Poor Rush Is Going To Have His Hands Full-- His Naughty Congressional Republicans Are Razzing Him Again... And McCain's Mom Hates Him!

Rush just can't his troops in good order. The latest round started with serial adulterer and corruptionist John Shadegg denigrating Limbaugh by pointing out he's just a television personality, implying that he isn't the leader of the Republican congressional delegation. I wonder how long it will take Shadegg, well know in DC as a gutless wonder with no backbone whatsoever, to grovel and apologize for offending his lord and master.

Then the heads of the two GOP congressional incumbent protection committees, two clueless Texas extremists with different agendas, NRSC chair John Cornyn (who has to appeal to whole states, including some that never seceded from the Union) and NRCC chair Pete Sessions (whose strategy is to only appeal to the fringe base in deeply red districts, mostly in the South and Mormon West), started fighting with each other. Sessions has been over the rails lately, bragging his committee's strategy was culled from the Taliban and more recently accusing President Obama of sabotaging the economy so he could grab power. Cornyn implied to the Dallas Morning News that House Republicans should find someone a little more mainstream than Sessions.

The Texan who leads the Senate Republican campaign effort rejected Dallas Rep. Pete Sessions’ allegation that President Barack Obama is intentionally sabotaging the U.S. economy.

“I don’t know where he’s coming from on it,” Sen. John Cornyn said Wednesday. “I’d like some sort of clarification about what he meant.”

Democrats mocked Sessions-- a member of the congressional GOP leadership who chairs the party’s House campaign committee-- as paranoid and flirting with conspiracy theories after he was quoted accusing Obama of intentionally destroying American jobs and trying to depress the stock market in order to topple the capitalist system... Cornyn explicitly rejected the idea that Obama wants higher unemployment, lower stock prices and general economic malaise.
“Absolutely not,” Cornyn told Texas reporters.

...Asked whether he is comfortable with his fellow Texans remaining in place as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, despite the gaffe, Cornyn deferred to the judgment of House Republicans, who picked Sessions late last year.

The GOP has brought in another House member to run recruitment, California Congressman Kevin McCarthy who is also an extremist but who understands that to stop hemorrhaging seats the GOP is going to just have to bite the bullet and start recruiting "candidates based less on ideology and more on their chances of winning. The goal, he said, is to seek out prospects who are ethnically diverse, female, less partisan and even supportive of abortion rights. So far, these efforts are more concept than reality." It's doubtful McCarthy cleared this with Limbaugh who is likely to go insane when he hears about it since it violates his vision of narrow-cast conservative politics.

Instead of just taking orders from Limbaugh, the way most of his colleagues do, McCarthy claims he's getting his strategy directly from The Thumpin': How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution by Naftali Bendavid. The book, written by an Emanuel toady trumpets his blueprint for recruiting Republicans and reactionary Democrats to run for Congress while knocking actual Democrats out of the primaries. When you look at a list of the dozen Democrats who vote most ffrequently against Democrat values on crucial issues and who most cross the aisle to support the Republican Party's anti-working family agenda, you find 9 of Emanuel's recruits-- from bad to worse: Gabby Giffords (Blue Dog-AZ), Zack Space (Blue Dog-OH), Harry Mitchell (Blue Dog-AZ), Chris Carney (Blue Dog-PA), Heath Shuler (Rahm's greatest hit, Blue Dog-NC), Brad Ellsworth (Blue Dog-IN), Joe Donnelly (Blue Dog-IN) and Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS).

The dozen worst Dems in Congress-- mostly Emanuel recruits

So McCarthy's plan is to recruit a bunch of social moderates-- even pro-Choice Republicans-- that will drive Limbaugh up a wall. He's already started trying to persuade John McKinney, minority leader of the state Senate, to run against Jim Himes. Although McKinney has "repeatedly refused to provide any responses to" Project Vote Smart on his political stands, his voting record shows that he is relatively pro-Choice, relatively pro-environment, and that he was rated an F by the NRA in 2008 and a D in 2006.

McCarthy has also recruited fellow Californian Assemblyman Van Tran to run in Orange County against the very popular moderate, Loretta Sanchez. Tran's voting record in the Assembly would have to be rated as extreme right wing but he's gotten better grades from pro-Choice groups than most Republicans and one year even almost sounded like a moderate when it came to civil rights for Asian-Americans and once got an acceptable rating for a gay organization. In then end, though, Tran is just another garden variety right-wing rubber stamp.

McCarthy said such openness is necessary to rebuild the party, which lost control of Congress and the White House in the past two election cycles. “We’re at 178” seats in the House out of 435, he said. “You get beyond the majority and people can worry about what they want to purify.”

That argument is rankling some Republicans, who said the party must continue to distinguish itself from the Democrats.

“Standing for something is better than standing for nothing,” said consultant Eddie Mahe. “There’s that age-old saying, ‘The reason moderates don’t accomplish much is they don’t believe in anything enough to fight for.”

While some Republican leaders-- like Eric Cantor-- says the essence of Republicanism is about greed, selfishness and supporting Big Business, others are upset when the GOP ignores the social issues. It's why Huckabee and Cantor are at war for the soul of the Republican Party. As for McCarthy, it sounds like he's gonna get waterboarded by Cheney and Limbaugh. Meanwhile McCain's 97 year old mom took a swipe at Limbaugh for him. Even the pig-man isn't going to a get into a fight with a 97-year old lifelong Republican... well he?

"I belong to the Republican Party," McCain, 97, said during an appearance on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. "What he represents of the Republican Party has nothing to do with my side of it. I don't know what the man means, I don't know what he's talking about... I think [Steele] was exactly right when he defined this man as an entertainer," she said. "To my horror, the Republican Party made him back up on it."

..."I, myself, can't figure out that type of person who really more or less gets joy out of denigrating people. I'm just not that type of person, I don't have friends like that, and thank God I am not around people like him."

Rush explains his drug addiction by admitting that hillbilly heroin made him "entirely unreasonable and irrational. It is all you care about. Nothing else matters, no matter how important to you otherwise; it doesn't matter as much as the addiction. Feeding it, the fear of no being able to, is what animates your existence everyday." (And he hates bloggers too.)