And in an easy victory in yesterday’s special election to fill Attorney General Mark Herring’s state senate seat, Democrat Jennifer Wexton defeated the hand-picked darling of the Loudoun GOP far-right wackos, knuckle-dragging anti-Semite John Whitbeck, as well as independent challenger Joe May.
Wexton secured an outright majority, beating the combined total of her two opponents with a solid 52.7% of the vote (to 37.5% for knuckle-dragging anti-Semite Whitbeck and 9.8% for May).
Whitbeck, as we fondly recall, thought it was the height of humor to warm up the crowd at a local GOP rally last fall with a “joke” the punchline of which was that the Jews are still trying to collect on “the bill for the Last Supper.”
May, a well-respected long-serving state delegate of the old Republican school (i.e., one who believes the job of an elected representative is to discharge his constitutional and legal responsibilities to run government, rather than obstruct government with ideological grandstanding) was ousted by the GOP’s far-right tea party fringe earlier this year and then gave up trying to secure his own party’s nomination for the state senate seat when, per usual, the Loudoun Republican Committee announced it would have a closed-door “mass meeting” instead of an open primary, insuring that the far-right wacko crowd dominated the proceedings, as they did.
Had May been the Republican nominee he would have had an excellent shot at winning the general election: he had won the respect of reasonable voters of both parties over the years for getting things done in Richmond, and in recent years ran unopposed for reelection as state delegate.
So a lesson here for the Republican Party? When you (a) rig the rules to exclude the voters and let a small cabal of ideological extremists pick your candidate and (b) pick as your candidate someone who is so far in the “Christian” right-wing tank that he sees nothing wrong with a vile anti-Semitic joke, you just might lose on election day!
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