Grit Your Teeth and Smile

My lovely wife forwarded me this post from Lone Star Times. Color me highly amused. Just barely sworn in and already acting like an asshat. I guess all you efenants can get on with your buyer’s remorse now, huh?

What’s even funnier to me is the bitching in the comments. Essentially, some of the party faithful are complaining that they didn’t have any other choice. That depends on how you look at the issue and what your goal is. If your only goal is to get somebody from the efenant club elected, then, no, I guess you didn’t have any other choice. However, I don’t have that goal and I was under the mistaken apprehension a lot of self-described conservatives didn’t either.

I have this funny idea that party affiliation is (or should be) shorthand for a set of principles and beliefs about government. It’s most useful in dealing with candidates that have not been elected before and have no track record. More important are the ideas the politician in question is espousing, not the party affiliation. With the newly anointed CD22 representative, you had a track record to examine. If anybody in CD22 who actually cared about fiscal restraint or social issues or any of the other things that “conservatives” claim matter voted for SSG, they deserve what they got. If party affiliation trumps principles, you can whine about how you feel betrayed by her actions and we can all laugh at you. If you, as a precinct chair, voted for or endorsed SSG, you made a conscious decision and don’t get to whine about “no other choice”. There were other choices available, and collectively, y’all picked a piss-poor candidate because it looked vaguely possible she might have a chance. Real conservatives were presented and rejected or they dropped out. So Her Royal Pinkness got the nod, and now you wanna complain. Too little, too late. You should have made some more noise and bucked the system a little more and maybe you wouldn’t be here.

Frankly, the GOP and Tom DeLay handed CD22 to Nick Lampson. The entire thing was a goat-fuck from the minute Tom DeLay resigned, and the GOP’s response ended up making the whole thing worse. If anybody in the GOP wants to point fingers they need to point at (in descending order) Tom DeLay, Tina Benkiser, and Jared Woodfill.

Of course, my candidate lost completely, but I didn’t have the slightest bit of embarrassment voting for him, and it sure didn’t leave me with any regrets. I voted for a guy that can understand the concepts of fiscal restraint and limited government, which are things efenant politicians have completely forgotten. I can guarantee that if my candidate had won, you wouldn’t be seeing this kind of behavior.

As a final note for all the efenants out there, maybe if you had actually fielded a decent candidate you wouldn’t have got your ass handed to you. Instead, business as usual was the order of the day and the donks have Congress. Way to go, asshats.