Gaping Void for the Democrats

I'm still just jazzed with the developments in New York's 14th congressional district, and of course nationally.

At WaPo, "Crowley’s loss leaves gaping void for next generation of Democratic leaders":

The fact that Joe Crowley's surprising defeat has created a leadership vacuum for House Democrats -- detailed nicely here by @pkcapitol -- underscores one of the party's problems https://t.co/mxyKBQwonM

— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) June 27, 2018

Rep. Joseph Crowley did not hide his ambition to be House speaker some day. Now, after his stunning primary loss Tuesday, the next generation of Democratic leaders is a blank slate.

The congressman from Queens set out on a mission over the past year to put himself in place to one day, whenever Democrats won back the majority, grab the gavel and run the House.

“I find myself possibly in the position of — where what I’ve attained so far in terms of leadership — that may happen in the future. It may not,” Crowley told The Washington Post last fall while campaigning for several Democrats around Las Vegas.

On Tuesday, that dream came crashing down, with Crowley becoming the latest in an entire generation of Democratic emerging leaders to fail in their quest to seize the mantle from the 70-something trio of liberals atop the House caucus for more than a decade.

Crowley’s crushing defeat came at the hands of an underfunded challenger on his ideological flank in a party primary. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 28, is a former Bernie Sanders campaign organizer who called for the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency amid the public outcry over President Trump’s migrant separation policy.

Crowley’s loss drew immediate comparisons to the stunning upset of Eric Cantor (R-Va.) four years ago when he was the sitting House majority leader and lost to now-Rep. Dave Brat (Va.) in the GOP primary.

But, in that instance, House Republicans had several other young lawmakers who had the standing and support to rise into top posts, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who was waiting in the wings for another year to take charge.

Crowley, 56, despite being in his 20th year in office, was considered a relative newcomer to Democratic leadership circles because the other three have been at the top since early last decade, longer than most House Democrats have even served in Congress.

RTWT.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Victory Heralds a Hard-Left Shift in the Democrat Party? (VIDEO)

Actually, I don't think the woman's ideology was the biggest part of the story. The Democrats have been an openly socialist party for a long time now. The biggest thing is that the woman was a political newcomer and she knocked off not only the #4 top Democrat congressional leader, but that her opponent was a big wig old-line party boss in the Bronx-Queens political establishment. That's what's freaking people out. The new guard is coming after the old guard, and that includes Nancy Pelosi, who's jonesing on the speaker's gig again should the Dems take back the House in November.

The New York Times had a background piece on the woman, "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Emerges as a Political Star."


See the discussion at Fox Business at the video, and at the Los Angeles Times, "The surprise defeat of Rep. Joe Crowley may signal Democratic unease about Pelosi's leadership team":

The stunning primary defeat of New York Rep. Joseph Crowley, a 10-term incumbent once seen as a likely replacement for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, is forcing Democrats to again address their inner divisions, including questions about who will lead them if they regain control of the House in 2018.

Grumbling about whether Pelosi and other long-serving Democratic leaders should step aside has been getting louder in recent years, with a surprising number of new Democratic candidates saying this year that they would not back the San Francisco Democrat for speaker.

The surprise loss by Crowley, the fourth-ranked Democrat in the House, pushes that debate front and center.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old Latina activist running her first campaign, beat Crowley in Tuesday’s primary in New York's 14th Congressional District. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and held strong appeal in a district made up mostly of ethnic minorities.

Election victories by a new generation of progressives like Ocasio-Cortez may increase the pressure on Pelosi and other Democratic leaders, especially if Democrats win control of the House by a small margin.

Among other things, these newcomers want Democratic leaders to more aggressively confront President Trump’s policies and openly embrace liberal priorities, like a single-payer healthcare system. And they are tired of being told to wait patiently — years or even decades --- for their turn at the leadership table.

“You’re going to have a lot of new members that are very independent, and I think they are going to be making good arguments for what kind of leadership they want to see,” Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) said.

Crowley’s defeat drew comparisons to the surprise 2014 primary loss of then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican targeted by tea party advocates as being part of the GOP establishment. Cantor’s ouster triggered deep soul-searching inside the Republican Party and was followed the next year by the toppling of House Speaker John A. Boehner.

“I wouldn’t take anything for granted if I were in leadership now,” Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) said. “I suspect there are going to be challenges to leadership, I don’t think there’s any question.”

Pelosi urged people not to read too much into the loss, saying Ocasio-Cortez was a good fit for a district that had become more progressive.

“Nobody’s district is representative of somebody else’s district," she said, adding that the outcome is “just a sign of [the] vitality of our party.”

Though Pelosi was easily elected as minority leader in 2016, she faced the largest number of defections in her career. It’s unlikely that members will outwardly jockey for position against the powerful leader, who has said she plans to become speaker again. But some would-be rivals are likely to begin lining up support behind the scenes to fill the leadership Crowley will vacate.

House Democratic Caucus Vice Chairwoman Linda T. Sanchez (D-Whittier), who is expected to make a bid to replace Crowley as caucus chair, made waves last fall when she said on C-SPAN that it’s time for new leadership in the party. It was a surprising statement from a member of leadership, especially one from California. Sanchez has been a less visible part of the leadership team since.

“I think that I would be a good caucus chair,” she said. “Having said that, I’m not making any announcements.”

Democrats are shocked and in disbelief about Crowley’s loss, Yarmuth said, and they aren’t quite ready to consider others for his role...

Still more.

Donald Trump and the End of American Exceptionalism

Blah, blah, blah.

Here's yet another leftist screed warning about the dangers of Donald Trump and Trumpism. These screeds have been polluting the web with an increasing frequency this last few weeks. That's how frightened the political class has become.

From Jelani Cobb, at the New Yorker:

In the sixteen months since he declared his candidacy, Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign has elicited comparisons to those of George Wallace and Barry Goldwater, to the hallucinatory paranoia of Joseph McCarthy, to the fascist preoccupations of Charles Lindbergh, and to lesser lights of American demagoguery like Father Coughlin and the Know-Nothings of the nineteenth century.

The unifying theme among these figures, beyond their disdain for democracy, was their common residence in the loser’s aisle of American history. McCarthy’s conspiratorial manipulation of the public eventually earned him the enmity of both Republicans and Democrats and a vote in the Senate to censure him. Wallace carried just five states and garnered thirteen per cent of the popular vote. Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson by sixteen million popular votes, winning just fifty-two Electoral College votes to Johnson’s four hundred and eighty-six. Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 classic “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” charted the lunatic genealogy of fringe movements dating back to the early years of the Republic, but the more sanguine assessment of that lineage is that few of these movements—anti-Catholicism, anti-Freemasonry, or Know-Nothingism, for instance—managed to sustain themselves in the long term or to fully inhabit the political mainstream.

Goldwater is heralded as the father of modern conservatism, but he could occupy that niche only because successive generations of his heirs refined and streamlined his message, buffing away the elements that the public saw as extremist. The modern Republican Party staked its claim on conservatism, not on Goldwaterism.

All this points to yet another reason why Trump represents a unique danger in American politics. Trumpism does not seek simply to make a point and pass on its genes to more politically palatable heirs, nor is it readily apparent why he would need to settle for this. When George Will announced his departure from the G.O.P., last summer, he offered a modified version of Ronald Reagan’s quote about leaving the Democrats—“I didn’t leave the Party; the Party left me.” But a kind of converse narrative applies to Trump; he didn’t join the Republican Party so much as its most febrile elements joined him. Trump is partly a product of forces that the G.O.P. created by pandering to a base whose dilated pupils the Party mistook for gullibility, not abject, irrational fear that would send those voters scurrying to the nearest authoritarian savior they could find. The error was in thinking that this populace, mainlining Glenn Beck and Alex Jones theories and pondering how the Minutemen would have fought Sharia law, could be controlled. (For evidence to the contrary, the Party needed look no further than the premature political demise of Eric Cantor.) The old adage warns that one should beware of puppets that begin pulling their own strings.

In this light, Trump represents a kind of return to the old-time religion, a fundamentalism that rejects the effete nature of dog-whistle politics the way the religious right defined itself by rejecting the watery tenets of liberal Christianity. Implicit within dog-whistling is enough respect for democratic norms and those outside one’s base to speak to that base in terms that the mass populace can’t readily decipher. Here, plausible deniability is at least a recognition that there are people with interests different from one’s own and that their influence, if not their interests or humanity, warrants a certain degree of respect. Trump is doing the opposite of this. He is an exhorter in a midsummer tent revival: direct, literal, and speaking at a decibel that makes it impossible to misunderstand his intentions. The end result of Trump’s evangelism is that a xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, serially mendacious narcissist is poised to pull in somewhere north of fifty million votes in the midst of the most bitterly contentious election in modern American history. The easy analysis holds that Trump’s jihad against decency has wrecked the Republican Party, but the damage is far more extensive than this...

The main problem here is its incompleteness. Cobb completely omits the Democrat Party from any responsibility for the rise of Trumpism. But as anyone with half a brain knows, the radicalization of the Democrats since at least the Iraq war has unleashed ideological forces that just now seem to have spun out of control, mainly because Trump is unfiltered (in his professed disdain for political correctness, and so forth). Also, Cobb forgets that the culture itself has changed since the the days of both Goldwater and Reagan. Social media has only accelerated a coarsening of American life that's seeped into politics like a cancer. Trumpism won't go away because Obamism isn't going away. Polls show that partisans on both sides have increased in strength and there's precious little incentive to cooperate with the opponent. Fractured, polarized politics lets out the worst. If Cobb were honest he'd at least concede that forces across the ideological spectrum are responsible for where we are today, and his failure ---- along with those of his political class ---- will ensure that these same forces of a long shelf life.

But keep reading.

And see also, "Social Media Enables Prejudice to Slip Back Into the Mainstream."

Donald Trump Is Setting the GOP Agenda

Well, fine by me.

Let the RINO establishment party hacks figure it out. Trump's throwing the political system up in the air.

At Politico, "Every Republican presidential contender is playing Trump’s game. And losing at it":

Remember way back to two weeks ago when the Donald Trump candidacy was the best thing to ever happen to Jeb Bush?

The billionaire business mogul would distract the other contenders for the nomination, the Bush team assured pundits all over Washington. Trump is “other people’s problem,” declared Mike Murphy, chief strategist of the pro-Bush Super PAC Right to Rise. The Donald would allow Jeb to just keep on chugging along. Bush would become the safe and responsible brand—the Honda Odyssey of 2016—to which panicked Republicans would eventually flock.

That didn’t last long. A week after boasting that it would ignore Trump, with its usual Clouseau-like finesse, JebWorld decided to hit Trump every day. Which means every GOP candidate is now playing Donald Trump’s game instead of their own—and doing about as well as you’d expect.

The decision to engage him has outsized consequences for the GOP “brand,” whatever that is these days. Not since Joan Collins sauntered onto the set of “Dynasty” or Gary Coleman uttered his first “Whatch talkin’ about, Willis,” has anyone so dominated a universe as Donald Trump has the GOP. Trump single-handedly has moved the GOP to the right on immigration, to the left on free trade and in circles on pretty much everything else. He has the other candidates so confused that they are stepping all over their own messages. After all, how else can one explain Bush’s latest effort to show he is not an establishment loser by going [sic] flaunting an endorsement from Eric Cantor, the most notorious establishment loser in history?

Keep reading.

Republican 'Leaders' Shitting Bricks as Donald Trump Speaks Truth to Corrupt Beltway Amnesty Business-as-Usual

Hey, more power to Donald Trump. Americans are noticing and they're thankful for the honest talk on the corrupt bipartisan failure to secure this nation's borders.

At the Washington Post, "GOP leaders fear damage to party’s image as Donald Trump doubles down":

The head of the Republican National Committee, responding to demands from increasingly worried party leaders, spent nearly an hour Wednesday on the phone with Donald Trump, urging the presidential candidate to tone down his inflammatory comments about immigration that have infuriated a key election constituency.

The call from Chairman Reince Priebus, described by donors and consultants briefed on the conversation and confirmed by the RNC, underscores the extent to which Trump has gone from an embarrassment to a cause for serious alarm among top Republicans in Washington and nationwide.

But there is little they can do about the mogul and reality-television star, who draws sustenance from controversy and attention. And some fear that, with assistance from Democrats, Trump could become the face of the GOP...

Keep reading.

I had Fox News on all afternoon. Charles Krauthammer didn't even want to give Trump the time of day, especially after Laura Ingraham upbraided Charles Lane, also on the panel, for distorting Trump's comments while spewing typical leftist pro-illegal alien PC. Establishment types just don't want to deal with this issue. Ingraham of course has been on top of it a long time and was validated last year with Dave Brat's secure-the-borders victory in Virginia's 7th Congressional District (after beating Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the primary). She'd championed Brat throughout the campaign.

Then Hannity's show opened with three families who've lost loved ones to illegals. It's a visceral issue for Americans. It remains to be seen if it's not the Democrats who've got more to worry about than the GOP.

Eric Cantor to Resign From Congress

At Roll Call.

And watch Cantor's final speech yesterday as Majority Leader:

Boom! New Poll Finds 65 Percent of Americans Reject Obama on #Immigration

At Gallup, "Approval of Obama's Handling of Immigration Falls to 31%."

A full 65 percent of those polled disagrees "with the way President Obama is handling immigration."

Recent developments contributing to the ongoing debate about immigration include Obama's delay of a review of deportation policies by the Department of Homeland Security in the hope of striking a legislative deal on immigration reform with Congress. Also, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's recent primary loss was widely viewed as a defeat rooted in Cantor's perceived stance on immigration. The primary loss and subsequent shakeup in House leadership could spell greater challenges for Obama as he tries to work with Republicans. Additionally, the media has recently enlarged its spotlight on the increasing numbers of unaccompanied Central American children who have crossed the U.S. border, seeking their already immigrated family members and a generally better life.

Obama's approval on immigration has dropped since last August across all political affiliations, even among those in his own party....

Notice how Gallup is clueless on "the bottom line" at the entry.

The GOP doesn't need to approve "immigration reform." That's not the message coming out of these data. Americans are shocked that our borders are out of control and they want a clamp down. Seriously, people are seeing through this manufactured crisis. It's a threat to national security and the White House --- and the open-borders amnesty-shilling Democrat Party --- will pay the price.

Added: Linked by the Mad Jewess, "MANY Diseases That Are Horrible Come In to America From Mexico. Leftists LIE."

Thanks!

Laura Ingraham Helped Propel Dave Brat's Campaign — #VA07

Laura Ingraham slams sham tea party "patriot" Jenny Beth Martin at the clip below.

And boy, Ingraham really racked up the creds with this insurgent win out of Virginia's 7th congressional district.

Even the far-left New York Times pumped and praised her impact on the race, "Potent Voices of Conservative Media Propelled Cantor Opponent: David Brat Was Aided by Influential Figures Like Laura Ingraham":

If Eric Cantor needed evidence that his political career was in real trouble, all he had to do was look outside his living room window one night last week. At a stately country club about half a mile from his home in the affluent Richmond suburb of Glen Allen, so many people had come to see the radio talk show host Laura Ingraham stump for Mr. Cantor’s opponent in the Republican primary, David Brat, that the overflow parking nearly reached his driveway.

Ms. Ingraham was so taken aback at the size of the crowd — inside the clubhouse, hundreds of people crammed onto staircase landings, leaned over railings and peered down at her from above — she wondered aloud what was really going on.

“We all looked at each other, saying, ‘He could totally win,'” Ms. Ingraham said in an interview. “I’ve had two moments in American politics in the last 15 years where I knew there was a big change afoot. One was when I left the Iowa caucuses in 2008. I walked out of there and said to a friend, ‘Barack Obama is going to win.’ And the other was when I left that rally last Tuesday.”

Few people did more than Ms. Ingraham to propel Mr. Brat, a 49-year-old economics professor who has never held elected office before, from obscurity to national conservative hero. And few stories better illustrate how his out-of-nowhere victory was due in large part to a unique and potent alignment of influential voices in conservative media.

Crucially, voices like Ms. Ingraham’s combined with shoe-leather, grass-roots campaign work by a highly organized local conservative movement to fill a void left by the absence of support from national Tea Party organizations and boldface Republican Party names.

Mr. Brat may have been turned away when he asked for financial support from well-funded conservative groups, and he was largely ignored by the national and local news media, which considered Mr. Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House, a shoo-in. But he was a known quantity to the loyal audiences of radio personalities like Ms. Ingraham and Mark Levin, a Reagan aide and a revered figure in the conservative movement, and Breitbart.com, the website founded by the provocateur Andrew Breitbart.

Together, Mr. Levin and Ms. Ingraham reach nearly 10 million people each week. And the Breitbart sites log 60 million page views each month. Those audiences are heavy with engaged, politically motivated voters who turn out in Republican primaries — the kind of voters who came out for Mr. Brat on Tuesday.  “Of the 70,000 voters yesterday in Virginia, I am sure 95 percent go to Drudge, Breitbart, Mark Levin or Laura Ingraham every day, multiple times a day,” said Stephen K. Bannon, who wears many hats as a radio host, a filmmaker and the executive chairman of Breitbart.

More.

FLASHBACK: "Jenny Beth Martin Makes More the $450,000 Annually as National Coordinator of Tea Party Patriots!"

Eric Cantor's Home Style — #VA07

An outstanding piece, from Sean Trende, at RealClearPolitics, "What Cantor's Loss and Graham's Win Mean":

In his political science classic, “Home Style: House Members in Their Districts,” Richard Fenno hypothesized that members of Congress have three goals: re-election, power in Washington, and enacting policy preferences. To pursue the second two goals, a member must achieve the first, and to do that, he or she must adopt a style that suits the district. If these images are not consistently reinforced, the incumbent will have trouble. Crucially, Fenno notes that the adoption of an effective home style involves a two-way communication process: Telling the constituents about oneself, but also listening to constituents. With the benefit of hindsight, we can probably apply this model to explain most of the Tea Party wins and losses over the past few years.

I have yet to read anything suggesting that Cantor had a good home style. His staff is consistently described as aloof, and his constituent service is lacking. This is consistent with my experience. Anecdotes are not data, but after passage of the Affordable Care Act, I called his office with a question about what autism therapies for my son would now be covered (I lived in Cantor’s district for six years). I never heard back. This surprised me, as constituent questions rarely go unanswered. I never once saw Cantor, not at county fairs, not at school board meetings, and not in the parades that would sometimes march past our house (we lived on a major thoroughfare). This isn’t to say that Cantor never did these things, only that they weren’t frequent enough to register; he wasn’t the stereotypical Southern politician whose face showed up at every event.

In short, Cantor seemed more focused on the second and third goals of a politician -- power and policy -- to the detriment of the first. I am guessing he didn’t realize he might have a problem until he was booed at a district meeting a month ago. If he’d run scared, the result might well have been different. But he didn’t, and he lost. This is really the big-picture message for GOP incumbents. You don’t have to remake yourself into a Tea Partier. But you do have to care.

Leftist Garance Franke-Ruta Smears Dave Brat Campaign Manager Zachary Werrell

"The Garance" is "sensationalizing" Zachary Werrell's Facebook postings, "David Brat campaign manager scrubs Facebook page after election":

The campaign manager for the tea party-backed Republican who ousted House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in one of the biggest upsets in congressional history is a 23-year-old class of 2013 Haverford College graduate who posted a slew of provocative opinions on a public Facebook page that was removed from view overnight following David Brat's victory.

From comparing George Zimmerman’s shooting of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin to abortion to calling for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration and encouraging the adoption of the silver monetary standard, Zachary Werrell – one of just two paid staffers for the upstart campaign of Randolph-Macon College economics professor David Brat – sought in 2012 and 2013 to build a public profile as a socially conservative libertarian voice. The Facebook postings were either taken down or made private overnight Tuesday in the wake of Brat's win, but Yahoo News took screenshots of some of the remarks before they were removed from view. A cached version of Werrell's page remained available on Google as of midday Wednesday.

"The Garance" looks like a skeezy bimbo.

Sometime back Ann Althouse just destroyed "The Garance" in a Bloggingheads episode.

The left circled the wagons around "The Garance," who was clearly unable defend herself in a simple diavlog.

A total skanky progressive loser now tryna dog the victorious Dave Brat campaign. Pathetic.

Via Memeorandum.

Reid Epstein's Appalling Meme Suggesting Dave Brat Would Exterminate the Jews — #VA07

At Twitchy, "‘Just nasty’: What exactly is WSJ trying to suggest with this piece on Dave Brat?"

And from John Podhoretz, at Commentary, "An Appalling Cantor Meme":

That's some remarkable bullshit. RT @Tyler_McNally pic.twitter.com/JHGQmY3jN7
— Neal (@Neal_Dewing) June 11, 2014

That Dave Brat Would Exterminate the Jews As the commentariat rushes to find meta-meaning in the defeat of Eric Cantor last night—a difficult task, because his primary loss was clearly the result of several smaller factors that added up into one serious shellacking—there’s one that’s especially cheap and especially disgraceful. So disgraceful, in fact, that it’s only hinted at in either an easily denied or giggly sort of way. And that is the idea that Cantor lost in his district because he is a Jew.

Among the reasons adduced by the regrettable Norman Ornstein in the New York Daily News: “He was highly visible as the only Jewish Republican in the House, in a district with a strong evangelical presence.” The fact that Cantor has served the district as a Jew for 23 and a half years is not noted, nor is the fact that evangelicals are more likely to be philo- than anti-Semitic.

Reid Epstein of the Wall Street Journal proffered his own version in this cute set of sentences:  “David Brat, the Virginia Republican who shocked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor Tuesday, wrote in 2011 that Hitler’s rise ‘could all happen again, quite easily.’ Mr. Brat’s remarks, in a 2011 issue of Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, came three years before he defeated the only Jewish Republican in Congress.” How Brat’s invocation of Hitler relates to Cantor’s Judaism is not clear, but Epstein decided to link them, and the link is suggestive, and not in a good way.

No, not a good way at all. More like a leftist exterminationist way.

Also at the Other McCain, "Libertarians Are Hitler or Something."

PREVIOUSLY: "Leftists Spew Anti-Semitism in Response to Eric Cantor Loss in #VA07."

Eric Cantor Spent $168,000 at Steak Houses

Now this is telling.

From Katie Pavlich, Town Hall, "Cantor Spent $168,637 on Steak Houses, Brat Spent $122,793 on Entire Campaign."

Gives a whole new meaning to the term red meat conservative... pic.twitter.com/RkAzO5zlSN

— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) June 11, 2014

Cantormageddon: Political Earthquake Roundup the Morning After

At the clip, CBS News political director John Dickerson comments, and his piece at Slate, "Haunted House: Eric Cantor’s surprise defeat is a warning to all Republicans: Be very afraid."

And Media Matters takes CBS to task for not disclosing Frank Luntz's ties to Eric Cantor, "CBS News Doesn't Tell Viewers Its Pro-Eric Cantor Analyst Was Paid By His Campaign."

At the clip, Luntz admits, "We Republican pollster suck."



More:

* At WaPo, "Cantor internal poll claims 34-point lead over primary opponent Brat."

* Erick Erickson, at Fox News, "Why Cantor Lost."

* National Journal, "Eric Cantor's Pollster Tries to Explain Why His Survey Showed Cantor Up 34 Points."

* WaPo, "Chaos erupts at Cantor’s election night headquarters after his departure."

* Mickey Kaus, at the Daily Caller, "Notes on Cantormageddon."

* Politico, "For Barack Obama, Eric Cantor loss comes with a price."

* Big Government, "Lamar Alexander, Thad Cochran Brace for Falls After Cantor Crumbles?"

* Hot Air, "Did Cantor really lose because of immigration?"

* Los Angeles Times, "Eric Cantor upset: How Dave Brat pulled off a historic political coup."

* Wall Street Journal, "GOP Leadership Scramble: Five Lawmakers to Watch."

* Chris Cillizza, "The seismic political consequences of Eric Cantor’s stunning loss."

* John Judis, at TNR, "Dave Brat and the Triumph of Rightwing Populism."

* Wall Street Journal, "David Brat’s Writings: Hitler’s Rise ‘Could All Happen Again’."

* USA Today, "House GOP grapples with Cantor's loss."

Pete Hoekstra, Former Chairman of House Intelligence Committee: 'Eric Cantor Probably Lost Touch With the People Back Home...'

Some awesome commentary from former GOP Representative Pete Hoekstra, at CNN.

Compare Hoekstra's commentary to former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson's comments, where he says Cantor's defeat means that the Democrats will likely keep their Senate majority in November. Seriously, the dude's in another reality or something, and by the end of his comments Hoekstra's just shaking his head in disbelief.

Click that link above for the video.

And ICYMI, "Dana Bash on #VA07: 'You Can See I'm Speechless. It's Not Often That I'm Speechless. And I'm Not Alone In This Town...'"

Leftists Spew Anti-Semitism in Response to Eric Cantor Loss in #VA07

At Twitchy, "Left pivots from ‘Tea Party is dead’ to ‘Tea Party hates Jews’ after Cantor loses."

Also at Expose Liberals, "Progressive bigots claim Eric Cantor lost because he’s Jewish," and Yid With Lid, "A Word to the Idiots Who Are Blaming Eric Cantor's Loss on Tea Party Jew Hatred":

.@BTiBeauty You know YOU'RE racist for raising the anti-Semitism card, right?
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 11, 2014

.@Redistrict Raising the anti-Semitism card? Stay classy dude.
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 11, 2014

I once read that when God created the world, sparks of his holiness were spread across the earth. Every time that a person makes the choice of performing a righteous act, one of those sparks is purified and sent back to heaven, through that process we become closer to God.

Liberal/Progressive government takes away that choice. It assumes that left to our own devices, we will do the wrong thing (or at least what they say is the wrong thing), government takes over the role of God, and steps in to control our decisions. Liberalism takes away our personal choice and gives it to the government, retarding our spiritual development and most importantly, the opportunity to get closer to our maker....

The Jewish picture of God is of a creator who instilled in us a personal responsibility to do the right thing, but he also provided us with the choice to accept that responsibility or not. Just like the tea party. There is no room in Jewish law for a government that forces us to do (their interpretation) of the right thing. There is also little room for a Government that does not include religion and morality in their consideration set before they make decisions.

It is Tea Party conservatism that best matches Jewish tradition. When it comes right down to it, tradition tells us those principals such as limited government, individual responsibility, and traditional morals are all Jewish principles.

'Chaos in the Marble Halls...' — #VA07

At Twitchy, "‘Chaos in the marble halls’: In wake of Eric Cantor loss, Congress goes into full freak-out mode."

LIGHTS ARE ON ALL OVER CAP, leadership aides/members in the building, chaos in the marble halls....
— Robert Costa (@costareports) June 11, 2014

READ: Cantor loss throws Congress into disarray http://t.co/oJVqPlbyUz

— Robert Costa (@costareports) June 11, 2014

Eric Cantor Defeat by Tea Party Shakes Republican Politics to Its Core

Heh, perhaps the major dailies should have a contest for most dramatic headline.

I nominate this piece at the Los Angeles Times.

Dana Bash on #VA07: 'You Can See I'm Speechless. It's Not Often That I'm Speechless. And I'm Not Alone In This Town...'

Dana Bash is CNN's chief congressional correspondent. She earned a lot of creds with conservatives for her honest and dogged reporting on the Anthony Weiner scandal a few years back. She's definitely a journalistic insider on Capitol Hill, and she's genuine here in admitting she was completely flabbergasted yesterday at Majority Leader Eric Cantor's epic defeat.

VIDEO: Dave Brat Victory Speech — #VA07

Previous Eric Cantor earthquake blogging here and here.



More at WTVR CBS 6, "WATCH: David Brat victory speech."

"Brat has accused the House majority leader of being a top cheerleader for 'amnesty' for immigrants in the U.S. illegally..."

Heh, that's the juicy quote from a WaPo piece last Friday, "Tea partier takes aim at Cantor in Va. primary."

And see Michael Patrick Leahy, at Big Government, "Cantor Primary Challenger David Brat: Anti-Amnesty Mailer 'Act of a Desperate Campaign'":

Eric Cantor's primary challenger David Brat ripped the Majority Leader as “the number one Republican supporter of amnesty” in a dramatic press conference steps away from a rival event by a liberal Democrat intended to paint Cantor as the face of GOP intransigence on immigration.

The day after Cantor portrayed himself as an anti-amnesty warrior in campaign literature, Brat accused Cantor of coordinating with Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), the Democrat holding the rival press conference, to provide him political cover in his moment of greatest need.

Cantor, Brat noted, had previously visited sites with Gutierrez in a pro-immigration reform tour. "You would have to be pretty gullible not to see a link there," Brat said.

The long-shot challenge from Brat has improbably gained national attention after Cantor was booed and heckled by a crowd of Tea Party activists at a recent Republican party event. Cantor has had to go on air with attack ads fact-checkers have criticized as misleading and adopt the language of anti-amnesty hawks in his mailers, clashing with his “making life work” rebranding effort.

Typically, party leaders are able to win reelection easily, especially in primaries, so the concerted efforts by Cantor are seen as deeply embarrassing for the Virginia Republican considered Speaker John Boehner's heir apparent.

"This is the act of a desperate campaign," Brat said about the mailer.

More.

BONUS: You gotta love it, at the leftist New Republic, "Immigration Reform Died With Eric Cantor's Shocking Loss to a Tea Party Challenger."

And at BuzzFeed, "Only President Obama Can Help Undocumented Immigrants Now, Advocates Say."