The Kos Kiss of Death

I never heard of Ciro Rodriguez or Henry Cuellar until the words "Ciro" and "Cuellar" started popping up all over the blogosphere like the names of a couple of wireless telephone companies.  I thought - what is this Ciro of which you speak?  And why is Ciro suddenly in my face? 

Turns out there's a picture of Cuellar, who isn't a cell phone company but a Texas Democratic Congressman in a safe Democratic seat, hugging George Bush at the State of the Union speech, and that was all it took for him to earn the reprisal of the politburo that is the Kos crowd. 

So Ciro, who is also not a mobile phone company but a Democrat who ran against Cuellar in 2004 and lost, and was running against Cuellar again in yesterday's Texas primary, became the reservoir for all that "netroots support" which so spontaneously bubbled up out of the Kos politburo.  And guess what.  He lost yesterday.  Again.  Cue the election fraud theories.

Which makes Kos 0-17 when he decides to place his Midas touch on a candidate (including Paul Hackett), 0-18 if you include Howard Dean's presidential campaign, or 1-67 if you count all the states in the 2004 presidential primary (the one win being Vermont, Dean's home state), or 2-67 if you count Dean winning the DNC chair.

So the only victory which the Kos crowd actually have under their belt is the one that has saddled Democrats with a chairman perched upon a paltry warchest of $5 million cash on hand going into the 2006 midterms, which is about what Mike DeWine has on hand for his race to keep his one Senate seat in Ohio.

The reason I write this on an Ohio blog is that this is the crowd coming to our state in the fall.  I don't know the first thing about TX-28, although I was in San Antonio registering voters on the Dave Matthews Band tour in 2004, which is probably more time spent there than the Kos crowd combined.  But like TX-28, most of the people who are going to come play in our sand box have never lived here, never set foot here, never voted here, but will use Ohio as their own ideological purity playground, then leave after they get their jollies, consequences be damned. 

And in Ohio, money is changing hands, which adds just that little extra bit of absurdity to the notion that any of the Kos crowd gives a rat's ass about the people and politics of Ohio, or TX-28, or anywhere else they don't actually live and vote.  Which safe Democratic seat in Ohio will draw their ire next?  They switched allegiances on Paul Hackett when Sherrod Brown hired Kos' business partner.  Is Stephanie Tubbs Jones next, the safest Ohio seat?  She's a hugging type.  Tim Ryan, the second safest Ohio seat?  And he's pro-gun, pro-life...better be careful with those bear hugs, Tim!

Kos and his ilk endlessly rage against the "beltway mentality", the "establishment" making choices for others...they have become a caricature of all they claim to despise, a small group of part time amateur Machiavellis with big megaphones whose hubris far outweighs the reality.  They end up littering the Democratic Party with a ridiculous cycle of cliched ideological anger, then attempted reprisal, then schoolyard bullying, then bad blood, and then, as always....defeat. 

Just like TX-28.