Politico: Dems’ final insult: Landrieu crushed: Cassidy trounces incumbent with Republicans set to control 54 Senate seats in the next Congress.

Dan Greenfield points to the divisions in the democrat party which are likely to ensure that Republicans can continue to win.

There are really two Democratic parties.

One is the old corrupt party of thieves and crooks. Its politicians, black and white, are the products of political machines. They believe in absolutely nothing. They can go from being Dixiecrats to crying racism, from running on family values to pushing gay marriage and the War on Women.

They will say absolutely anything to get elected.

Cunning, but not bright, they are able campaigners. Reformers underestimate them at their own peril because they are determined to win at all costs.

The other Democratic Party is progressive. Its members are radical leftists working within the system. They are natural technocrats and their agendas are full of big projects. They function as community organizers, radicalizing and transforming neighborhoods, cities, states and even the country.

They want to win, but it’s a subset of their bigger agenda. Their goal is to transform the country. If they can do that by winning elections, they’ll win them. But if they can’t, they’ll still follow their agenda.

Sometimes the two Democratic parties blend together really well. Bill Clinton combined the good ol’ boy corruption and radical leftist politics of both parties into one package. The secret to his success was that he understood that most Democrats, voters or politicians, didn’t care about his politics, they wanted more practical things. He made sure that his leftist radicalism played second fiddle to their corruption.

Bill Clinton convinced old Dems that he was their man first. Obama stopped pretending to be anything but a hard core progressive. …

The left isn’t interested in being a political flirtation. It nukes any attempt at centrism to send the message that its allies will not be allowed any other alternative except to live or die by its agenda. …

[In the 2014 election,] Republicans benefited from a Democratic civil war. They were running a traditional campaign against a more traditional part of the Democratic Party. They didn’t really beat the left. They beat the old Dems.

The old Dems were crippled by the progressive agenda. They were pretending to be moderates while ObamaCare, illegal alien amnesty and gay marriage were looking over their shoulders. They married Obama and it was too late for them to get a divorce. And it doesn’t look any better down the road. …

The old Dems have no ideas and no agenda. The progressives want to get as much of their agenda done even if it’s by executive order and even if it makes them even more unpopular than they are now. The old Dems have realized that they are the ones who will pay a political price for progressive radicalism.

And waiting in the wings is the 2016 election.

Read the whole thing.

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Barack Obama was a unique event. Along came a smooth-taking leftist radical with pop star quality, able on the basis of his mixed racial heritage to push our national race-obsessed buttons.

Prior to the arrival of Obama, the GOP seemed to have a perennial winning hand, based simply on the fact that the democrat party nationally would always find itself under the thumb of its radical left-wing base and was doomed therefore to nominate national candidates too left-wing ever to win in a center-right country.

Barack Obama broke the democrat’s logjam by adding intense pop cultural appeal to the political mix. Barack Obama was not just another left-wing democrat. He was the flavor-of-the-month, an instant pop culture star, embodying all sorts of powerful impulses deeply rooted in the national subconscious. Electing Barack Obama would not just be voting for another politician. Electing him would be voting down the nation’s guilt for slavery and segregation. Electing him would be voting for a dazzling new post-racial future in which America’s promise would be finally realized and all men would live as brothers. Normally, only a certain typically older, politically-engaged portion of the population votes. For Obama, all of Hollywood, all the readers of supermarket tabloids, all the student idealists, all the 15-year-old girls of every age turned out to vote.

But they have just one Obama and he is now a lame duck president. After Obama, we’re going right back to the old dynamic in which the democrat base forces that party to nominate ordinary mortal non-celebrities who are too far left politically to win nationally. The portion of the Obama electoral base which made the difference and won him his elections will not be interested in participating in ordinary elections.

Jim Geraghty responds to actual WaPo column headline.

The real problem for Democrats is that “smug” isn’t really their strategy; it’s how they emotionally react to their conclusion that their viewpoint is better, more moral, smarter, wiser, fairer, more sensitive, more compassionate, and so on than the opposition. It’s not a campaign issue; it’s a character issue.

Undoubtedly the wittiest man on the Internet.

Karin McQuillan, at American Thinker, thinks Ebola can be lethal politically as well as epidemiologically.

The Democrat/Progressive Party may be signing their own death certificate in the 2014 elections with their mishandling of Ebola. One and half million people are quarantined in Sierra Leone. The first case has hit America. And all Obama has done is make a speech saying everything is fine here, but he’s sending American troops into harm’s way there. A ghastly virus that kills 50-100% of its victims and has no known treatment is something people notice. It is something women notice. Ebola is creating an epidemic of fear, for good reason. The Democrat ruling elite’s complacency, incompetence and leftist pieties are losing them the public trust.

Have you seen the photos from the TV Dallas/Fort Worth chopper of workers cleaning the Ebola victim’s vomit from the sidewalk in front of his apartment building? The CDC has it under control — they ordered the vomit to be power washed. The area is not cordoned off, the workers have no protective clothing, and passers-by are tracking through the water in sandals. The blogger who posted them comments: “from the casualness of the guys doing the power-washing, it is unlikely that (1) they put any disinfectants in the power-washer or (2) they were even told what they were cleaning.”

The decontamination of the sick man’s apartment, including dirty sheets and towels, has not begun, even though his girlfriend, her son and two grown nephews are confined there. This is a nightmare for them. The CDC only learned from a CNN report that the sick man’s sweat-soaked sheets were still on the bed. They had done nothing to help the quarantined people.

Trust the government to keep us safe? Tell that to Duncan’s neighbors, the EMT workers now in quarantine, and the five men from the Sheriff’s department, all allowed to enter the apartment without protective garb. They went there to serve the official quarantine papers – also done a day late.

Read the whole thing.

Let’s hear it for the Tea Party and the Conservative Movement. Led by political geniuses like Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, and Micky Kaus, we just succeeded in tossing out of office for sins of ideological impurity almost certainly the most competent and conservative political leader in the House of Representatives.

Old John McCain betrayed the GOP on more crucial occasions and vital Senate votes than I can count, and we ran him for president against the most glamorous and most radical democrat party nominee in a generation. The Third Senator from New York, Lindsey Graham coasted easily to victory yesterday, having “more fun than any time I’ve been in politics,” kicking the crap out of the Tea Party.

But GOP great minds are today patting themselves on the back for successfully joining with liberal democrats in Virginia’s 7th District to eject from James Madison’s former seat the single congressman representing the greatest institutional threat to the Left.

Cantor’s crimes consisted, of course, merely of being an effective majority leader and operating as part of a system. Cantor wound up a target for a unfocused animosity against the system, while being additionally singled out for special blame for trying to negotiate with our adversaries to resolve the immigration mess.

Cantor’s loss is a particularly bitter one because it was, in significant part, produced by passionate enthusiasm over the only issue on which many conservatives and Republicans are dead wrong.

I was reflecting about all this unhappily today, and I found myself wondering how it is possible for Republicans to traffic commonly so openly in false and obviously bigoted stereotypes of Hispanic immigrants, to indulge so frequently and so loudly in xenophobia and nativism in a society in which the heavy hand of political correctness so typically enforces strict censorship of un-PC speech and condign punishment for conspicuous violations. I think that Republicans actually get to be bigots and racists about the Beaners because the liberals indulgently stand back and avoid criticizing that kind of Republican argumentation, knowing perfectly well just how electorally suicidal it is.

I know personally a lot of people, I actually have cousins, of fairly recent immigrant background, whose grandparents came to this country roughly a century ago, who talk like they think they came over on the Mayflower, and who self-indulgently like to believe that the Mexican illegal working as a laborer on construction, doing agricultural work, or making peanuts washing dishes is taking something away from them and spoiling their view of the landscape. These people seem to have no idea what earlier arrived Americans thought of their own exotic and uncouth ancestors back in the day when those ancestors arrived here –just like today’s Mexicans– to take jobs Americans wouldn’t do.

Cantor was right to want to do something to straighten out the unenforceable immigration legal mess, and the loudmouth, low IQ conservative leadership which took hold of an cheap and easily exploited emotional issue to attack him actually merely organized the proverbial circular firing squad. They knocked off one of our absolutely best political leaders, and they did it using an issue on which they were wrong and an issue whose exploitation is certain to harm Republican prospects. We used to win elections in California. We elected Ronald Reagan governor of that state, and then gained the presidency. Then, the same kind of bright thinkers devoted their political energies to bitching about the presence of the Hispanic immigrants who mow their lawns and do all the other manual labor in California, and they gave the state away to the insanely radical California democrats. Keep it up, and we can count on the same process working nationally.

How did Cantor actually lose?

Andrew Sullivan’s gloating readers are this morning offering some clues.

Reader 1:

I live in the 7th District in Virginia, and I am a Democrat who voted for David Brat in the open primary. There has been a whisper campaign going on among the Democrats in the district for the last few weeks and it resulted in many Democrats coming out to vote for Brat. We felt especially encouraged after the 7th District committee nominated Jack Trammell to be the Democratic candidate for the seat last Sunday. We now feel we at least have a fair chance at winning it. (By the way, Jack Trammell is a professor at the same small college as Brat, Randolph-Macon.)

Reader 2:

Here’s a theory to support your reader who, though a Democrat, voted for Brat: in 2012, roughly 47,000 people voted in the 7th District Republican primary. This time, roughly 65,000. Now let’s assume that of those 18,000 new voters, 16,000 were Democrats voting to axe Cantor, then rework the numbers if they hadn’t voted: Cantor would then have had around 29,000+ votes, and Brat would have had around 20,000+. Which would have worked out to approximately 59% for Cantor, which is where he was at in 2012 and much closer to his internal polling showing him with a lead of 34% among likely REPUBLICAN voters.

I’m thinking time will show that Democrats in his district were fed up with him, and decided to do something about it.

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Cantor should just run, and win, as an independent in November, rather than giving up. What would a left-wing democrat (sandbagged in a primary by the opposition party) do?

And Virginia should get rid on non-party-registration and open primaries.

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CORRECTION: Damn! Cantor actually cannot run as an independent. Commenter JKB points out that Virginia not only has open primaries, it has a “sore-loser” law preventing candidates defeated in a primary from entering the race as independents.

Via Reason.

The New York Daily News explains why we all wish that we lived in Idaho.

If only all election debates were like this!

Long-shot candidates at the Republican primary husting for the Idaho governor’s race made for hilarious viewing Wednesday with their bizarre takes on life.

The politically incorrect leader of a biker gang, Harley Brown, claimed his fellow riders were “cop magnets, like a Playboy bunny in a mini-skirt gets hit on all the time.”

Meanwhile, second wannabe guv Walt Bayes insisted the Bible foretold nuclear accidents and urged every citizen to take potassium iodide tablets to protect their thyroid glands.

The unpredictability of what the duo, who’ve both qualified for the May 20 primary, would say saw the contest was broadcast by Idaho Public Television on a 30-second delay.

Representing the mainstream was incumbent Gov. Butch Otter and state Sen. Russ Fulche.

“I don’t like political correctness. Can I say this? It sucks! It’s bondage,” Brown, who had a cigar firmly placed into his shirt pocket the whole time, told the cameras.

“I’m going for the vote of the real people out there, not these bondage-type who don’t have a clue about picking up strangers at night and hauling them God-knows-where,” he added.

After claiming he had “a Master’s in raisin’ hell,” he told viewers his plan to seize power.

“You bind those evil spirits behind the feds with the blood of Jesus, the name of Jesus, the power of entombment of the Holy Spirit, the power of agreement, the word of God. Take air superiority, and then roll in with your tanks on the ground, like … lawsuits. Blitzkrieg!”