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McConnell: We Will ‘Crush’ Tea Party Challengers ‘Everywhere’
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) believes that incumbent Republicans won’t have a problem holding their seats in the 2014 elections.
“I think we are going to crush them everywhere,” McConnell said about Tea Party challengers in a New York Times interview published Saturday. “I don’t think they are going to have a single nominee anywhere in the country.”
E.J. Dionne: The Right’s New Clothes
Republicans truly are having the internal debate that [Rep. Paul] Ryan called “messy,” “noisy,” and “a little bit uncomfortable.”
But Ryan may have revealed more than he intended when he downplayed conservative divisions. “For the most part,” Ryan insisted, “these disagreements have not been over principles or even policies. They’ve been over tactics.”
In which case, this is not an argument over ideas at all, but a discussion of packaging.[…]
But what’s most troubling here is that it did not occur to Ryan to check the [brown paper bag lunch] story because it apparently didn’t occur to him that most kids on free lunch programs have parents who do care about them. They just can’t afford to put a nutritious lunch in a brown paper bag every day.
Ryan was so eager to make an ideological statement about family structure that he was not bothered by the implicit insult he was issuing to actual families of children on the lunch program. A little more empathy could have saved Ryan a lot of trouble. He apologized for the factual error but not for the insult.
… for now, I am inclined to respect [Sen. Ted] Cruz for giving us his views straight and not pretending he’s manufacturing new ideas. If conservative rethinkers such as Ryan have more than rhetorical and tactical differences with Cruz, they have yet to prove it.
(Bolding mine)
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