This would give them legitimacy, and a powerful platform for their views, and they could move the party toward their positions. However, in order for it to work, THEY WOULD HAVE TO COMPROMISE!

And compromising is something that ideologues never want to do. So they just remain in the political wilderness.

Yeah. That’s a recipe for electoral success.

Stick the the principles of small government and individual liberty and the GOP can flourish, but we’ve got to stop getting mired down in personal issues and single-issue litmus tests for candidates.

The fact is that the woman with the unspellable and unpronouncable name in this article is not as bad as she is made out to be here and holds reasonable positions in most areas, except for a couple of social issues where the party would be a lot better off if it took a laissez faire attitude. She’s not anyone’s dream candidate, but she’s still better than Joe Lieberman.

There’s a good article on this controversy at NationalBroadside with some of the facts left out of this article.

There is a seperate Conservative Party in New York. I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be. I am saying that segregation from the local GOP necessarily has two consequences.

1) A local GOP which is more liberal to moderate in official composition.
2) Forfeiture of both the baggage and benefits of the GOP franchise and brand.

I made my point mostly in response to the posts that asserted that the Scozzofava support from the GOP is evidence that the GOP brand should be rejected. I am saying that such endorsements are a consequence of past rejection.

All that said, it would be great if Hoffman won demonstrating the value of the conservative brand to the GOP.

If it wasn’t about winning they wouldn’t justify, to themselves, that they need to support folks like Scozzafava in the first place. The folks who are always the most indoctrinated, in this case in the idea that conservatism cannot win, are the indoctrinators (the party leadership).

I could be wrong, after all I’m trying to rationalize the stupidity of supporting Scozzafava so I could be way off base.

Of course, Ace meant “bears repeating”.

And I could have gone off on the image of “bares repeating” but didn’t want to go there today.

I like the image of you as a grizzly holding a smoking rifle.

In other words, I did not support McCain, but, I did vote gainst Obama. Therefore I am a RiNo, because I did not support him. Seems that there is a new meaning to the term RiNO. I guess McCain is not a RiNO after all, only those that didn’t support him.