Lugar loses, Tea Party wins

Commentary

May 9, 2012

By John Seiler

Back during the People Power Revolution in the Philippines in 1986, which kicked dictator Ferdinand Marcos out of power, one U.S. Senator who played a role by flying to the country was Richard Lugar, R-Ind. I remember at the time he was dubbed by correspondents on the islands as the “Stepford Senator” for his robotic performance. The reference, of course, was to the 1975 movie, “The Stepford Wives,” in which men replace their feminist wives with obedient cyborgs.

Now the Stepford Senator finally has been defeated in the Republican primary in Indiana by the state treasurer, Richard Mourdock. The winner had big Tea Party backing. And his platform certainly is conservative.

But who knows. I only judge politicians by what they do in office, not by what they promise. When Lugar was elected to the Senate in 1976, he was a bright young consevative as well. But in Washington, there’s a cliche about the New York Times and the Washington Post soon saying such guys are “growing in office” and are “gaining strange new respect” — as they sell out their priniciples and constituents. Lugar was one of those.

Times attack

For now, at least, the Times immediately attacked Mourdock. Wrote Andrew Rosenthal, a member of the family that long has owned the paper and the editorial page editor:

“Senator Richard Lugar used to get around 60 percent of the vote in his elections in Indiana. But he was opposed in the primary by the state treasurer, Richard Mourdock, and lost big. Mr. Mourdock’s campaign was fueled by millions from the Tea Party and national right-wing organizations that wanted to make an example of Mr. Lugar for the ultimate sin of seeking compromise across party lines. Senator Charles Schumer of New York put it well: ‘There are a lot of things wrong in Washington, but too much compromise is certainly not one of them.’

“Mr. Lugar, for 35 years a bedrock of sensible bipartisanship on foreign policy….”

See what I mean? The Times, although supposedly “liberal,” manufactured the lies that help get America into the Iraq War quagmire that bankrupted our country. It was their own Judith Miller who “stovepiped” propaganda from the Bush administration about Saddam Hussein supposedly having “weapons of mass destruction” — which he didn’t.

Lugar went along with Bush and the Times and now, naturally, is commended by the Times for “sensible bipartisanship.” Meanwhile, 4,486 brave young Americans are dead, along with more than 109,000 Iraqis, according to U.S. government estimates revealed by Wikileaks.

And Iraq is falling back into dicatorship.

Mourdock platform

Again, we don’t know what Mourdock will actually do in office. But his campaign platform said:

“Richard believes that military force should be used only when a vital national interest is at stake and that any U.S. mission should come with clearly defined goals and objectives.”

Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan, the GWOT, etc. And unlike Lugar’s Stepford Wife backing of Bush.

Surprisingly, Mourdock even brought up monetary policy. This clearly shows the influence of Ron Paul, who has made that a key policy issue, in calling for, “End the Fed.” Mourdock doesn’t go that far, but at least his position is:

“Richard supports efforts to require an audit of the Federal Reserve as a means of ensuring accountability.  Richard also believes that the Federal Reserve should narrowly focus its efforts on promoting stability and strengthening the dollar rather than attempting to artificially control such economic factors as employment levels and interest rates.  He opposes the Fed’s program of so-called ‘quantitative easing.'”

So he’s moving in the right direction. No wonder the inflationist New York Times, home of the ultra-inflationist Paul Krugman, hates him.

Dinosaurs

Mourdock was gracious to his defeated opponent:

“When I began my campaign for U.S. Senate in 2011, I started it in a unique way — asking for a round of applause for Dick Lugar. Senator Dick Lugar has served Indiana with distinction for 35 years of his life, and we are grateful. Let’s start the General Election in the same way we started the Primary – by honoring someone that we all owe a lot to — our Senator.”

Lugar was ungracious in defeat, clinging as Ferdinand Marcos had 26 years ago to the vast power now slipping from his grasp. In a farewell letter, he attacked Mourdock’s

“embrace of an unrelenting partisan mindset is irreconcilable with my philosophy of governance and my experience of what brings results for Hoosiers in the Senate….

“In effect, what he has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party.  His answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook.  He has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it.”

Bipartisanship? Yeah. Click here for a list of Lugar’s bipartisan support, with Democrats, of police-state bills that have turned America into a closed society, beginning with the Soviet-style USA “Patriot” Act of 2001.

As to the New York Times… In the 1980s, even conservatives were forced to read the Times and the Washington Post because that’s what everybody else read, and those papers had the best, sometimes the only, coverage of national issues. But nowadays, people can better coverage online, from numerous alternative sources, without the far-left, “bipartisan,” police-state, perpetual-war advocacy positions of those papers. Now, people can find the truth on their own.

The Times lost $40 million last year. The Post just re-ported a $23 million loss in the first quarter of 2012.

Like Lugar, the Post and the Times are dinosaurs stumbling in the mud, on the way to extinction.