Run

Run! Run away!

Run away from George W. Bush!

He's radioactive!!!

Click here to see a very happy man, incumbent Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI), who beat back an a hard rightwing challenge, funded by the arch-conservative "Club for Growth", to win his Party's renomination. He had massive help from the Republican National Committee, which is terrified of losing the Senate.

Chafee has been what passes for inside-GOP opposition to their El Presidente, but his presence in the Senate as a 98% assured rubberstamp Republican vote is no blessing. However, he did make one principled (or maybe clever?) move last week, stalling or possibly killing the U.N. Ambassadorship nomination of noted Captain Kangaroo impersonator John Bolton.

The persistently intelligent military centrist Steve Clemons writes at his The Washington Note:

Chafee showed backbone on the issue of whether John Bolton reflected a brand of foreign policy that Chafee could accept -- both at the end of July and again last Thursday.

Having lived in Rhode Island and appreciated his father's service, I cut Chafee slack and think he's actually a reasonably principled guy. But he's voted with the President way too much of the time, and I'll be all too sorry if the Dems do not take the Senate or House from the GOP. Two more years of single party rule?

While there's always the chance Bush/Rove will eventually weasel Bolton through, the big news is that running against El Presidente worked. The GOP would like you to believe that some of their individual members are actually now dissenters. After six years of voting with Bush, four years of denying the real problem with Iraq -- that we should have never invaded in the first place, after Medicare Part D and Terry Schiavo, how much comfort will those alleged "dissenters" be when Social Security Privatization is on the floor?

So run, little Republican incumbents, run like so many quivering white mice with beady red eyes, like so many lemmings into the sea, run, run away!

You'll never be missed.