Indiana Republicans "Choose Between Party And Country"

So says Dana Milbank in Sunday's Washington Post in regards to the Tuesday GOP Senate primary between 36 year incumbent Richar Lugar and tea party fave Richard Mourduck.  Lugar, who has a 77% conservative rating according to the American Conservative Union (more conservative than the Maine Senate Republicans who are around 50%) is behind by 10% according to recent polls, and Mourduck is running ads about how Lugar is Obama's "favorite Republican," which have been effective.

What Lugar has done over a long stretch of his career has been a leading GOP voice for sane policy regarding nuclear weapons.  What was the source of these ads was his support in late 2010 for Obama's push for a renewal of the SALT with Russia, something supported by all living previous Republican Secretaries of State and Defense.  This is the main framework for the post-Cold War control of the US and Russian nuclear arsenals, still large enough to wipe out humanity if  all set off in a full exchange.  This is not just country, but the entire world, and whatever else he has done, his announcement after the 2010 election that passing this was his top priority was one of the most intelligent and wise things Obama has supported, something that should be slam dunk obvious. 

In addition, Lugar coauthored the Nunn-Lugar Act in 1993, which provided for the initial monitoring of the post-Soviet nuclear weapons arsenal, again about as important a thing there is.  It really is easy to forget that no other issue comes close to being as significant as this one, although withoug regular drills for school kids to hide under their desks or people building fallout shelters in their backyards, it is easy to forget this.  Whatever we do with our economy or social or even environmental policy does not involve threats that could wipe out humanity entirely, certainly not anytime soon (maybe runaway global warming in the distant future). 

Anyway, while some Dems think it will be great if Lugar goes down because they might have a better chance of defeating Mourduck than Lugar in the general election, I think that if  Lugar goes down on Tuesday as appears likely, this will be one more serious nail in the coffin of any sort of intelligent discourse on the US national political scene, where complete fantasies triumph in a miasma of propagandizing that is so incoherent it cannot even be called ideological, because that would suggest that there might actually be some ideas involved beyond just the worst sort of knee jerk partisanship and looney bin cage rattling.