Yesterday, in efforts to retain his status as the Republican Party’s candidate for re-election, Senator Thad Cochran furthered the cause of stripping away the veil of illusion that obscures the extent to which our political class is corrupted and broken. We owe him a debt of gratitude for exemplifying the worst of what political junkies are capable of in their hunger to retain power.

Dismissing, without the slightest thought, the values and principles most Americans hope to find in their elected representatives, the Republican Establishment (read as Mitch McConnell, Haley Barbour, Orin Hatch, et al) pooled its resources to use race baiting and fear mongering to crush the candidacy of a decent, principled Conservative of their own party in favor of retaining a 77-year-old-obviously-senile-incompetent-42-year-member-of-Congress.

The challenger, Chris McDaniel, is an attorney, conservative commentator, and Republican politician in the Mississippi Senate since 2008. Yesterday, McDaniel actually received 25,000 more Republican votes than Cochran. However, because the Republican Establishment, via false advertising and fear-based robo-calling, mobilized 35,000 African American Democrats to cross over and vote Republican…their deceitful and manipulative methods resulted in a 4000+ vote win for Cochran.

I listened to many callers to conservative talk radio today. The general consensus is outrage and disgust. The good news is that anger and outrage, once transformed into righteous indignation, can be a force for good.

That is now our challenge.

While it would be easy to remain enraged, as so many are, at the Republican party’s lack of ethics and arrogance bordering on criminality…rage will not get us where we need to go. We need to awaken to what was done in Mississippi and commit to not allowing such tactics to prevail elsewhere. We need to become educated, vocal and determined citizens in order to weed out the liars, crooks and manipulators within both parties by remembering not only Mississippi but also that there are more of us than there are of them

Our Founders, both John Adams and George Washington, knew the two party system would become corrupted and fail. But they also knew We The People would be here to do the heavy lifting and willingly pay the price that sustaining liberty requires.

The moment has arrived. Liberty is at risk. Now is the time. Ours is the price. We pay it now or lose everything worth having.

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