The heresy hunters begin the purge
Though she enjoyed the support of the 4 Republican chairmen whose counties comprise New York’s 23rd congressional district, the GOP’s new heresy hunters decided Dede Scozzafava wasn’t pure enough to be a bona fide Republican and agitated against their party’s candidate; on Friday, she withdrew from the race and encouraged her supporters to vote for the Democratic candidate. Now, intoxicated by their successful destruction of Scozzafava’s campaign, the heresiologists who are now the Republican base have declared the time ripe for a purge of the national leadership.
The GOP Establishment Must Be Purged as the GOP Loses in NY-23
The race for NY-23 has taken a startling, exciting twist. Regardless of what happens on Tuesday, we know for certain the Republican candidate will not, after getting $900,000.00 in support from the Washington GOP Establishment, will not win. Scozzafava dropped out.
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Now? We should be magnanimous in victory — and whether Hoffman wins or loses, as long as Dede Scozzafava loses it is a victory — but we should demand accountability, we should demand a reckoning, and we should demand a purge from the party establishment of those people most responsible for the Republican disaster in NY-23.
Undoubtedly, other Republican candidates will watch their right flanks carefully, lest the loonies press upon the national leadership who in turn press upon those who are adjudged impure.
It bears remark, then, that purges carry invariably the seeds of the actors own destruction. The ravening Red Staters, resolved to cleanse the Republican Party once and for all, can only destroy it — and will then inescapably go down in flames themselves. After all, once the freethinkers are gone and everybody else has been terrified into thinking as they ought, where can leadership and the intellectual wherewithal for dealing with ever-changing circumstances come from? Not from within the movement; there, those capacities were deliberately destroyed.
It would be allright with me if that strange pastiche of malcontents who are now the Republican base self-destructed, but what is to happen to the country writ large without an intelligent loyal opposition around which the sane and decent can mobilize?
