Samizdata

Michael Barone in the Washington Examiner asks: Can the Republicans win the House in 2010?.

Might I suggest this is actually not the right question or at least not a very interesting one to ask.

How about “Would it actually make much difference if the Republicans win the House in 2010?”

Until the Big State Tax and Regulate schmucks like McCain, Romney and their entire ilk are explicitly repudiated and figuratively (and in a perfect world, literally) thrown into Boston Harbour, I will tell you what difference re-electing the party that gave the world George Bush (either) will make… No meaningful difference at all.

Obama is the bastard child of the both parties, make no mistake about it. Nothing he is doing now would have been even within the realm of political possibility if the state had not already been vastly expanded with Republicans in the Whitehouse.

No child left behind indeed… they will be paying for this legacy for a very long time.

No one who gives a damn about liberty should even consider supporting the Republicans until they have had a profound and merciless internal blood-letting and made themselves worth voting for by throwing the Big Staters out. They are not even close to that point yet.

Now is very much the time to call for as much Republican disunity as possible because so much hangs on what happens now. If the mega-statists keep control of both parties as completely as they have over the last twenty years, there will be no way out of the deepening hole.

… for the US Supreme Court. Quelle surprise, Judge Sonia Sotomayor gets approved for the highest court of the land in the USA.

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life

Thus sayeth Sonia Sotomayor in 2001. As Newt Gingrinch pointed out, can you imagine the reaction if a white male Bush appointee for the Supreme Court had ever, and I mean ever said:

I would hope that a wise white man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life

The New York Times and Washigton Post would be filled cover to cover with KKK allusions and the nomination would be ‘challenging’ to say the least. But of course this only works one way.

This is yet another useful litmus test on Republican politicians (and indeed anyone who calls themselves ‘conservative’).

Did they implacably oppose Sotomayor? If not, they are indisputably and unequivocally ‘on the other side’, which is to say they are unalloyed statist collectivists and exactly the sort of people who must be driven from the party if it is even going to be worthy of the title ‘opposition’, rather than ‘Obama’s Loyal Cheerleaders’… and until the Republicans can become a meaningful opposition party, it cannot be a alternative that is worth voting for because in truth voting for such a party is just voting for more of the same, just in a different wrapper: a toxic illusion of choice.

Now is not the time for Republican unity, it is the time for for the party to tear itself apart and put a great many people to the political sword without remorse or pity… starting with nine US senators.