Salon’s Jim Newell this morning noted the weird avalanche of headlines on the Drudge Report:
And gave us a roll-call of the writers, bloggers, and talk radio hosts who helped gin up the insurrection:
There’s Drudge, of course. And Ann Coulter. And radio/TV personality Laura Ingraham, who recently suggested that the United States should have traded Eric Cantor to the Taliban for Bowe Bergdahl. And the writings and tweets of Mickey Kaus, now of the Daily Caller, have been indistinguishable from those of a Brat staffer in recent months.
Here’s Mickey’s latest post:
Bottom-Up Bipartisanship? Yesterday Dave Brat, the conservative economics professor who is challenging Majority Leader Eric Cantor in today’s primary, sent out what I assume will be his final pitch to voters …
Notes: 1) This is a pitch — against a “low wage agenda” and “crony corporate lobby” — that can appeal to Democrats as well as Republicans. Maybe partisanship will eventually be transcended, not at the top, with David Brooks, Gloria Borger and Jon Huntsman imposing a Beltway consensus they hammer out at an Atlantic panel, but at the bottom, where less sleek figures like Brat, Phyllis Schlafly and Jeff Sessions, can make common cause with Democratic workers who’ve gotten the short end of previous top-down triumphs such as global trade and Reagan’s 1986 amnesty, as well as of ineluctable technological trends like automation. 2) Perhaps not coincidentally, Democrats can vote in the Cantor vs. Brat primary. …
Backfill: See also this earlier Brat release, which expands the potentially bipartisan anti-corporate agenda to “other issues – like spending, debt and insider trading” …
That’s what Brat seems to represent, so far as I’ve been able to glean in the past hour or so. And here’s part of Mickey’s previous post, mocking Cantor for backing “amnesty” for immigrant “kids”:
Little did Cantor know that this exquisitely calibrated stand would prove to be about the most embarrassing position he could take — when the “kids,” often unaccompanied, started surging across the southern border, causing a humanitarian and policy crisis just as he was facing a challenge in Tuesday’s Virginia primary. Even the New York Times couldn’t help but notice that the young illegal migrants said they were motivated, not just by conditions back home in Central America, but also by the prospect that they’d qualify for Cantoresque amnesty. ”Central Americans, [said a Salvadoran immigration official] were left with the sense that the United States had ‘opened its doors’ to women and children.”
Check out how many of his posts for the past two months have been obsessively about the Cantor race.
He won big tonight. Almost as big as Brat.
The Dish 