TheAgitator.com
Fitzgerald for Senate?
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008My Fox column this week suggests the best replacement for Obama in the U.S. Senate might be the man Obama replaced–former GOP Sen. Peter Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald, you may recall, was ousted from the Senate by his own party for, among other things, his principled stands against corruption, pork barrel spending, and bailing out failed corporations. Seems like exactly the kind of person the Senate, the state of Illinois, and for that matter, the GOP need right now.
A few people have noted since the column went up that Fitzgerald currently resides in Virginia. I’ll confess that I haven’t looked at Illinois law, but given that Alan Keyes was able to swoop in and claim residency in the state a month before his run against Barck Obama, it shouldn’t be too difficult for Fitzgerald to get residency to fill the slot if he were nominated.
It isn’t going to happen, so the point’s moot. The real point of the article is that the people who ought to be governing tend to be too principled to survive party politics.
Surely the residency issue can be overcome — Fitzgerald just needs to change his name to “Peter Fitzgerald Kennedy,” and nobody will ever question his qualifications or right to hold a Senate seat from *any* state.
leave the seat empty. let’s start making govt smaller NOW.
“… the people who ought to be governing tend to be too principled to survive party politics.”
Truer words have never been written, but I can still improve on them.
IF
1. The people who ought to be governing tend to be [read: are] too principled to survive party politics.
AND
2. The people who wind up governing are corrupt enough to survive party politics.
THEN
3. No one should be governing [read: free-market anarchy].
Q.E.D.
I’m not so sure about free-market anarchy. I kind of believe that it ends up with human flesh being bought and sold in the markets.
We need SOME rules, just not so damn many.
3 Words: Senator Coach Ditka!!
Anyone think that Fitzgerald could have beaten Obama in ’04?
I’ll second the “free market anarchy” option.
Fitzgerald might have. Now, I might have a bigger mancrush on Fitzgerald than Radley does, but Fitzgerald’s issue was in the primary where the Hastertnistas were recruiting people for a challenge of Fitzgerald. As it turns out, the two people closest to Fitzgerald in politics and principle (Steve Rauschenberger and Jack Ryan) wound up with more than 50 percent of the vote combined, with Ryan getting 35% of the vote and Rauschy 20%. What Fitzgerald saw was a self-funded Jim Oberweis running with Hastert’s muscle behind him. Oberweis is a perennial candidate (read: losing candidate) who most recently ran for Hastert’s seat twice in 2008, losing the special election in the spring and the general election in the Fall. In 2003, Oberweis had one Senate campaign under his belt and seemed to have the organization behind him. What hurt him was that now-IL GOP chairman Andy McKenna also ran in the open primary.
Fitzgerald would have won the primary, but he would have had to spend and campaign. If he didn’t have a challenge by the GOP, he would have had a challenge from the Democrats, but I’m not sure it would have been Obama.
Survival of the fittest. Apparently being moderately corrupt is the key to survival in American politics.
http://rightklik.blogspot.com/
“We need SOME rules, just not so damn many.”
There would be rules, only the rules would be arrived at through voluntary cooperation instead of force.
What I would like to know is, given the present statist paradigm, how exactly does one limit the number of rules? And who gets to decide?
Until I get a satisfactory logical answer to this, I insist that free-market anarchy is the only alternative.
This all comes back to the people-the electors. Many are too lazy to really find out what is going on so they can make an informed decision, they vote for the party. It’s easier that way. The result is, that if one is not a member of the party, one is unelectable, therefore irrelevent. People interested in politics are forced to fit into the party mold. Political parties appeal to the spineless wimps with no principles, and therefore that is who we get to choose among. Independent thinkers are actively discouraged in party politics, and the loyalty of the politicians is first and foremost to the party, not the constituents. What a sham. There is an old saying that people get the type of government they deserve. True that.
Don’t forget that one of the things Sen. Fitzgerald did to annoy the GOP was to submit an actual career prosecutor with no ties to any IL political machine for appointment as US Attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald.
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/12/the_fitzgerald_factor.php
I find this irony so irratating. The Republicans ran this guy out of their party…and he was replaced by the guy who would eventually destroy their party’s candidate in the next presidential election. And no one in the GOP will learn from this.