Lisa Murkowski's Alaska

And so, the Revenge of the Murk is complete:

The lawyers have started leaving.

That is perhaps the surest sign that Joe Miller’s chances of becoming the next senator from Alaska are evaporating. With each passing day that election workers here in the state capital manually count write-in votes cast for Senator Lisa Murkowski, it appears increasingly likely that Alaskans spell too well for Mr. Miller’s math to work.

Assisted by lawyers sent by the Republican National Senatorial Committee, the Miller campaign set out to challenge every smudge, stray mark and misspelling they could find (and, often, only they could find) on write-in votes that appeared to be for Ms. Murkowski. ..

Now the dispute could become irrelevant. After three days of counting, the state has determined that 98% of write-in ballots were cast for Ms. Murkowski – and 90% of those were cast so cleanly that they have survived even the sometimes bafflingly strict scrutiny applied by monitors working for Mr. Miller.

Even if every ballot his campaign has challenged was thrown out in court, which is not likely, Mr. Miller could gain less than 10,000 votes. Several thousand absentee ballots that remain to be counted could help him narrow the margin, but not likely enough for him to win. The write-in count is expected to last several more days.

The only thing that could have made this a dish served even colder is if the Murk had tap-danced on Sarah Palin's face directly rather than through a vicarious surrogate.  Which, in retrospect, leaves one to wonder whether it might not have been a better idea, both in the immediate objective of finishing off the Murkowski Dynasty for good and in the longer term aim of adding some much-needed "gravitas" to her thin resume, for Sarahcuda to have taken on the bug-eyed crackwhore herself.  I mean, surely Mrs. Palin could have taken down the Murk without breaking a sweat - right?  And with a six-year lease inside the Beltway in hand, the foundation for a future presidential run would have been a lot more solid.

Or maybe in her heart of hearts, 'cuda feared she might end up exactly where Joe Miller did, felled by "write-in" because of her craven cut & run from the Alaska governorship last summer.  A factor with which the Murk herself taunted Palin on more than one occasion over the past several months.

Either way, the GOP-splitting, Obama/Democrat 2012-restoring nightmare scenario has come true, as Princess Nose Candy formally initiated hostilities with Jim DeMint on CNN:

The table's all set, folks.  If DeMint's earmark ban passes in the caucus, that's all the pretext she'll need for walking right out of it.  Or she can stay put and keep right on porking anyway in gleeful defiance of it and dare DeMint to "make her day" - and THEN bolt, perhaps making common "indepedent" cause with Olympia Snowe over Tea Party "intolerance".

And rest assured, the DeMint forces are already on DefCon1:

Prominent conservative leaders are putting critics of Sen. Jim DeMint on notice: Stop blaming the South Carolina Republican for the GOP’s failure to take back the majority in the Senate - or else.

Led by Richard Viguerie, who heads the Web site ConservativeHQ.com, a group of three dozen high-profile DeMint backers, say they will respond to the senator’s detractors “in word and deed.”

“Conservatives will not only challenge and beat more Republican senators in Republican primaries, but conservatives will stop funding and volunteering for the NRSC and the RNC,” Viguerie wrote in a letter addressed to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman John Cornyn and Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. “Instead, conservatives will send their money to, and volunteer for, Senator DeMint’s Senate Conservative Fund and the candidates Senator DeMint supports.”

And Viguerie and his counterparts didn’t stop there:

“It would be our goal for the Senate Conservatives Fund to raise more money than the NRSC,” the letter continues. “Conservatives will also work to defeat in Republican primaries those Republicans who retain consultants who criticize or try to undermine Senator DeMint.”

Just as a reminder, I am, shall we say, less than a fan of Dick Viguerie.  He's the Ultimate Tighty-Righty, so ruinous and treacherous a purist that he turned on no less than President Ronald Reagan within literally days of assuming office in 1981, and consistently right through his eight year, America-rebuilding, conservatizing, yes, "transformational" tenure.  He's made an ill-gotten career out of being a professional bitcher & whiner who stabs every one-time ally in the back, as Jim DeMint is no doubt destined to discover at some point.

I think the freshly re-elected South Carolinian will, eventually, pull his head out of his ass long enough to realize that, as Ben Franklin once said, we must all hang together, or Red Barry will surely all hang us separately.

I hope he will.  I pray it.  Because The Ultimate Enemy is not RINO establishmentarians or Tea Party insurgents, not Lisa Murkowski or Jim DeMint, but Barack Hussein Obama and the Democrat Party.  If we take our eyes off the prize of saving the American Republic as it has existed for 234 years and tear each other to shreds instead just when that objective is coming within reach, the culpablity for the disasters that follow will no longer rest with Red Barry; we - ALL OF US - will have doomed our country as surely as having guided the killing blade ourselves.

And that's one irony that is simply too bitter to endure.