Nine Turncoat Republicans

Nine members of the GOP stood with Obama and his proxy on the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia "Soviet" Sotomayor. Some of these Senators have long been lost causes, long ago deciding that anything with the dint of conservatism was wrong for them. For the Collins and Snowe of Maine delegation, endorsing a judicial activist, gun banning Latina supremacist may have actually represented the will of their bizarro New York North Woods refugee constituents, but I know South Carolina fairly well having spent considerable time there (in Charleston, Hilton Head, and Myrtle Beach) throughout my life both pre and post-Hurricane Hugo, and I am a native Tennessean, so to see Lindsay Graham and Lamar Alexander spit in the eyes of their down home conservative voters confounds me. I view their betrayal as a craven kind of pandering to a breed of Hispanic voters who will never vote for them anyway. The type of person who would place race or ethnic identification over track record and character will always vote Democrat. Any voter so shallow as to play the candidate "looks like me" game is going to cast their lot with the true expanders of the welfare state, the statist dole pushers who have since FDR been Democrats. Fair-minded people from any background, the types that would never join an exclusionary organization like La Raza or even the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, will look past race or ethnicity to see the values that define a person much more than where someone was born or their skin tone. Our family doctor, who knew we were Jewish, during the Gore-Lieberman run for the White House once declared, "I bet you can't wait for the election so you can put Lieberman in the VP seat." I found this to be one of the most offensive assumptions a supposed professional could make, that as Jews we were excited about putting a coreligionist in a seat of power. In the event, we proudly voted Bush-Cheney. So political cowardice, trying not to offend a voting block that was never going to stand with them anyway, has cost two Southern Senators many of their conservative backers.