John McCain: In Order to Survive, Republicans Must Become Civilized, and Endeavor to Persevere

He's a Democrat. I don't mind that he's a Democrat, but he's going around the country claiming to be part of the opposition party.

This is, essentially, the Democratic response: ObamaCare was duly passed, it was an issue in a presidential campaign that the GOP lost, end of story — whether or not there are 51 or even 60 votes in the Senate to defund this thing. He actually used the phrase “elections have consequences,” which must be the first time a member of the *minority* party has ever tossed that into a debate. Like Ramesh Ponnuru says, weren’t Ted Cruz and Mike Lee elected too?

UPDATE: (Jack M.)

Here's a blast from the past. 2002 to be exact. McCain's been a Democrat for at least 11 years, or so his one-time "chief strategist" seems to imply in this 2002 interview. In 2013, Weaver, apparently, is a Republican consultant again.

John Weaver hunches his angular frame over a Styrofoam cup of coffee in the basement cafeteria of the United States Senate and tries to explain what might seem--to an outsider--his peculiar political loyalties. Once a loyal Republican strategist who directed the presidential aspirations of uber-conservative Phil Gramm and helped plot John McCain's maverick primary run in 2000, he has since re-registered as a Democrat and severed consulting ties to all Republicans except McCain, for whom he still serves as chief strategist. "I only work for Democrats now," he tells me. Noticing that he has overlooked the party affiliation of his most prominent advisee, I helpfully add: "And John McCain." Weaver shrugs his shoulders and grins, "Oh, right."

Update 2: Moar Context!1!

Here's some more relatively contemporaneous context. Granted it's from the New York Times in 2008, so grain of salt...but the players remain the same.

Mr. McCain had begun to ally himself with the Democrats on a number of issues, and had told Mr. Daschle that he planned to vote against the Bush tax cuts, a centerpiece of the new president’s domestic agenda. Mr. McCain often made “disparaging comments” about Mr. Bush on the floor of the Senate, Mr. Daschle recalled.

Still, Democrats were stunned one Saturday in late March when, by their account, John Weaver, Mr. McCain’s longtime political strategist, reached out to Thomas J. Downey, a former Democratic congressman from Long Island who had become a lobbyist with powerful connections on Capitol Hill. In Mr. Downey’s telling, Mr. Weaver posed a question to him over lunch that left him stunned.

“He says, ‘John McCain is wondering why nobody’s ever approached him about switching parties, or becoming an independent and allying himself with the Democrats,’ ” Mr. Downey said in a recent interview. “My reaction was, ‘When I leave this lunch, your boss will be called by anybody you want him to be called by in the United States Senate.’ ”

Mr. Weaver recalls the conversation differently. He said that Mr. Downey had told him that Democrats, eager to find a Republican who would switch sides and give them control of the evenly divided Senate, had approached some Republican senators about making the jump. “I stated they couldn’t be so desperate as they hadn’t reached out to McCain,” Mr. Weaver said in an e-mail message last week.

Whatever transpired, Mr. Downey raced home and immediately called Mr. Daschle. It was the first step in what became weeks of conversations that April between Mr. McCain and the leading Democrats, among them Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and John Edwards, then a senator from North Carolina, about the possibility of Mr. McCain’s leaving his party. One factor driving Mr. McCain, Mr. Downey said, was his bad relations with the Republican caucus.

So, yeah. As they use to say in the old NFL commercials: "You make the call!"

(End Updates)

Apparently they're working on a one-week CR that will let them have some time to argue about ObamaCare and such.

And Open Thread.

Oh, if this is an open thread, I should mention this: Sex Jihad.

It's bad. It's how women serve the Jihad -- by servicing the Jihadis, 20, 30, or more of them per tour.

At 2:42:

posted by Ace at 07:54 PM

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