Conservatives Mobilizing the Purge “Cap and Traitors”
I’m told that the folks behind www.capandtr8tors.com are the same geniuses who were behind the tea parties movement earlier this year. The targets are the eight House Republicans who voted for the American Clean Energy and Security Act, and the threat is that “They have 5 Days from the time of their vote to change them, or we will work to vote them out of office.”
Grammatically speaking, it seems to me that it should be “tr8ors” rather than “tr8tors” but perhaps that’s overly literal.
Meanwhile, though the cause here could not be less just, it is worth emphasizing that it’s a willing to issue these kind of threats—and be somewhat serious about them—that keeps the Republican caucus fairly disciplined and effective. Democrats on the Hill know they have little to fear from left-wing critics, and consequently it’s hard to get folks in line.
33 Responses to “Conservatives Mobilizing the Purge “Cap and Traitors””
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June 29th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Matt, a word to the wise. You’re the last person who should be giving spelling advice.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Matt, a word to the wise. You’re the last person who should be giving spelling advice.
This is true, but on the other hand I think he’s right in this case.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
“Meanwhile, though the cause here could not be less just, it is worth emphasizing that it’s a willing to issue these kind of threats—and be somewhat serious about them—that keeps the Republican caucus fairly disciplined and effective.”
At the same time, it’s what’s made the Republican Caucus a minority. You know what happens if you replace Mark Kirk with a Republican candidate that’s more conservative, even if only on the environment? A Democrat takes that seat.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
What colby said.
I honestly sometimes think the GOP is going to find a way to lose seats in the House in 2010.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
it’s a willing to issue these kind of threats—and be somewhat serious about them—that keeps the Republican caucus fairly disciplined and effective.
And small!
June 29th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
I honestly sometimes think the GOP is going to find a way to lose seats in the House in 2010.
Exactly.
The people that need to be purged from the GOP are the people behind the capandtr8tors.com website.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
By the way, maybe they are fans of casual Italian-style eating establishments and simply forgot the “ia”.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
This is related to your bi-partisan post below. The Reps are definign themselves as such a narrowly right wing party that basically the Democratic party is a bi-partisan party now.
Bill Maher described it pretty well on his show a couple weeks ago. The Democrats cover the spectrum from far left to center right.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
What are the “Tr8tors” supposed to do within five days? Is this like The Ring? Shouldn’t they wait for the vote on the bill that comes out of conference, if there is one?
June 29th, 2009 at 5:09 pm
it is, of course, easier to enforce this kind of thing if the party in question is fairly ideologically united (i was going to say “coherent,” but really, enough’s enough).
June 29th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
That “clever” use of the numeral 8 is guaranteed to win over L33T Gen-Y internet types to the GOP.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Thanks, MattY! I visited that page and, because it looked a little strange, I looked in the source.
At the bottom, it’s pulling in a Javascript from ckt1.cn. I’m going to guess that’s not intentional and they were hacked. I’m also going to guess it’s not a good sign, especially for those using IE.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
The people that need to be purged from the GOP are the people behind the capandtr8tors.com website.
Al, are you implicitly arguing that if everyone believed as you do that the GOP would become even smaller? And that your mindless adherence to GOP-talking-points is only a shtick meant to move the overton window while the GOP tries to expand its tent to include people who would be horrified if they realized that the GOP believes the same things you do?
June 29th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Maybe http://www.capandtr8ors.com was already taken.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
I agree with colby et al that the grassroots strangulation of wandering Republicans keeps them smaller than they would otherwise be. However, the Democrats are so loose with discipline that even with the WH, the House of Representatives, and a nearly fillibuster-proof Senate, they still have to work hard at getting heavily watered-down legislation passed.
As someone that’s much more of a progressive than a Democrat, I wish the majorities in Congress and the White House would be a lot more concerned with getting a progressive agenda through than with protecting the Democratic Party’s brand, particularly when the other party’s brand is utterly tarnished. Getting national healthcare, an effective cap-and-trade bill and a more progressive tax bill passed would be worth having the brand sullied a bit. In fact, it would be worth temporary electoral defeat. What progressives need is politicians and activists that realize this.
Republicans screwed up by not understanding which way the wind was blowing, and continue to not understand today. Democrats screw up by not having the courage to rally together to achieve what is clearly possible, in the mistaken belief that any hard-nosed behavior will be punished by the electorate. Clinton’s impeachment really hurt the Republicans, didn’t it?
June 29th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Tyro,
Maybe I am stepping into something bigger than this thread, and if so, I apologize. But my reading of Al is exactly the opposite of what you imply.
The people running this website and the tea parties are so determined that every Republican official be ideologically pure that the party is fielding candidates too conservative to win in moderate areas. It is working great in Alabama and Utah, but sucks for them pretty much everywhere else. And so they are losing seats all over the country because they will stand no deviation from the official line, especially when the official line only appeals to 30% of the voters.
If moderate Republicans didn’t have to worry about challenges on the right in the primaries, they could agree with moderate portions of the administration agenda, and stand a better chance of keeping their jobs. I would like every Senator to vote more like Schumer, for example. But Schumer couldn’t win in Indiana, and so we have to deal with some of Bayh’s heterodoxies, but that is better than the alternative of another straight Republican. Most of the time.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
In fact, it would be worth temporary electoral defeat. What progressives need is politicians and activists that realize this.
Good luck with that.
As I have noted before, I think what progressives really need is to wipe out even more Republican Senators. It may sound greedy, but the more Democrats in the Senate, the more progressive the 60th vote.
June 29th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
The double “Until” is nice, too.
June 29th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Tyro – what Curtis said.
The people behind the capandtr8tors.com are more interested in ideological purity than building a winning coalition. To me, that’s the best way to ensure that the mainstream of the party doesn’t get what it wants. Notably, I don’t see the left threatening the 44 Democratic Members of Congress who voted against Waxman-Markey (I am wrong about that?). Largely that’s because the mainstream of the Democratic Party is simply smarter than the GOP these days – they realize, in a way that the GOP doesn’t, that forcing Democrats in marginal districts to vote for liberal legislation all the time is the best way to have those Democrats lose their seats and be replaced by Republicans.
For example, the morons in Pennsylvania who primaried Arlen Specter are learning that the alternative to Republican Arlen Specter that agrees with them 60% of the time is either Democrat Arlen Specter who agrees with them 20% of the time or Democrat Joe Sestak who agrees with them 0% of the time. So, congrats to the Pat Toomey clan, you’ve successfully switched at least 40% of your Senator’s votes to the Democratic side. Great job.
June 29th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Well, politicians willing to martyr their careers for a sufficiently important cause used to exist. I think most Democrats realized they were playing with electoral fire when they passed Civil Rights legislation in the 1960’s.
The issue with trying to expand the number of Democrats in the Senate is that it is running out of seats that are winnable by someone that meaningfully shifts the 60th vote to the left. Challenging Sunuunu in NH would be a good candidate. I also thought that going after Specter’s seat would have made much more sense than rolling out the red carpet for him.
If we’re really serious about doing what you suggest, we also have to pile on heavily to win the seats in Maine.
June 29th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
My point was that the funny thing was that if all Republicans believed as Al believes, politically speaking, the Republicans would be a permanent minority party. He kind of knows that his political beliefs are the fringe. He just gets upset when the fringe actually turns their guns on Republicans instead of just Democrats.
June 29th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Grammatically speaking, it seems to me that it should be “tr8ors” rather than “tr8tors” but perhaps that’s overly literal.
I would think this staement was pretty funny, except that Matt, the master of grammar and spelling, probably thinks that is being serious. Despite over a decade on the internet, and five years obsessively playing original EverQuest where most players were young enough to be my granchildren, I have never typed a word in which numbers substituted for letters, or used similar atrocities such as “u” for you. I’m fine with acronyms (e.g., BTW, IMO, AFK), but have to draw the line somewhere.
June 29th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Al, I apologize for saying you don’t have a brain. While clearly partisan, you’ve made intelligent points in this thread and my respect for you has gone slightly up.
June 29th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
It’s even worse than that. I’d guess for a portion of that group ideological purity just means voting against anything Obama comes up with.
June 29th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Marlowe: Even the pre-internet generations had their novelty license plates and whatnot. The art of replacing syllables with numbers that sound the same is older than and separate from the Internet’s usage of that.
June 29th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
Al, I apologize for saying you don’t have a brain. While clearly partisan, you’ve made intelligent points in this thread and my respect for you has gone slightly up.
This is what drives me crazy about Al. He produces well-reasoned arguments on the basketball threads as well, but then he’s right back to spitting talking points and disingenuous cherry-picking on the reast. He’s obviously intelligent. If he just advanced his actual opinions and respectfully explained his reasoning, he could contribute to the discourse and probably make us a lot smarter. Hell, he might even win a few people over to his side now and then. But instead he spends 90% of his time trolling. I don’t get it. I really don’t.
June 29th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Al, I apologize for saying you don’t have a brain. While clearly partisan, you’ve made intelligent points in this thread and my respect for you has gone slightly up.
But this just confirms that Al is just a “persona” he plays as the fanatical right wing talking points dogmatist. He doesn’t actually think his beliefs represent a viable governing strategy. But he gets pissed off when the plebes take the talking points seriously.
June 29th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
[...] has company. How do we apply this law when both sides of the debate accuse the other side of treason? They [...]
June 30th, 2009 at 7:12 am
Anonymous wrote:
I’ll second that. From my childhood in the 50’s, I remember a poem that ended:
… don’t be disconsol8.
But bear your ills with 42d, and they won’t seem so gr8.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:50 am
Well, politicians willing to martyr their careers for a sufficiently important cause used to exist. I think most Democrats realized they were playing with electoral fire when they passed Civil Rights legislation in the 1960’s.
The thing is, the overwhelming majority of Southern Democrats in Congress voted against Civil Rights legislation, and it took the votes of non-Southern Republicans to get that legislation passed. So unfortunately, that was actually not a case of large number of members of Congress voting against their personal electoral interests. At most, it was a case of some members of Congress voting against the personal electoral interests of some other members of their own party.
The issue with trying to expand the number of Democrats in the Senate is that it is running out of seats that are winnable by someone that meaningfully shifts the 60th vote to the left.
Replacing any Republican Senator with a Democratic Senator in any state that is less Republican than Nebraska will have this effect. So, at a minimum that would include Bond (MO), Burr (NC), Collins and Snowe (ME), Ensign (NV), Grassley (IA), Gregg (NH), Martinez (FL), and Voinovich (OH). I also think you could make a case for Lugar (IN), Kyl and McCain (AZ), Thune (SD), DeMint and Graham (SC), and Chambliss and Isakson (GA).
Of course the more of these people you replaced, the harder it would be to substantially improve the 60th vote by replacing another. Still, there is enough vote-to-vote variation that you would probably still be getting significant gains by replacing up to around ten or so of these people (the precise number depending on exactly who you replaced and who would be next in line).
I also thought that going after Specter’s seat would have made much more sense than rolling out the red carpet for him.
That all depends on how Specter behaves now that he is a Democrat. If in the end he ends up voting pretty much like you would expect a Democrat from Pennsylvania to vote, then it will have been very smart to switch him instead of challenge him.
June 30th, 2009 at 9:22 am
The tr8or vs. tr8tor vs. traitor debate is not one of grammar but rather orthography (a.k.a. spelling) a rather late arrival on the scene especially here at Matt’s place.
After approximately 2 centuries of the enforcement of increasing spelling orthodoxy, the military-led enthusiasm for acronyms along with new media’s premium on abbreviated spellings a la “tr8or” suggest that the age of orthography may be coming to an end. Indeed, authors and typesetters may soon have restored to them the liberty of spelling as they see fit. Dare we call it the age of Yglesias?
June 30th, 2009 at 11:11 am
As Diane Feinstein said recently, criticism from anyone to the Left of Olympia Snowe has absolutely no effect on her.
July 1st, 2009 at 5:00 pm
[...] clean energy legislation, in effigy. Organizers of the anti-Obama tea party protests are also coordinating a harassment strategy — in similar fashion to their treatment of Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) [...]