The Way of the Baboon (or why Spadea pissed on Reagan)

Baboons don't hunt other species.  Instead, they employ their ferocious looking teeth to attack and injure other baboons.  Some Republicans are like this too.

Unlike so many conservative websites in the past, this website has made a point to refrain from focusing on the sins of those in the nominally right-of-center party.  We figured they have problems enough, and there is so much ready trade amongst the Democrats, so much to criticize, that... why bother the GOP?  And so we have generally given Republicans a free ride, made them exempt from the focus of our criticism -- even as some of them have adopted social policies that would have made "the gimp" from Pulp Fiction wince.

If anything, we preferred the softly, softly approach with Republicans.  We tried to talk with them, even when our meetings were cancelled and our points of view dismissed. Once we even had to suffer a chief of staff whose demeanor towards us was akin to that of Miss Beulah Ballbreaker from the movie Porky's.

But even when showered with such rude affections from the leaders of our own party, we refrained from finger-pointing. 

Others have taken a different path.  Fox News and NJ 101.5's news host Bill Spadea -- a former candidate for Congress and the Legislature who collected tens of thousands in political contributions from his fellow Republicans , and who very recently fronted for a political action committee devoted to electing local members of the GOP, blithely accused a Republican legislator of criminal misconduct the other day.  And he did so with all the gravity one uses to direct someone to a toilet. 

To be fair with Spadea, he's been dumping on Republicans for some time.  Back when he ran the national College Republicans, then RNC National Chairman (and future Governor) Haley Barbour felt obliged to unfund Spadea's organization after it attacked both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush for not being Republican enough.  It takes some kind of balls for a college kid to call out the father of the modern conservative movement for not being "pure" enough.

Some of the people Spadea had on his show are even worse.  They're members of a 16-person caucus.  Just 16.  It's like a big family.  16 is small enough that you should -- after 8 or 9 years -- get to know each other and be able to talk to each other.  But instead of talking, one of these 16 legislators put another one up to call out a third.  So this involved about a fifth of the caucus.  And what did the one put up to call the other one out accuse him of -- gross criminal misconduct and political corruption.  And the joke of it is, the one called out is probably the biggest boy scout in Trenton.

So this was just egregious, nasty, damaging behavior for its own sake:  Hurt and injure your own rather than going after the other side.  It's the way of the baboon.