rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

and so, the congressional hissy fit goes on.

Upstate Republican, Pushed Out, Backs Democratic Rival

so the rundown, because I know all of you dirtbags won’t bother to click on the above link: Obama nominated a Republican congressman from upstate New York to be the Secretary of the Army. that guy said, “yeah, okay. sure.”
so there’s a special election on Tuesday to decide who will man this vacant seat until next year’s midterms.
as such, it’s the only race for a house seat this year. and what makes this race for an upstate New York congressional seat interesting to, you know, people outside of upstate New York,  is the fact that it had three major contenders in it. up until this weekend, that is.

so you have the Democrat; some guy who is only notable because he’s a Democrat. and then you had (note: had) the Republican; an assemblywoman named Dierdre Scozzafava, who had originally taken the nomination with the blessing of the local GOP establishment. and then you have a guy from the Conservative Party. now I don’t purport to know how this dude entered the race, but his name is Doug Hoffman, and he appears to be a Real American Hero.
Hoffman is purportedly running on a platform that places him firmly on the far right (though I can’t confirm, because his goddamn awful website keeps on freezing my browser), and has picked up endorsements from groups like the Club for Growth, the National Organization for Marriage, and Fred fucking Thompson.
well, if there’s one thing I learned from watching hordes of morons stomp circles into the National Mall during the poorly focused “tea party” rallies this summer, it’s that if you get people on the fringes of any political movement worked up, they’re bound to go out and create more of a stink than they actually merit. meaning to say: there’s lot of dumb assholes from around the country throwing money at this Hoffman cat because he’s ultra-conservative. and they think that his election will serve to put Republicans elsewhere on notice to nominate more conservative conservatives.
so they scored a small victory. after weeks of getting outspent by the Democrat on her left (Bill Owens is his name) and the Hoffman on her right, trailing both badly in the polls, and being hammered by national conservative organizations for supporting gay rights and legal abortions, Dierdre Scozzafava dropped out of the race on Saturday. she didn’t endorse Hoffman, but rather just bowed out, and told her supporters that they were free to support whoever they wished.
she wasn’t very happy about this. Michael Steele at the RNC issued some sort of condescending statement about how Scozzafava had committed a selfless act by getting out of the way, and immediately endorsed the other guy. and the conservative campaign danced a jig. she had, like, 15 percent of the vote, and that would give them a leg up on the “Nancy Pelosi democrat,” as they call Owens.
and then today, in a nice little “fuck you” to the conservatives, Scozzafava went ahead and backed Owens. that keeps the race between the conservative and the democrat decidedly undecided a day before the polls open, and to those in the know, it also says to the Republican civil war is straight rollin’. and that this contest in upstate New York will be a barometer, of sorts, on what kind of direction the party should be taken in. 
if it’s true that we’re witnessing a very public internal spat, then I’m all for it. the GOP could stand a few more years of doubt; those assholes have been voting in block formation literally for decades. Republican leadership has used dumb, traditional-family-values bullshit to push through tax breaks that reward the exorbantly wealthy and promote a painfully simple foreign policy for about 25 years. and now they’re tripping over themselves as to who’s going to lead. well, now, despite demographic shifts that indicate you can’t win at the polls by exploiting nationalism and xenophobia any longer, the Republican party has to wrangle with that seething base it has relied on for so long. during which, as a house divided, they’ll probably continue to fail. 
I hope this bloodletting lasts for another decade. nothing could help the country more than watching Republicans have a vicious, hurtful and time-consuming backyard wrestling match among themselves for a good while longer. maybe they’ll emerge as something I, you know, would actually vote for.