I had on recently one of those political gasbag shows when I heard one of the participant journalists ask another (paraphrasing), "Do you thing we've been over-reacting to the defeat of Eric Cantor, R-VA, the sitting Majority Leader, in Tuesday's Republican primary?" The answer was very long and did not include the word "Yes." I think it'd be fun to hear the case for the press having missed this big story.
David Brat, the giant slayer, went to high school a few miles from me (and a few years later) in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. He's an economics professor at Randolph-Macon College who also holds the M Div degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. "I measured my intellect against the Ivy elites," he has boasted. At the Rate My Professor site, he gets generally favorable comments, especially from the co-eds. And, speaking of "eye candy," how about his wife? I guess he was raised Dutch Reform but now attends Mass with her. The reformed Dutch couldn't compete with the blonde charms of Roman Catholicism.
Not everyone is enamored of the newest David Goliath Killer. Andy Borowitz imagines Eric Cantor's interior dialog when the votes were half counted:
Should I have cut more school lunch programs for poor children? Perhaps. Should I have cast more votes to screw over disaster victims? Definitely. Should I have not said the thing about treating children of immigrants like human beings? Man, do I wish I could take that one back.
Perhaps the divinity scholar will take a harder line, but we may never know, for the swaying media lantern will soon shine elsewhere--maybe on the Mississippi Republican runoff for US Senate, where another "Tea Party insurgent," Chris McDaniel, finished in a 49-49 tie with six-term incumbent Thad Cochran in the Republican primary a few weeks ago. In that race, the horrors of Obamacare were temporarily superseded by trespassing charges after a pro-McDaniel blogger took pictures of Cochran's wife, who has dementia, as she lay abed in her nursing home. The idea there seemed to be that you cannot trust a man whose wife is in such a state, even if he appears to hate Obama as much as you do. Then, on the night of the primary, a couple of McDaniel officials were apprehended behind the locked doors of a courthouse where ballots from the neck-and-neck race were being stored. This caused the jaded Amy Davidson to observe that two instances of illegal entry seems like it would be sufficient even for a general election campaign.
You cannot say that the Republicans are boring. I wish they didn't hold so many seats in the Congress, however. It's apt to get worse before it gets better.
