The Scozzafava Case

Politico" is running an article titled "GOP Mulls Stripping Dede of her Top Post." (They must know Dede Scozzafava personally, to be calling her by her first name like that. This is somewhat presumptuous, isn't it? I mean that we would automatically know who "Dede" is, and also that they can feel so free to approach her with such familiarity. But such a thing is common when the person being referred to is a female or a member of a minority. And it is also foolish, when you think of the chance they're passing up here to roll their tongues over yet another of those beautiful Italian names of the elaborate kind.)

This article speaks of how enraged New York Republicans are that after feeling that she had no choice but to drop out of the race as the Republican candidate to be the U.S. Representative from New York's 23rd District, Scozzafava then threw her support to the Democratic contender, Bill Owens, who then won the seat and thereby replaced a moderate Republican named McHugh, who had joined the Obama White House by becoming Secretary of the Army. As punishment, the leader of the Repubs in the New York legislature is now seriously considering stripping Scozzafava of her leadership post in that body. He and other NY Repubs are accusing her of having committed treachery to the party.

But there's something highly important missing from this article and also, it seems, from the minds of all those angry Repubs, namely that there is no mention of how Scozzafava, after a lifetime of faithful service to the party, was rewarded by seeing the R. Limbaugh wing of the Republican Party, which now seems to be the body and the soul of what's left of the GOP, flew up into the arctic fastnesses of northern New York and roundly attacked Scozzafava. They called her entirely too moderate to be a good Republican, and instead they urged the voters of the 23rd to forget all about their local interests and their local traditions and to instead adhere to the malevolent ideology of today's most common Republicans by rejecting Scozzafava and instead choosing a man who didn't even live in that district and in addition was running under the aegis of something called the "Conservative Party."

I didn't know there was such a thing. I thought the Republicans were the " Conservative Party" in all but in name. And in addition, the tactic made no sense. Those hardheads must not have know where this district is. People in that part of New England are a hard-bitten bunch (it gets very cold there -- I can tell you from personal experience), and they don't take kindly to such things as being told to forgo their local interests and instead kowtow to talk show and Alaska refugee rowdies, and the (nearly) predictable thing happened, even if, till the D. Armey and S. Palin vultures showed up and started circling, that district's electorate had voted Republican for a solid 100 years..

So it was not the Repubs but Ms Scozzafava who suffered the high treachery there.

Now, after reacting to that betrayal in an entirely logical and fitting way, the lady is finding out how the party for which she had labored with love for so long has actually been, for some time now, much like those countless and perfectly straight ranks that marched so often through the streets of places like Nuremberg and Berlin in the 1930's, with everyone forced to stay in step or face drastic punishment, up to and probably including the application of sharp blades to their necks.