The extremists are taking over the party!

A few days ago, the left-wing activist group MoveOn.org began sending out emails seeking contributions to fund primary challenges against any Democratic senator who does not fully support “health care reform with a public option.” Now there’s an update: MoveOn executive director Justin Ruben says the group has raised $3,578,117 for the project and is thinking of new ways to punish errant Democratic lawmakers.

Haven’t we heard this somewhere before?  Oh yeah, from Obama lackey Valerie Jarrett:

White House adviser Valerie Jarrett said Scozzafava’s pullout under pressure “tells a lot about where the Republican leadership is right now.” They are “more and more extreme and more and more marginalized,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Hey, Val, you might want to give George Soros a ring and let him know he’s going to be marginalized.

Republicans are - rightly - crowing this morning about the GOP’s victories in the New Jersey Governor’s race and a battery of races in Virginia from the Governorship on down and what they say about the turn in the national mood, if not in a pro-Republican direction then at least in a direction that’s sufficiently hostile to the Democrats that voters in states won by Obama and dominated by the Democrats in the last few years are willing to give individual Republicans another chance.

But the key word there, even in an across-the-board sweep like happened in Virginia, is individual. There remains an ongoing battle on the Right over how Republicans choose which candidates to support - who voters and the national party organs should back in primaries, when and whether to support third party candidacies, etc. It’s a battle intensified by Doug Hoffman’s loss in the NY-23 race after the NRCC-backed candidate, Dede Scoazzafava, ended up swinging the race to the Democrats when she endorsed Bill Owens. But in making sense of such debates, this is a point that cannot be stressed enough: no matter how favorable or unfavorable the overall national climate may be, no matter what ideological compass you want the party to follow, you can’t ever overlook the importance of the individual candidates and the conditions they run in. I said it in 2008 with regard to presidential campaigns, and it’s true as well of races for Governor, Senate or House: ideas don’t run for president, people do.

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Arlen Specter told David Gregory on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday Morning that the GOP has become too conservative:

“The Republican Party has gone far to the right since I joined it under Reagan’s big tent.”

Meghan Mccain says the GOP needs to become more moderate:

“I just wish that moderates like myself — more moderate Republicans and more socially liberal Republicans — weren’t looked at as, ‘Get rid of the dirty moderates. Get rid of them.’”

We hear similar statements from Kathleen Parker, David Brooks, Peggy Noonan and David Frum. I must have missed something here. In what way exactly has the Republican Party moved to the right since Ronald Reagan’s presidency?

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David Brooks is shocked, shocked I tell you, that Barack Obama is a leftist.

Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”

David Brooks, you are an idiot. You should be disqualified from voting ever again. Why? Any reasonably objective person who bothered to actually look at what Obama did, instead of what he said, would have reached the conclusion he is a leftist radical at heart.

David, you’re just stupid. It was obvious. Hell, if you’d paid any attention at all, Obama’s willingness to take the New Party’s pledge to seek their endorsement should have told you Obama is a leftist. His speaking out against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act should have told you he is a leftist. His surrounding himself with people like Bill Ayers should have told you he is a leftist.

But you wanted to believe. You wanted to believe because you stand for nothing.

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