Establishment Shaken as Eric Cantor Gets His Ass Handed to Him in Primary

Much as most of those who pay attention to domestic politics I was shocked to see House Majority Leader Eric Ivan Cantor go down in flames last night in his Virginia primary. Being that he is such a slimy son of a bitch I pretty much thought that he was immune. Unfortunately for Cantor so did he because according to accounts he didn’t bother with much campaigning, instead unleashing an onslaught of negative advertising against unheralded challenger David Brat. While the national circus that is the political paparazzi, the protectorate that surrounds the corrupt DC elite like an impenetrable force field and the Republican party sift through the rubble it is somewhat dishonest to refer to Brat, an economics professor as simply a so-called “Tea Party” challenger rather than a man who doesn’t fit into such lazily defined media categorizations and had a message that resonated beyond the GOP party base.

Despite the ongoing bogus political narrative in this once great country that only serves that very small percentage who  are able to buy clout that are classically described by the late, great Hunter S. Thompson as only standing for "the systematic destruction of everything this country claims to stand for, except the rights for the rich to put saddles on the backs of the poor and use public funds to build jails for anybody who complained about it". Cantor was one of them and watching him slowly circle the drain after voters in Virginia's Seventh Congressional District actually pulled the chain has to have them if not seeing the writing on the wall, at least understanding that the rotten system that they suckle off of will require more work from them going forward to keep their tickets punched on the gravy train.

While the emergent meme as of this evening is that it was Cantor's lack of racist fervor in keeping illegal aliens out of the country that led to his demise. This is pretty much total horseshit because the "undocumented immigrants" to use the politically correct term are a precious source of cheap labor for greedy corporate bosses who keep wages down. I excerpt the following from the Washington Post story  “Why Cantor’s loss is especially bad news for big business”:

The country's most powerful business lobbying groups already knew they had a problem with the GOP when Tea Party lawmakers nearly forced the country into a massive default of its debt last year.

But with Eric Cantor's shocking defeat Tuesday night, things for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable just got a whole lot worse.

For one, they lost a major defender of their favored policies--from the beneficial tax treatment of private equity income to immigration reforms favored by the country's biggest tech companies. But even worse for their prospects, Cantor lost to a challenger who specifically attacked him for his close ties to business -- going so far as to single out the BRT and the Chamber.

"The central theme of Brat’s campaign is that Cantor is beholden to business — specifically the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable," wrote Politico in April.

“If you’re in big business, Eric’s been very good to you, and he gets a lot of donations because of that, right?” Brat said at a local meeting of Republicans in Virginia, according to Politico. “Very powerful. Very good at fundraising because he favors big business. But when you’re favoring artificially big business, someone’s paying the tab for that. Someone’s paying the price for that, and guess who that is? You.”

It's true that Cantor enjoyed a strong relationship with business, especially with Wall Street. The industry that gave him the most campaign contributions was the securities and investment sector. Individuals from the private equity firm Blackstone were his biggest financial supporters. Cantor went to bat for the industry repeatedly over politically unpopular issues, including the taxation of income at private equity firms at the lower capital gains rate.

Liberals and progressives should take heed but they too are crying in their beer in the aftermath of the shocking defeat of Cantor in that their faux populism has been taken from them and used to far greater effect than they are ever able to muster. The defense of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continue to this day despite the fact that both of them are Wall Street puppets but the Democratic party shills and operatives are already crawling out to defend their corrupt party and the meager crumbs that the post-Reagan era Democrats throw in the direction of the poor. There is not one goddamned thing that the Democrats will do to take on big business, particularly financial parasites who fund them just as they do their Republican counterparts.  The defeat of Cantor by an unknown who nobody saw coming who just happened to be selling the right message at the right time doesn’t bode well for the establishment and that is the establishment of either criminal party.

But there is an even bigger loser within the entrenched special interests who were dealt a blow by Brat's win and that is the Israel lobby. Eric Ivan Cantor has long been one of the top Congressional lackeys of extremist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his loss has to sting Bibi badly. According to a piece by Max Blumenthal entitled "The Bibi Connection":

While on a trip to New York days after the Republican victory, Netanyahu authorized another 1,000 more settlement units in East Jerusalem, a direct rebuke of Obama. That same day, Netanyahu held a meeting with the incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the only Jewish Republican in Congress, and a leader of the right-wing in the House Republican Conference. Cantor’s office produced a summary of the meeting for the media that contained the remarkably crude statement: Cantor promised Netanyahu that “the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the [Obama] Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington.”

The neocon invested editorial department at the Washington Post is particularly restive with such warmongering propagandists as Jennifer Rubin bemoaning the fall of the House of Eric in one of her three screeds today entitled "Cantor, foreign policy and the GOP":

Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution, a longtime observer of Cantor, tells Right Turn: “Viewed strictly from the perspective of American foreign and defense policy, this is a major blow for the party and for the country. Cantor had been a very strong and articulate voice for a Reaganite foreign policy.” He wonders if “the success of ‘conservative populism’ has as one of its (presumably unintended) side effects the defeat of Republican internationalism.”

[That would be the same Robert Kagan who is married to Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland, chief architect of the coup d'etat and US backing of neo-Nazis in Ukraine]

Nevertheless, Cantor’s defeat did not turn on foreign policy, and the party as a whole seems to be abandoning its flirtation with isolationism. Graham, after all, is principally known as a foreign policy hawk, and he won going away. Likewise, perhaps the tea party’s most beloved figure, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) has become a fierce defender of U.S. power and the chief critic of the president’s lead-from-behind philosophy. He’s pushed the party to stand up to Vladimir Putin and to pursue Iran sanctions.

[The deranged Ted Cruz can expect to soon be swimming in a reservoir of Sheldon Adelson's dirty money along with...]

 Texas Gov. Rick Perry, in both 2012 and in the pre-2016 election jostling, has argued in favor of rebuilding our military, standing by Israel and remaining vigilant in the war against jihadist terror.

Despite the loss of Cantor the Israel lobby has an extremely deep bench and there is no shortage of sleazy politicians eager to whore themselves out to right-wing Israeli interests while shitting all over the United States of America which they theoretically have taken an oath of office to serve.

But no matter who steps up to fill his shoes as one of America's preeminent political scum buckets the unexpected takedown of Cantor should provide a clear warning shot to a rancid establishment that the peasants are finally getting ready to start rolling out the guillotines.