practice it most faithfully of all?

UPDATE:  Behold, the face that can launch a thousand erections....

....and will elect a "bearded communist" to the United States Senate.

Delaware officially moves in my rankings from "Safe Republican" to "Safe Democrat".

Hope it was worth it, jackoffs.  Personally, I think the bill for your little triumph has only just begun.