Murkowski to Mount Write-In Candidacy?

Lisa Murkowski — it’s not a name that exactly rolls off the lips, is it? And it’s not a name that rings for a major cause or an identifiable issue or … anything. It’s a name that rings for Lisa Murkowski, and really nothing else. Well, I guess it rings for “establishment,” but that’s not something that lights anyone’s candle.

Except that now, after she has been rejected by the Republican primary voters in Alaska who wanted Joe Miller, a conservative who actually knows what the word means and embraces it, and after the Libertarian Party gave her the back of their principled hand, Lisa Murkowski is a name that may earn a bit of infamy. She may mount a spoiler write-in candidacy for Alaska’s Senate race. It’s as if, having been denied the seat to which she obviously feels entitled, Murkowski will do whatever she can to make sure that no one else can have the seat either. As Stacy McCain eloquently asks:

How long before Murky keys somebody’s car in the parking lot?

Well, I’d say a little over 50 days, more or less.

We had something similarly psychotic threaten to rip up the Republican Party here in Texas around primary time back in March, with a candidate who was so sure of her vision and genius that, having lost the gubernatorial primary, she promptly went to work threatening to sue the party over trivial nonsense (again), and is to this day still raising money for some future Quixotic run for glory. That candidate wasn’t establishment by any means, but the petulance is the same. Some folks just plug their ears when the voters speak. One such folk currently occupies the White House.

I’m not talking about him “like a dog,” by the way. Dogs actually listen, for one thing. But I digress.

Murky’s obvious sense of ownership of that Alaska seat — the same sense of entitlement we see in Charlie Crist’s antics in Florida — is the biggest threat to the Republican Party’s fortunes in November. There are bigger threats down the road, namely the changing demographics of Republican states like Texas and the left’s nationwide “Colorado Model” that steals seats with bogus or exaggerated ethics hit jobs, but the biggest threat in the here and now is the likes of Murkowski and Crist. They’re unprincipled establishmentarians. They stand for nothing. In Crist’s embrace of Obama, they’ll obviously fall for anything. In the unlikely event that they win, they’ll be little islands of useless self-centered angst. Or reeds in the political wind. They’re really of no use to anyone in the Senate but themselves, because they’ll get to wear the title “senator” and parade around as absurd “insurgent” upstarts because they dared to take on … the voters in their own parties who want a return to some semblance of government by the people, and are making sure that this is no country for old RINOs.

How courageous.