Will The Teabaggers Subvert Mainstream Conservatives Next Year?

Moneybags Adelson financed the teabaggers & now is backing Charlie Crist against their hero Marco Rubio

The biggest funder of the Republican Party, sleazy Las Vegas gangster Sheldon Adelson, will be hosting a fundraiser for someone he sees as another prospective U.S. senator to do his bidding: Charlie Crist of Florida. It's somewhat ironic because Adelson underwrote the expenses of the teabagger movement-- as the sugar daddy of the Astroturf firm Freedom's Watch (to the tune of millions of dollars)-- and the far right of that movement has just announced that they are targeting Crist for defeat.

The teabaggers announced yesterday that they will be turning their guns (not literally we hope) against mainstream conservatives like Crist in order to secure the nominations of far right extremists like Marco Rubio. They want to remake the Republican Party more in their own image. Deranged GOP has-been, Dick Armey, is rushing to the head of the parade, threatening Republicans who aren't deferential enough to the extremist elements he purports to lead.

The teabaggers are fully behind extreme right fringe candidate Marco Rubio who trails Crist in the polls. And local teabagger organizations in other states are rushing to embrace lunatic fringe candidates who-- if nominated by the GOP-- are likely to guarantee the election of Democrats. So far the teabaggers are pushing for unelectable candidates in Colorado, Connecticut, California. They apparently got stumped when no one could find a state that started with "D," but they are expected to find more states soon.

“We were very disappointed with Gov. Charlie Crist when he supported the stimulus, the bailout, and he appeared publicly with President Obama,” said Everett Wilkinson, a South Florida-based organizer for Tea Party Patriots. “The opposition comes from Crist’s support for the largest spending plan ever and the environmental policies he’s pushing on the American people.”

Rubio has already made appearances at Florida tea parties, and protesters have been seen waving signs declaring, “Anybody but Charlie Crist.” He also has Armey’s endorsement, and Armey headlined a Dallas fundraiser for him several weeks ago.

Teabaggers also talk about taking over local Republican Party organizations, especially in states that tend to go for secessionism and hard core extremism like South Carolina and Texas. Teabaggers are already at war with South Carolina GOP incumbent Bob Inglis and their latest target is another conservative backbencher who they say slipped up, Texas kook Mike Conaway, who represents the heart of the Lonestar State, CD-11 (Odessa, Midland, San Angelo). Conaway, like many Republicans voted for Bush's TARP program, and a teabagger named Canyon Clowdus is challenging him in the GOP primary.

“He has put a financial burden on my four children that will amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars each,” Clowdus says of Conaway on his campaign website.

“I think it was a bad, bad political decision,” Armey said of the 34 Senate Republicans and 91 House Republicans who voted for the TARP bailout, “and if you talk to grass-roots activists, it has become a political test for them.”

Other Republican House members who voted for TARP on October 3, 2008 include conservative stalwarts like Spencer Bachus (R-AL), Roy Blunt (R-MO, now running for the U.S. Senate), John Boehner (R-OH), Mary Bono-Mack (R-CA, another target of teabaggers), Ken Calvert (R-CA), Eric Cantor (R-VA), Mike Castle (R-DE, now running for the U.S. Senate), Charlie Dent (R-PA), David Dreier (R-CA), Mary Fallin (R-OK, now running for Oklahoma governor), Pete Hoekstra (R-MI, now running for Michigan governor), Mark Kirk (R-IL, now running for the U.S. Senate), John Kline (R-MN, a radical teabagger himself), Jerry Lewis (R-CA, widely considered the most corrupt member of Congress), Dan Lungren (R-CA), Buck McKeon (R-CA), Gary Miller (R-CA), Mike Rogers (R-AL), Hal Rogers (R-KY), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Paul Ryan (R-WI), Mean Jean Schmidt (R-OH), Pete Sessions (R-TX), John Shadegg (R-AZ), Mark Souder (R-IN), Zach Wamp (R-TN, now running for Tennessee governor), and Frank Wolf (R-VA).

Among the Senate Republicans who voted for TARP and may now face the ire of teabaggers are Bob Bennett (R-UT), Richard Burr (R-NC), John Ensign (R-NV), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX, now running for Texas governor), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), John McCain (R-AZ), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Arlen Specter (R-PA), and John Thune (R-ND).

Many of these Republicans are facing teabagger-supported extremists in the primaries. One such challenge-- to Arlen Specter-- already caused a partisan fence jump. And Bob Bennett is unlikely to win renomination in Utah. In Florida Rubio is gaining momentum among right-wing activists and he could actually snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory for the GOP, beating Crist in the primary and then going down to a real drubbing in the general election against a middle of the road Democratic nonentity.