That he lies about his opponents record? I guess that's politics as usual. I thought Blat was supposed to be the different guy? Perhaps this will help you understand where I'm coming from. From the editorial board of the nation's most prominent newspaper, The New York Times. The Opinion Pages| Editorial In G.O.P., Far Right is Too Moderate The forces of political nihilism not only remain alive and well within the Republican Party, but they are on the rise. Witness the way they shook Washington on Tuesday by removing from power Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, who had been one of the most implacable opponents to the reform of immigration, health care and taxation. His crime (in addition to complacent campaigning)? He was occasionally obliged, as a leader, to take a few minimalist steps toward governing, like raising the debt ceiling and ending a ruinous shutdown. For that he was pilloried in his Virginia district by a little-known resident of the distant extremes, David Brat, whose most effective campaign tool was a photo showing Mr. Cantor standing next to President Obama. By falsely portraying the seven-term incumbent as just another compromiser, just another accommodationist to the power of big government, Mr. Brat managed the unimaginable feat of bringing down a majority leader in a primary, and by double digits. “Cantor is the No. 1 cheerleader in Congress for amnesty,” Mr. Brat wrote in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Friday. This is utter nonsense. More than anyone else in the House, including Speaker John Boehner, Mr. Cantor was responsible for the chamber’s refusal to vote on the Senate’s immigration bill. He personally refused to allow a vote on an amendment to give legal status to undocumented immigrants who serve in the military. He did publicly muse about the possibility of a bill that would provide a path to citizenship for children brought to the country illegally, perhaps aware that the long-term future of the Republican party requires the support of some Hispanic voters. But after voting down the real Dream Act in 2010, he never brought his own bill to the floor. He sent fliers around his district saying the “Obama-Reid plan to give illegal aliens amnesty” would ignore the rule of law and “reward people for illegal behavior.” He was nonetheless called “amnesty-addled” by one of Mr. Brat’s talk-radio surrogates. Mr. Cantor did vote repeatedly to raise the debt ceiling, as Mr. Brat likes to point out in his most irresponsible smear. But Mr. Cantor is better remembered as the leader who, along with Mr. Boehner, openly encouraged the House Tea Party class of 2010 to begin a series of high-stakes debt standoffs with the White House that nearly plunged the country over the brink of default. Having unleashed the most destructive political impulses of his party, he finally fell victim to them. Those impulses continue to batter the party around the country, producing candidates who are light-years from the mainstream. Chris McDaniel, who has a strong chance of winning the June 24 runoff for the Republican nomination to Mississippi’s Senate seat, was the first to sign a new anti-immigrant pledge not to grant amnesty and to prevent growth of legal immigration. Joni Ernst, the new Republican nominee for Iowa’s Senate seat, is anti-amnesty, hates the Clean Water Act, and wants private Social Security accounts. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who won his primary on Tuesday, supports immigration reform but placated conservatives by regularly going on talk shows to bash Mr. Obama’s foreign policy and suggest the possibility of impeachment. Mr. Brat will probably go to Congress next year, joining Republicans like these who will face a momentous choice for their party. Will they replace Mr. Cantor and other leaders with even more divisive politicians determined to stage confrontations with the president at every juncture? Will they continue to ignore a stagnating economy, inadequate education and decaying cities? If they do, they will create an opening for Democrats. The majority of Americans remain appalled by this extremism and want better choices than the one in Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/opinion/in-gop-far-right-is-too-moderate.html?hp&rref=opinion
Business as usual. Beltway establishment is being chipped away at, both parties are increasingly polarized, nothing will get done until 2016 at the earliest, because that's the only time when one party can control the House, Senate, and White House.
That's not a position. Why did you call him an extremist if you don't know any of his positions? Just throwing out trite keywords. Debate tactics as usual from Deckard.
I didn't follow the race, but Cantor's campaign dropped $5M+ on this primary vs. something like $120K by his opponent. So just how complacent was he?
Virginians Choose Even Bigger Tool Posted by Andy Borowitz WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — In a development that few had thought possible, Republicans in the Seventh District of Virginia on Tuesday night found an even bigger tool than Rep. Eric Cantor to represent them in the United States Congress. Apparently deciding that Cantor was insufficiently heartless to represent their district, Republicans turned out to the polls to elect David Brat, a man whose political views “border on sociopathy,” according to exit-poll responses from voters who supported him. During his concession speech, Rep. Cantor reflected on the mistakes that might have led to his defeat: “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. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but at the end of the day I was just too damn empathic for this district.” But Rep. Cantor was gracious in defeat, offering words of congratulation to the victorious Mr. Brat. “The people of the Seventh District have spoken,” he said. “The time has come to pass the torch to a new generation of asshats.” When asked about the defeat of his longtime colleague in the House, Speaker John Boehner said, “I will give a formal statement as soon as I can stop laughing.”
I came in to this forum assuming that this back and forward banter was maybe started by one poster or the other, but sadly, there is no instigation necessary for some posters like treeman to get started. They just flat out insult and ridicule posters without engaging in intellectual and logical conversation. This is the internet fellas, why do you guys feel the need to attack one another when we can educate one another?
A picture of Brat is beginning to emerge. Prognosis: TEABAGGER ON STEROIDS. David Brat, the Libertarian Who Beat Eric Cantor, Doesn't Believe in the "Common" Good When tea party challenger David Brat sent Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House majority leader, to the ash heap on Tuesday night, vanquishing the incumbent by more than 10 points in the primary race, the politerati were stunned. Political journalists scrambled to answer a question: who is this guy? The political pros knew that Brat had mounted a campaign largely based on two issues: bashing Cantor on immigration (that is, excoriating the congressman, who was quite hesitant about immigration reform, for not killing the possibility of any immigration legislation) and denouncing Cantor for supporting a debt ceiling deal that averted possible financial crisis. But not much else was widely known about this local professor who dispatched a Washington power broker. A quick review of his public statements reveals a fellow who is about as tea party as can be. He appears to endorse slashing Medicare and Social Security payouts to seniors by two-thirds. He wants to dissolve the IRS. And he has called for drastic cuts to education funding, explaining, "My hero Socrates trained in Plato on a rock. How much did that cost? So the greatest minds in history became the greatest minds in history without spending a lot of money." An economics professor at Randolph-Macon College in central Virginia, Brat frequently has repeated the conservative canard that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae brought down the housing market by handling the vast majority of subprime mortgages. That is, he absolves Big Finance and the banks of responsibility for the financial crisis that triggered the recession, which hammered middle-class and low-income families across the country. (In fact, as the housing bubble grew, Freddie and Fannie shed their subprime holdings, while banks grabbed more.) In his campaign speeches, Brat has pointed out that he isn't worried about climate change because "rich countries solve their problems": If you let Americans do their thing, there is no scarcity, right? They said we're going to run out of food 200 years ago, that we're goin' to have a ice age. Now we're heating up…Of course we care for the environment, but we're not mad people. Over time, rich countries solve their problems. We get it right. It's not all perfect, but we get it right. Update: After Mother Jones published this piece, several videos referenced were set to private. He did not say what might happen to not-so-rich countries due to climate change and the consequent rise in sea levels, droughts, and extreme weather. Asked about cuts to Medicare, Brat replied that he supported drastic reductions in payouts: I'll give you my general answer. And my general answer is you have to do what's fair. Right. So you put together a graph or a chart and you go out to the American people, you go to the podium, and you say, this is what you put in on average, this is what you get out on average. Currently, seniors are getting about three dollars out of all of the programs for every dollar they put in. So, in general, you've got to go to the American people and just be honest with them and say, "Here's what fairness would look like." Right. So, maybe the next ten years we have to grandfather some folks in, but basically we're going to move them in a direct line toward fairness and we have to live within our means. He frets about the state of morality in schools and about Beyoncé: For the first 13 years of your kid's life, we teach them no religion, no philosophy, and no ethics…Who is our great moral teachers these days? Every generation has always had great theologians or philosophers by the century that you can name. Who do we got right now? [Audience: Jay-Z] Right. Right. [Audience: Beyoncé] Right. Beyoncé. When you can't name a serious philosopher, a national name, or a serious theologian, or a serious religious leader, at the national level, your culture's got a major problem. We got a major problem. Brat railed against Cantor for supporting a path to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants. Brat called this a policy of "amnesty" and accused Cantor of "getting big paychecks" from groups like the Chamber of Commerce for his position: If I misspoke and said "secretly," he's been pretty out in the open. He's been in favor of the KIDS Act, the DREAM Act, the ENLIST Act [which Cantor blocked in May]…On the amnesty card, it's a matter of motivation. I teach third-world economic development for the past 20 years, I love all people, I went to seminary before I did my economics, and so you look at the motivation. Why is Eric pushing amnesty? It's not a big issue in our district, everyone's opposed to it, and so why is he doing it? And the answer is, 'cause he's got his eye on the speakership. He wants to be speaker, and big business, right? The Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce wants cheap labor. So he actually is selling out the people in our district. He's not representing the district, the will of the people, and he's getting big paychecks by doing so. So he's very clear on amnesty. Brat is, not surprisingly, no fan of the United Nations: "Common-" anything I'm against. United Nations. Common everything. If you say common, by definition you're saying it's top-down. I'm going to force this on you. That's what dictators do. His view of who deploys a top-down approach, naturally, includes President Barack Obama: The left does not believe in diversity. They believe in top-down, I'm going to force my way onto you. Obama is forcing un-diversity onto everybody. It's not diversity. It's top down, central planning, on everything. As Mother Jones's Timothy Murphy noted, Brat identifies as a libertarian but not a full Randian, and he doesn't buy the idea that there's anything dangerous about playing chicken with the debt ceiling. Bring it on, he says.
Tea Parties did not donate a dime to his campaign. He's not a Tea Party candidate. I would say that article got roughly 1% correct (his name)
Par for the course really....you didn't actually think that an article with the word "teabagger" in it would be accurate did you?
Actually that was my little touch. It's just stunning: just three months ago Cantor was the tea party darling for Boehner's job. If anything this pretty much sums it up that the tea party is now in control of the republican party. Somewhere Hillary is giggling
Oh, come on. Are all NBA/NFL players extremists now? I mean, half of them will openly thank God during interviews when they win a big game. I certainly don't care for Brat, but that's a stupid reason for claiming he's an extremist. Also, one positive thing I will point about Brat is that his victory is an example of how money in politics is super super overrated and politicians can't just buy their victory like so many people claim. You have to have ideas which will resonate with the people, and well, Brat did that and Cantor didn't.
Can Eric Cantor run as an Independent though? I'd imagine a lot of people in Congress (including Democrats) will actually want him back in office and might back him for it.
Sure, he could run as an independent and try to appeal to the moderates. He would come in third and probably ensure the seat goes to a Democrat, which would make him even more hated by Repubs.
