Seven Sons

Pat Toomey, a former corporate shill head of the Club for Growth (motto: “rich people really shouldn’t have to pay taxes”), is challenging Arlen Specter in the 2010 primary. This, despite a former head of the Pennsylvania chapter of CFG begging him not to do so. Why not? Well, no reason…other than:

–Pennsylvania is clearly now a blue state, and the moderate Republican (by the current to-the-left-of-Jefferson-Davis standard) presidential candidate John McCain lost to Barack Obama by 10 points last November despite McCain and moose hunter VP Candidate Sarah Palin basically living there the last month of the campaign

–right-wing butt boy Rick Santorum got absolutely hammered in 2006 and lost by 18 points despite being the incumbent, and Toomey is to the right of Santorum somehow.

–any Democrat worth his salt can beat a Republican these days in Pennsylvania or most anyplace else in the Northeast, because the holy-roller anti-government Southern redneck image of the GOP scares the !@#$ out of people everywhere else in the country. And Pennsylvanians are old, right after Florida on the old scale, and that’s saying something. So you have a state of old people too poor to move to Florida who need services.

Absolutely asinine. A good opportunity for the Dems, because Toomey may well win the primary as all the former moderate Republicans around Philadelphia have fled the party in recent years. And he will get killed in a general election, probably by 25+ points.

Added bonus: one of the sweetest images I ever saw, politically, was Rick Santorum giving his concession speech in 2006, and his strangely dressed daughter (I hate the prosti-tot look as much as anyone, but this girl looks like a 12-year-old Mormon-cult third wife) bawling next to him. And I remember thinking, hon, your father equated homosexuals with people who f*** dogs. Someday, you will look back and realize your father is a dick.

I wonder if she has yet realized that.