Senate "Conservative" Fund Perfidizes Steven Lonegan

by JASmius

Yes, "perfidizes" is a word.  I just coined it.  It is the verb version of "perfidy," which means, "deliberate breach of faith or trust; faithlessness; treachery."

Sure looks like this applies to the Senate Conservative Fund's calculated abandonment of New Jersey Republican Senate candidate - and "True Conservative" - Steven Lonegan:

In less than 10 days, voters in New Jersey will go to the polls in a special election to pick their next U.S. senator and the expected anointment of Newark Mayor Cory Booker by the Democrats isn't going as planned. A key question, though, is why is it that an  organization "dedicated to electing strong conservative leaders to the United States Senate" appears to be entirely missing in action?...

It should not be overlooked that despite New Jersey's Democratic-tilt, Lonegan has been gaining in the polls by campaigning tirelessly as a principled conservative. A former state director for the conservative Americans for Prosperity, Lonegan supports defunding and repealing Obamacare, freezing spending, protecting the Second Amendment and defending the sanctity of life.  He is, in virtually every regard, exactly the type of candidate that the Senate Conservatives Fund – a SuperPAC founded by former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and now run by his former staff – pledged to support and help elect....

Well, that's easy - Lonegan hasn't a prayer against Booker, whose polling lead was over twenty points in the summer and is still in the teens now.  Why throw good money after bad, right?

Except.....

SCF's absence in New Jersey is even more striking when you consider that they've engaged in past races where the odds against victory were far greater. In 2010, for example, SCF embarked on a fundraising campaign in support of Delaware's Christine O'Donnell with the goal of "doubling the amount of coordinated funds the national party had decided not to invest in this critical race."

And in 2012, SCF's Hoskins issued a fundraising appeal for Missouri's Todd Akin that similarly attacked the "Republican establishment" for not helping Akin. Ironically, just weeks earlier Hoskins had told Politico:

Akin isn't weak because he's too conservative. He's weak because he's too liberal on spending and earmarks.

O'Donnell, if you'll recall, was the flake and fraud who smeared longtime GOP congressman Mike Castle as a closet homosexual, with evident Tea Party approval, to snatch away the Republican senatorial nomination for Joe Biden's old seat, thus converting a race against the Democrat and Lenin lookalike Chris Coons from a gimme pickup into a blowout defeat.  And there's Akin, the moron whom the Tea Party propelled to victory in a crowded Republican senate primary crammed to bursting with bona fide conservative candidates capable of taking out Claire McCaskill, only to forfeit that virtually unloseable race with his dumbass "legitimate rape" remark.  And apparently even Akin wasn't "pure" enough for the SCF.

Until....

Apparently conservative principles can fall by the wayside when there's a fundraising opportunity.

Unfortunately for Lonegan, however, it appears that unless he can manufacture an opportunity for SCF to invoke its phony "us versus the establishment" straw-man fundraising gambit, SCF will not even acknowledge him.

"Us versus the 'Establishment'"?  Seems to me I've heard that term in the not too distant past.

That's not to suggest, of course, that SCF has been sitting on its hands in recent months.  As I wrote last month, SCF has been targeting conservative Republicans in attack ads and national fundraising appeals over the fantastical fight to "Defund Obamacare."...

In Kentucky, SCF has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars attacking Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell – who had a 100% American Conservative Union vote rating last year. In fact, in a recent fundraising appeal touting McConnell's primary opponent, SCF called it a "David versus Goliath" race – ironically the same term many ascribed to the New Jersey Senate race just a few weeks ago.

In Arizona, where just last year DeMint said, "[N]obody has done more to advance the cause of freedom than Jeff Flake," SCF rans ads attacking this longtime conservative Republican but ignoring his Democratic neighbors Mark Udall in Colorado and Tom Udall in New Mexico – both of whom are up for re-election next year and both of whom were deciding votes on Obamacare.

And in North Carolina, SCF ran an attack ad against Republican Senator Richard Burr, who actually had a stronger conservative voting record two years ago than DeMint himself, and not against his liberal Democrat counterpart Kay Hagan, who, unlike Burr, is also up for re-election next year.

One could almost ask on whose side the SCF is - particularly if they genuinely want to take the country back from the Obamunist occupiers that have hijacked, debased, deconstructed, and oppressed it, as they endlessly, piously, and self-righteously claim.  It's a clear contradiction; a case of demanding the ends while denying the means.  Abraham Lincoln once said, "a house divided against itself cannot stand."  Or, as I've been repeatedly arguing, we're stronger together than apart, and at this unprecedentedly perilous place in American history, the forces of right need all the strength they can get.  What does it profit the SCF - and the Tea Party within which it resides - to stake claim to the cause of patriotic, constitutional conservatism while manufacturing enemies of it with a zealot's fervor?  Is it rightwing penis envy, or is there some other carnal factor at work?

Funny you should ask:

The donations, sent by average Americans, sometimes go for the Washington trappings these groups decry. SCF, a small operation, in recent months has spent $26,000 on an interior decorator. It has spent another $38,000 on rent....

[W]hat everyone has heretofore been too polite to say is that this defund exercise is (in part) the oldest of Washington stories–fundraising, and power.

Now is the Senate "Conservative" Fund the entire Tea Party movement?  Not at all, any more than Ted Cruz and his pie in the sky manipulations are.  The bulk of the TP grassroots are as ramrod upright and sincere - excruciatingly so - as humanly possible.  But what this story illustrates is that that enthusiastic idealism dare not leave the cynicism that remembers base human nature in its other suit before it goes out to do battle.  It is the lifeblood of idealism's co-pilot - vigilance - and the key to never forgetting who the true enemies of the Founding Fathers really are.