After the Republican establishment gloated on Tuesday for surviving primary challenges against underfunded Tea Party challengers, conservative talk radio host Mark Levin ripped into the Republican leadership for preferring candidates they can coerce to support policies their conservative constituents oppose.
Levin said the question of whether the Tea Party is dead is a stupid one, and he asked why establishment Republicans were spending “millions of dollars laundered through Karl Rove’s group and Mitch McConnell’s National Republican Senatorial Committee” to fight and trash conservatives:
These “Republican leaders” only want to be in the majority if they can control the people we send to Congress. Mitch McConnell does not want any more Ted Cruzes or Mike Lees, or anybody else who’s going to give him trouble. He wants Republicans who are going to lie down and do what he tells them to do.
John Boehner and Eric Cantor? Exactly the same thing. These people are not about empowering the American people; they’re about empowering themselves. They see a majority in the House and a majority in the Senate, not as an opportunity to serve the people, but to serve themselves.
Levin also noted that establishment candidates often do not want their constituents to know of their more-liberal policy preferences; thus, they do not run television commercials informing their constituents of their enthusiastic support for amnesty legislation.
“Have you seen their ads for amnesty?” Levin asked.
He said the same goes for their desire to spend more taxpayer dollars to fund projects for their cronies.
“Have you seen any ads for more borrowing?” he asked.
Levin said when it’s time to govern, Republican establishment politicians “jettison” their positions and promises made on the campaign trail.
He also blasted those in the chattering class who were once liberals, hated and did not support Ronald Reagan, and who mock constitutional conservatives, just like the liberal hippies and poets they are, choosing to work with Republican establishment operatives to trash conservatives.
Levin reminded his audience that in 2006, “George W. Bush and his right-hand political hack Karl Rove lost the House of Representatives and the United States Senate.”
He said nothing good was happening within the Republican party until 2010 when the people “rose up through the grassroots” after they had enough of George W. Bush’s policies and the direction Obama was taking the nation after the election.
Levin, whose book Liberty and Tyranny sold a million copies without being reviewed by mainstream outlets and who was a precursor of the Tea Party movement, said the Tea Party tidal wave in 2010 was not fueled by lobbyists or establishment consultants. Instead, he called it a “spontaneous movement of patriotic Americans with conservative beliefs“–individuals who were fed up with the overreach of Democrats who controlled Congress.
“Did the Republican Party stop them? No. You stopped them,” Levin thunderously declared. “And the result is the Republican Party benefited because it is the ‘opposition’ party.”
Levin noted that while candidates backed by Tea Party members like Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio won in 2010, candidates heavily supported by Karl Rove and Mitch McConnell in Florida, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Montana, New Mexico, and Wisconsin all got clobbered in 2012. He also said that the Republican establishment holds the blame for the GOP’s minority status in the Senate, but that its leadership wants to twist history to absolve themselves of that blame.
“All backed by Rove. All backed by McConnell. And all losers,” Levin said of the GOP candidates who lost in 2012, including Mitt Romney. “We must not allow the Republican establishment and their friendly media to work with the liberal media to spin.”
He questioned how Rove could be an analyst when he runs a group that has a direct interest in the outcome of primaries, adding that Rove is “no great architect.”
“But for the Tea Party, you’d be nothing, as you were before,” Levin told the Republican establishment. “But for the Tea Party, Pelosi would be Speaker.”