McCain: The "Defunders" Must Be "Held Accountable”

by JASmius

So naturally arises the question: Held accountable how, exactly?  Punished?  By what?  Being thrown out of the GOP?  Hell, most of the Tea Party is already begging Cruz and Lee and whomever else to walk out and go the third-party route, thereby not only killing the Republican Party stone cold dead, and the country right along with it (assuming it isn't already, which, of course, I do), and consigning and condemning the conservative movement and constitutionalist cause to political death and permanent irrelevancy.  Which I would think would be just hunky-dory with Darth Queeg.  So, again, what punishment is Maverick envisioning?

I wish he would tell us that, seeing as how he wasted an el primo opportunity to blast the Regime for withholding death benefits from military families by choosing instead to gratuitously exacerbate the GOP civil war.  But then it's been clear for years, long before he "did the job" for Barack Obama in 2008, that Sailor could care less if his party ever wins another election ever again.  Particularly since he's almost certainly not running for another senate term in 2016.  He hates the party almost as much as the Tea Party does, so why bother making any more phony pretenses of partisan fealty?

Allahpundit raises another outstanding question for TPers, though:

If this really was about trying to build consensus in Congress to stop O-Care, why is Mark Begich claiming that none of the defunders ever met with him to pitch him on joining them in voting no? He’s a red-state Democrat who’s up for reelection next year; it’s unlikely that he’d break ranks with his caucus, but if any Dem is going to, it’s one who’s in Begich’s position. Instead, he claims, “The only time Ted Cruz said something to me was when I was literally coming to the floor, you know the two tables down by the desk there where you cast your vote. He said, ‘You should vote for this.’ That was it.”  

Could be that Begich is lying, of course, but if he’s going to lie, there are more self-serving lies he could tell than that one. E.g., “I have grave concerns about ObamaCare, and Senators Cruz and Lee begged to meet with me about them. But once they threatened to shut down the government, I told them ‘Hell, no!’” A lie along those lines would please Alaska GOPers by signaling his alleged “concerns” about O-Care and Alaska Democrats by punching Cruz and Lee. And showing that he was opposed to the shutdown would please both. Instead, he’s making the lesser claim that no one on the defund side ever tried to meet with him. That makes me think it’s true, and if it’s true, why is it true? What did defunders have to lose by feeling him out to see what he’d need to conceivably vote with Republicans against Reid’s amendment stripping the “defund” provisions out of the House bill? Remember, Reid could have lost as many as three Democrats on that and still passed it by simple majority, so he might have let Begich cross the aisle in order to protect himself with reddish Alaska voters. Why not try?

Perhaps because the "defunders" purpose wasn't to persuade colleagues to their side, but to target members of their own party for vilification and abuse.  Given that that's actually what Cruz & Co. did, and achieved bupkis on actually defunding ObamaCare - as they had explicitly promised - it's difficult to see that they had any more honorable motivation.

Makes me wonder if either they or McCain realize that the former were playing right into the latter's hands.