The Criminal Non-feasance of Red-State Democratic Parties

I doubt Fourth District teabagger candidate Thomas Massie is stupid enough to say shit like this in front of anyone who might have palmed a camera, but I'm sure his teabagger-approved, billionaire-supported personal beliefs are just as ridiculous.

Charlie Pierce:

The Democratic Party in his home district couldn't find a single person to stand up and offer the voters in that district a chance not to be represented in Congress by an obvious crackpot. No local assistant DA. No ambitious college professor; the University of Georgia is in this district. Nobody wants to stand up and make the argument that it is better for all concerned that your congresscritter not be a nut. Nobody?

"You're the third person to ask me this question over the last few days," said Joe Wisenbaker, the Democratic Party chairman in Clarke County, a piece of which also is part of Broun's district, when I spoke to him just now. "The last one was a Republican woman who was very, very angry that we don't have a candidate. So here's what I tell everyone who asks: We do everything we can to encourage people to engage politically and to run as Democrats. Last time, we had a good candidate, a lawyer named Russell Edwards, and he went to work full-time to run against Paul Broun, and he got a third of the vote."

Since then, the district's gotten sliced and diced good and proper, but, if we're ever going to get out of the god-enfeebled fever swamp into which the radicalized Republican Party is pushing the nation, sooner or later, there has to be organized, relentless push back at the ballot boxes everywhere in every election, whether that turns out to be ultimately futile or not. (Of all the things about which Howard Dean was right, this is the most important.) To his everlasting credit, an Army veteran named Stephen Simpson primaried Broun last August, and that was a good thing, even though Simpson got beaten pretty badly. If the Republicans could come up with a candidate to a least raise the question of why we should have frothing loons in our national legislature, the Democrats should do their part as well.

"I've got a great number of people telling me that they don't want to be represented in Congress by a nut," says Wisenbaker. "I mean, we're all embarrassed here."

Dammit, do something about it, then. Find an unemployed UGA grad who can give a speech. At the very least, voters should hear somebody on a platform calling Paul Broun out instead of leaving it at a distance to impotent media snark.

Steve M:

Seriously, Democrats? This is the best you can do? A crook's son who won't campaign and who has a mockable past? There was nobody other Democrat in the entire freaking district who looked like more credible as a candidate?

Pathetic. One more House seat the GOP shouldn't hold, but will. 

Kentucky's Democratic Party is just as bad if not worse - usually. Amazingly, this year, we in Kentucky's Fourth District have a strong, sane, Democratic candidate to vote for.