WaPo's Jennifer Rubin: 'Good Riddance' to DeMint

Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post is supposed to be that outlet’s in-house conservative. But like David Brooks of the New York Times, she’s actually a liberal Republican posing as a conservative. After spending the better part of two years backing every move Mitt Romney made, assuring conservatives that he was the only candidate who could beat Barack Obama, she’s doubling down on her anti-conservative messaging rather than learning her lesson.

Today, she wrote at the Post excoriating the Heritage Foundation for handing over leadership to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). She wrote:

Let me first explain why this is very bad indeed for Heritage. Even DeMint would not claim to be a serious scholar. He is a pol. He’s a pol whose entire style of conservatism –  all or nothing, no compromise, no accounting for changes in public habits and opinions — is not true to the tradition of Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk and others. By embracing him, Heritage, to a greater extent than ever before, becomes a political instrument in service of extremism, not a well-respected think tank and source of scholarship. Every individual who works there should take pause and consider whether the reputation of that institution is elevated or diminished by this move. And I would say the same, frankly, if any other non-scholarly pol took that spot.

This is false. If Mitt Romney took over the Heritage Foundation, Rubin would cheer wildly before fainting in a fit of ecstasy. But Heritage is true to its conservative roots, and so embraces DeMint rather than say, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). But Rubin wasn’t done – she went on to bash Heritage itself:

In truth, Heritage’s Action Network has become among the most screechy in the all-or-nothing brand of politics, challenging all but extreme right-wingers and calling virtually all possible compromises a “cave.” While the Foundation is separate from the political arm, the appearance to the public is one of untempered extremism.

Untempered extremism? When calling for fiscal responsibility becomes extremism, all conservatives are extremists. In fact, Heritage is well within the mainstream of the conservative movement – at times, they’re even to the left of it, as they were with individual mandates.

But Rubin returned to DeMint to score her final points:

Now for the U.S. Senate, I am sure many senators on both sides are clicking their heels. DeMint has been a destructive force, threatening to primary colleagues, resisting all deals and offering very little in the way of attainable legislation. He has contributed more than any current senator to the dysfunction of that body. He has worsened relations between the House and Senate, as he did in the budget fights in recent years, by meddling and pressuring his home state representative. His departure leaves other senators who seemed impressed with his brand of politics free to find their way to a more constructive position in the body.

What Rubin fails to understand is that in the battle between the Tea Party and the establishment she champions, the Tea Party is winning, not losing. Like an MSNBC commentator, Rubin is a useful idiot for the left. Her latest expression of that idiocy is her opposition to both DeMint and to the Heritage Foundation.