The Washington press corps always love it when establishment Republicans scold conservatives for trying to “purify” the party, and Time magazine’s Michael Scherer did not disappoint. “Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar did not go quietly, after losing his primary contest Tuesday in Indiana to a Tea Party-backed challenger, Richard Mourdock,” Scherer wrote the next day in a Time “Swampland” blog titled “The Importance of Dick Lugar’s Farewell Warning.”
“If there is one thing the American people need to read today,” the former writer for the far-left Mother Jones directed, “it is his farewell missive, which may prove to be as prescient and long lasting as Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 exit speech warning of the coming military industrial
complex.”
MSNBC host Chuck Todd, NBC’s chief political correspondent, had rued the lack of attention to Lugar’s rebuke of his fellow Republicans.
From MSNBC’s 9 AM EDT The Daily Rundown on Thursday, May 10:
CHUCK TODD: The story that got over-shadowed by all of this, to me, that we would have been talking about – and I think if you’re the Republican Party you’re oddly happy, Michael Scherer, is the Dick Lugar manifesto that basically said he was chased out of his party.
MICHAEL SCHERER: Not only was it a manifesto, but it was an incredibly eloquent manifesto. There have been a number of people who’ve been chased out of the party now and none have either had the courage or the position-
TODD: They sort of wait until they leave office completely.
SCHERER: And it sounds like sour grapes. Here he was, like the way Lugar phrased that was as an appeal to the country saying, look, we’re electing positions now we’re not people and the long-term country is in trouble.
