Apparently, Missouri GOP Senate candidate, John Brunner isn’t counting on support from the grass-roots of the party in advance of the August primary election. In a radio interview with Dana Loesch, he was asked how he felt about Sarah Palin’s use of the word, “reload” and her utilization of the “cross-hairs” map, which targeted congressional Democrats for defeat in the November 2010 elections. I find his response less than inspiring.

“I look at these things and you look back and you think, oh, for crying out loud. You know what happens when you go to that level? You get everybody off message and when you get people off message, we have conservatives lose. If you choose your words a little bit more carefully….”

He expanded on that a bit. The exchange begins at the 4:37 mark.

Dan Riehl isn’t impressed either. Here’s a sample of his thoughts, via Big Government.

….That Brunner would double down with Loesch and throw Sarah Palin under the bus along with other Constitutional conservatives does not speak well for him. If this is representative of Brunner’s depth of commitment to the constitutional principles he mouths, he’ll likely be far too worried about how he’ll play on the TV talk show circuit to do stand up to the Left. Such conservatives need to be thrown out of Washington, not sent there.

I’m not very familiar with this particular race at this point, but I’ll be taking a hard look at both Todd Akin and Sarah Steelman. Brunner just torpedoed his chances of earning my support.

Read the rest of Riehl’s piece here