There Is No Middle Ground

Eric Cantor....Let me tell you something my mother used to tell me....After every disappointment, after every failure, after every set back...My mother used to ask me...''Now what did you learn?" There was always a lesson to be learned from something wrong I did...She seemed to think so...She had this saying that if one of my mistakes wound up costing me money...That was a "bought lesson" and bought lessons were the best kind because if it cost you money....You weren't likely to do that again....

If there is a lesson for you here....It's the same lesson President Obama has learned...There is no middle ground...You can't sit on the fence.....You either have to be for something or against something...You can't always take short cuts....My mother often told me that too!

See,it wasn't enough for Republican primary voters in Virginia’s 7th District that their congressman, That's you, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, helped the GOP regroup after President Barack Obama took office; that you often played bad cop to House Speaker John Boehner’s good cop during the 2011 debt-ceiling standoff; or that over your career, you voted with your party close to 96 percent of the time.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

People have short memories and attention spans Eric...

What mattered,  was that you were starting to appear—at least to the nuts in the Tea Party hard core—ever so slightly more conciliatory after President Obama’s 2012 re-election, You “failed to realize that the nut cases in the Tea Party were still demanding total opposition, whether it worked or not, however it polled.”

And the takeaway for You Eric, after losing on Tuesday to Randolph-Macon College economics professor Dave Brat, (WHO???) is that the GOP’s Obama treatment—rebuffing any attempts at compromise—can be turned on anyone. Including the GOP’s No. 2 man in the House....Uh That would be You Eric!

Yeah, there were lots of reasons for your loss: Brat’s campaign charge that you were pushing “amnesty” for illegal immigrants; a failure to spot the populist wave coming at him; spending too much time on leadership duties, as opposed to your home district; and reports that hardly anyone—on either side of the aisle—liked you personally. Yeah, for real...

Right now, there’s no zero lower bound in movement conservatism, so no matter how far right a Republican goes, there’s always someone out there willing to holler “RINO” and take it one step further to the right—even if they’re running against someone like you, who is no one’s definition of liberal.

It’s about rejecting compromise or even the appearance of compromise. Look at President Obama.

When he was trying to get bipartisan support on health care reform in 2009, he threw over the public option for the individual mandate—a Republican plan—and still got no GOP votes for Obamacare.

After getting shellacked in the 2010 midterms, he agreed to extend the Bush-era cuts on top marginal income tax rates in exchange for repeal of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and extended unemployment benefits.

 In 2011 he acquiesced to sequestration to avoid going over the fiscal cliff. President Obama gradually disenchanted many of his fellow Democrats, and for his trouble, Republicans labeled him a socialist.

Aint that a bitch?? You can't win sitting on the fence...There are no short cuts...There is no Middle Ground...You either be about something or be against it...My mother also told me...''Everybody is not going to like you and if they do...Then you're doing something wrong.."

Wisdom well shared!