The message was sent and NY-23 will be back in Republican hands in a year. along with quite a few more House and Senate seats. Remember, 40% of this country is conservative vs. 20% lib. Obama shining the light on how Dems really run things is awakening the nation to just how kooky left the Dem party is now. How’s that nationalized health care going?

I think that most conservatives objectively examining the situation would be happy with bucpac and its torpedoing of Lowell Weicker in favor of Joe Lieberman all those years ago. Like Scozzafava, Weicker abandoned the GOP. He later served as governor as an independent.

Rick, either you think that William F Buckley was wrong to support the Dem in that one isolated case (and Weicker was about as bad as liberal RINOs get) or you concede that sometimes, sharpening the long knives for incumbents is a legitimate strategy.

Once you concede the legitimacy of the strategy, it’s only a tactical question of when it is appropriate to deploy it. I strongly suspect that the consensus answer is almost never. That this strategy of primary and general election challenges from the right is much better deployed as a threat, something like nuclear deterrence than ever actually launching an internecine war.

Once you stop calling the mau mau brigade on the right morons and other unhelpful names, legitimize the tactic as something appropriate in extremis, you can get down to the brass tacks of examining GOP incumbents and finding out that, hey, their behavior by and large doesn’t merit going to the extreme solution you concede in theory is valid.

You are a voter in a congressional district bordering Canada in upstate New York that has gone reliably Republican since the 19th century. Your Republican congressman is picked to be Army secretary by the president and your county GOP committee taps a woman with moderate credentials in keeping with the district and deep local roots to run in a special election to succeed him.

But it is 2009 and that woman is not right wing enough for the national GOP, which foists a carpetbagging Glenn Beck acolyte with no experience and even less sense on you, driving the woman from the race.

Predictions that the right winger will win do not take into account that the people of the district are deeply insulted that their election has been hijacked by a bunch of uncouth loudmouths like Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, who may speak for what is left of the national GOP but not the good burghers of NY-23. Against all odds, the Democrat wins.

Meanwhile, back at the World Series . . .

This wasn’t even the first shoe to drop tonight. That will come in 2010. I can be very objective on this point: if I were a Democratic MoC in a moderate to conservative district, I would be scared shitless tonight. Political fortunes can turn in a year, but 2010 is poised to be a very, very Republican year. Note “Republican,” not “conservative.”

There’s a certain beauty — a symmetry — to the thought process. And as far as I’m concerned, I wish them all well. I hope the purists on both sides manage to form up two hard, shiny, pure little ideological knots.

And then, when 20% or so are happy on the left, and another 20% or so are cozy on the right, the rest of us can form up a new party and finally govern the country.

Bold colors over pale pastels…