No More Incumbents Blog

Senator John Warner will cease to serve as a Virginia Senator at the end of his current term.  He will have served for 30 years in the Senate.

He’s a good example that incumbents are not inherently bad, but that incumbents are even better when they go.  Senator John Warner has served our country and the State of Virginia in many different capacities over all the years.

In these times of heavy heavy lobbying, it is important to recognize that times have changed and it is more difficult today for new Senators to remain untouched by the influence of money.  I’d posit that if he had gotten off the incumbent stump in 1999 and ran for President in 2000, we might be in a better place as a country today.

Senator Warner recently had a nasty brush up against the Bush Administration and the Pentagon when he called for a partial withdrawal of troops from Iraq by Christmas.  His request was shot down rapidly and just a couple weeks later he is now announcing his resignation.

This opens up Virginia for the 2008 election, and it will make it very difficult for Republicans to hold the Senate.  Its possible that when Sen. Warner sat down at the poker tables with the Pentagon and the Bush Administration that he went all in on his request for a troop withdrawal and now he is showing that he was not bluffing.

This marks a bad week for the Republican party in the Senate and we’ll cover another Republican Senator, whose days are also being unexpectedly numbered.

Hypocrite Senator Craig of Idaho is reportedly stepping down from all of the committees that he sits on in the Senate.  Several Senators (both Republican and Democrat) are requesting that Republican Senator Craig should resign from the Senate all together after it was learned that he plead guilty to a misdemeanor in a bathroom in a Minneapolis Airport restroom.

The police reports discuss an incident where he repeatedly peaked into an occupied stall (occupied by a under cover police officer) and then locked himself in an adjoining stall and did some things that apparently insinuate some kind of strange under the stall behavior???

That resulted in the arrest or ticket or whatever it was.

Apparently, Senator Craig is most concerned that he was not able to ‘make the problem go away’ when he plead guilty.

Hypocrites

The crazy thing is this same Senator said of Bill Clinton that Bill was not only a ‘bad boy’ but apparently a very ‘nasty boy’ on Meet the Press.  Unless family values include some under the stall heavy patting, it would appear that this family value Republican is a hypocrite.

People may or may not care about him being a homosexual, heterosexual, or a ReStallSexual (Restroom-Stall-Sexual), but most Americans do not like a hypocrite, especially a hypocrite that preaches to them about how they are supposed to live, only to ignore their own preaching and then go and proposition a police officer. 

Apparently, Minneapolis’ finest resisted Senator Craig’s surge.

Dirty Jobs Candidate

Now on a lighter note, I wonder if the guy from Dirty Jobs would like to go and spend some time in the can (restroom not the jail) in Minneapolis trying to catch other ReStallSexuals.  I’m sure that is probably a fairly nasty jobs.  I would definitely want to tackle a job like that armed with a mask and a portable oxygen concentrator otherwise I’d probably only be able to last about 5 minutes sitting their in the stall working as bait.

We are awaiting for the news conference where Alberto Gonzales is expected to resign.  Many people had high expectations for him, but he seemed to only exacerbate and polarize politics and politicize the Justice Department.

He was involved in a number of scandals over the last seven years from penning documents that seemed to allow torture to either allowing the firing of US Attorneys for political reasons or being asleep at the wheel while it happened.  Either way it was a foul and at worst he may have harmed the constitution and the reputation of the United States around the world.

Everyone that goes to Nevada to play Texas Hold em wants to see the flop and Mitt Romney delivered one of the biggest flops of the primaries yesterday.

After formerly supporting a position that would create an amendment to the US Constitution outlawing abortion, just 16 days ago, Romney showed every body the flop in Nevada.  He came out flopping states rights over the current Republican Plank Platform. 

When his campaign attempted to clarify Romney’s flop, they stated that Romney did not feel that the Republican’s plank could be realized anytime soon.

It was bad enough that Romney flopped on abortion.  He didn’t have a lot of wiggle room with ProLife Christian conservatives eyeballing a Massachusetts Mormon Governor running for President.  He had to rub salt in the flopping wound by saying through his campaign team that the Republicans anti-abortion stance is not a winning hand.

Romney does not have much room working as a Maverick.  He has continually moved to embrace the Christian Conservative right.  So this would appear to be more of a flopping mistake than an attempt at true leadership by which he might attempt to move the Republican party back to the center in order to possibly salvage a 2008 election from the Democrats.

For many Christian conservatives this will likely mark the point at which they confirmed that they could not trust Romney, while centrists Republicans might start to see a candidate that they can embrace in their own party.  In some ways, this flip flop might be perceived as somewhat shallow outside of the Christian conservative movement, akin to replacing cabinet hardware with new knobs.  Same cabinet, just a slightly different look.  But to the Christian conservatives this is a major issue and Romney’s comments are either a major mistake or a calculated move to sacrifice Christians in favor of centrists and undecided voters that are rapidly defecting towards Democrats in mass.

ABC News: Romney Muddles Abortion Stance