The Woodshed Republicans screw up

What did the election results mean? There are two sides to this question: what caused the election results, and what will follow from them?

What caused them was the Republicans went to pot the last two years. They betrayed their core values - small government, accountability, immigrations reform, even sexual propriety. Remember, there's a double standard. Barney Frank did far worse than Mark Foley ever dared, but he's still around. Life's not fair, in case you didn't know that. The Republicans blew off their base, and their base took it badly. So badly, that they sought to punish the Republicans by voting for something even worse.

What, you say? I'm just spinning? No, look at some threads on Red State from the summer months. The evidence is plain. The comments were full of talk of how we'd teach the Republicans a lesson, and then bring them all back in 2008. And conversations I've had in meatspace (the real world) back this up.

Call these the Woodshed Republicans. There are a lot of them. I've met many. (I don't recall whether I came up with that term myself. Google comes up empty.)

Add to that the fact that most Democrats who won ran on a moderate to conservative platform. By the way, the Democrats deserve credit for that. If only they'd go the whole way and simply ditch the Left, we'd be in business with a working two party system again.

A referendum on the war? It's not that simple. How then can you explain Lieberman's victory? No, that won't wash.

The people embracing Democrat values? Oh, please. The Democrats were running *away* from those values! It was an overwhelmingly negative campaign season, on both sides. There were no positive values to speak of.

In summation, the Democrats didn't win so much as the Republicans lost.

So much for causes. Now, on to consequences. Here I have nothing but bad news.

Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House. Already she's talking about how only the ideologically pure will be permitted to be on committees. Forget the newly elected conservative Democrats. They won't be in charge. And she's already moving to replace a reputable committee chairman with a disreputable one. And there are more crooks and pork barrel kings to come. There's your culture of corruption.

Nancy Pelosi is an extreme ideologue, a Left wing lunatic. And now she's in power. The people voted for center-right Democrats, but they got Nancy Pelosi. Bait and switch. And anyone who was paying attention could have seen it coming. Can the Woodshed Republicans be blamed for being angry with the Republican incumbents? No. But they can be blamed for how they dealt with their anger. Every outrage Pelosi perpetrates in the next two years will be as much their fault as hers. Such are the wages of moral daintiness.

Expect even more big government spending. Expect even more government meddling in personal affairs. Expect more graft and influence peddling. And expect a cut-and-run foreign policy that will demolish our international credibility, embolden terrorists, betray our troops, and set the cause of freedom back yet again.

So we'll vote them all out in 2008, and the Democrats will be finished as a party. Big deal. By then the damage will be done. Some of it will take years to undo. Some of it will never be undone.

And another thing. If you were unhappy with your incumbents, wouldn't it have made more sense to boot them out in the primary?


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