I noticed many bloggers on the right are all upset because Mel Martinez will be RNC chair instead of Michael Steele. Yes, let's have the unsuccessful candidate for senator instead of an actual senator as chairman.
Now, I really don't see the advantage of Martinez over Steele, since I hear from Florida folks that Martinez is already MIA (so why would you give him more to do?), and Steele is a rock star and has a bright future. But when Don says, "all upset," he's being his usual, charming, understated self.
These kool-aid drinking wackjobs are in major meltdown. See RedState, and read the comments. Completely unhinged. The Vince Foster black helicopter insanity is back. Already.
Two years ago, I said immigration would destroy the party — and here we are. When Polipundit threw his little fit and threw his cobloggers off because they wouldn't toe his party line about immigration, I said it would kill us — and here we are. And we're talking moonbats, every bit as out of touch with reality and blind to anything but their own little false ideas as the Kos Kidz. Completely off the deep end, loony-tunes insane. And I don't think there's any point trying to talk reason to these people, any more than there's any point trying to talk reason with the Che Guevara crowd.
For example, all you have to do is read Mike Pence's immigration plan to see that there is no amnesty in it. But you can say that till you're blue in the face to these wackjobs and they'll turn around and claim — falsely — that Pence supports amnesty.
But the most idiotic, destructive thing about these moonbats is that they're demanding that the party take an even stronger line on illegal immigration. So let's look at how immigration worked for us in the last election, shall we? Here's an article in the Weekly Standard that sums it up nicely:
No one knows how much money was spent on these ads or the websites and mailers that went with them. But the candidates might as well have poured their dollars down a drain. Long before the votes were counted, tracking polls showed that the issue wasn't "working"–wasn't energizing voters or closing the gap between Democratic frontrunners and their GOP opponents.
[ . . . ]
Immigration was the dog that didn't bark. It did not prove an effective wedge issue. And as far as could be determined, it decided few if any contests. No congressional or gubernatorial candidate otherwise poised to win was defeated primarily because of his or her views on immigration. No more than one or two, if that many, struggling to catch up managed to ride it to victory. And the most stridently restrictionist candidate in the country, Arizona congressional hopeful Randy Graf, who ran a campaign based almost entirely on immigrant-bashing, went down in flaming defeat.
This wasn't for lack of trying by immigration naysayers–activists, candidates, or the Republican party establishment. The GOP leadership, particularly in the House, started planning their wedge campaign over a year ago. The party's cooler heads–in this case, the president, Sen. Bill Frist, Sen. John McCain, and the 21 other Republicans who voted for the Senate's bipartisan reform bill–argued strongly against a polarizing approach. Better to grapple with the problem, they urged–what the public wants is a solution. But the wedge players were more interested in political advantage. So instead of working with the Senate to enact law, they spent the spring and summer teeing up the issue for the fall campaign, casting a problem that in fact divides both parties as a contest between monolithic blocs: tough Republican enforcers and soft Democrat reformers.
Let's review that: It didn't work. That means that all the kool-aid drinking wackos out there who thing that the litmus test issue is immigration are as blind to reality as the HuffPo nuts. Just to make it simple: if immigration really were the hot button issue, the litmus test issue, then it would have won the election.
Like I said before, the immigration wackjobs have a wholly unrealistic and ridiculously simplistic idea of the issue. It isn't an issue. It's a cluster of issues. And no, sorry, you're not going to get your way all of the time — deal with it like an adult.
But back to that article:
Struggling candidates and activist PACs were only too happy to play into this scenario, generating some of the nastiest ads in recent campaign memory. The 600-plus page Senate bill was reduced to a single sound bite: More than two dozen spots misleadingly claimed that it would pay Social Security benefits to illegal aliens.
Stop right there. Once again, we have fact — the Senate bill did not award SS benefits to illegal aliens — and wackiness — throw them out, they're trying to give SS benefits to illegal aliens! They could have read the Senate bill, of course, but that would get in the way of their nutty ideology. We mustn't let facts intrude!
And some of those candidates went way past the line, apparently:
On one particularly unsavory website, Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow was pictured in a sombrero, bobbing back and forth to Mexican music, over a text that thanked her in Spanish for what it implied was an un-American vote for the package.
Excuse me? There are lines you do not cross, things that just are not acceptable. I wouldn't have voted for the idiot who put up this ad. This is right out of Pat Buchanan's playbook. But the real question is where was the Michigan GOP, why did they let this moron air the ad, and if he did it behind their backs, why didn't the smack him good and apologize for it?
Yes, there's too much apologizing — but this needed an apology. It still does.
No wonder the idiot lost the race. And you know what? I'm glad he lost. I don't want this moron anywhere near government, and I don't want him affiliated with my party. We don't need another Trent Lott.
As Election Day approached, the contrast between these Democrats and Republicans wasn't soft versus hard, as the House leadership had hoped. It was tough versus ugly–and polls showed voters, especially Hispanic voters, very clear about which approach they liked better.
Well duh — and speaking of duh, these wackos demand that the party get even uglier. Moonbats.
Gov. Janet Napolitano set the tone. She didn't denounce the fence or other border enforcement–in fact, she led the way, over a year ago, in calling for deployment of the National Guard on the border. She talked tough about smugglers; she repudiated amnesty. But she also insisted relentlessly that border enforcement was only a first step toward the solution: comprehensive reform of the kind proposed by the Senate. The more firmly she held to this tough but pragmatic line, the more frenzied her opponent grew–and as he promised more and more draconian enforcement, her lead only widened.
Other Democrats around the state were soon borrowing from the governor's playbook: Incumbent senator Jon Kyl's opponent Jim Pederson, Rep. J.D. Hayworth's challenger Harry Mitchell, and little-known state senator Gabrielle Giffords, running against the self-described Minuteman candidate, Randy Graf, in the eighth congressional district, which runs along the Mexican border. As Election Day approached, the contrast between these Democrats and Republicans wasn't soft versus hard, as the House leadership had hoped. It was tough versus ugly–and polls showed voters, especially Hispanic voters, very clear about which approach they liked better.
The results, in Arizona and elsewhere, speak for themselves. Janet Napolitano won handily with 63 percent of the vote. Randy Graf lost, 42 percent to 54 percent, and so did J.D. Hayworth, 46 percent to 51 percent. Another leading House hawk, John Hostettler, chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, was drummed out of his Indiana district. Jon Kyl squeaked by, but his margin of victory was not what he had hoped it would be in September. And not even the crassest anti-immigrant grandstanding could save Rick Santorum or the Colorado state house. Worst of all, looking to the future, the share of Hispanics voting for Republicans dropped to about 27 percent from about 38 percent in 2002.
A survey conducted the weekend before the vote by the Republican polling firm the Tarrance Group helps explain this surprising tilt. (Full disclosure: The poll was commissioned by the Manhattan Institute and the National Immigration Forum.) According to Tarrance, there was little if any immigration wedge effect: Only 11 percent of the public said they were going to vote on the basis of their views about immigration. One in four conceded that their feelings about the illegal influx were driving them to the polls, but an astonishingly large percentage of this group eschewed an enforcement-only policy: Thirty-eight percent said they preferred a comprehensive solution along the lines of the Senate bill. As for the larger electorate, asked to choose between two candidates, one for enforcement alone and one in favor of a comprehensive package, 57 percent of likely voters preferred the broader, more realistic solution.
Will Republicans learn from this? Will the country?
From the meltdowns I'm seeing, it's unlikely.