Jim Campbell, Citizen Journalist
The strange coincidences in the parallel lives of two elder senators, Richard Lugar and Diane Feinstein, let’s examine them.
With Richard Mourdock winning in the Indiana Senate primary. Mourdock defeated six-term Republican foreign policy elder statesman Sen. Richard Lugar. Diane Feinstein is vying for her 5th term.
Mourdock is backed by conservatives ranging from the National Rifle Association to local Tea Party activists to the Washington-based fiscal conservative group the Club for Growth.
Those who hold the 2nd Amendment sacrosanct loathe Diane Feinstein. There has rarely if ever been a tax she didn’t like or a way to limit the use and personal ownership of weapons nationwide.
Score one for Feinstein who just loaned her campaign $5 million.
Lugar is 80 while Senator Feinstein will be 79 on June 22nd.
Republican insiders in Washington said Lugar seemed to underestimate the seriousness of the challenge that Mourdock posed. The same can be said for the over confident Feinstein who announced she had put her race on cruise control, confident of little competition. That of course was before the recent surge of Elizabeth Emken, who is well qualified to replace the “Too Wrong” for “Too Long” tired senator from CA.
Mourdock criticized Lugar for voting for Obama’s two Supreme Court nominees and for his vote to end a filibuster on the Democratic-sponsored DREAM Act, which many conservatives see as merely a form of amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Source: Alex Wong/Getty Images Europe
(AFP OUT) U.S. President Barack Obama signs the New START Treaty into law as Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) (L) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) (R) look on during an Oval Office ceremony February 2, 2011 in Washington, DC.
The United States of America and Russia will cut down the number of their strategic nuclear missile launchers under the treaty. In typical fashion for the Obama administration during a congressional recess Obama agreed to destroy 80% of our nuclear arsenal. Dick Lugar and other RINO’s were only happy to comply.
Lugar voted for an increase in the gasoline tax, California has some of the highest gasoline costs at the pump. CA’s gasoline tax make in number 2 in the entire nation. This of course is the result of the environmental movements meddling, requiring additives in the gasoline and increases in state gasoline taxes. Environmentalists ushered in the gasoline additive movement. MTBE was added to reduce air emissions only to be determined later by scientists at U.C. Davis that it presented a far greater risk to human health as it seeped into the ground water. Then Governor Pete Wilson banned MTBE from CA gasoline as Feinstein stood idly by.
Feinstein the follower, also voted for the two most radical Supreme Court nominees in Sotomayor and Kagan.
Lugar accompanied Obama on trips. This did not bode well for him. Obama told a Council on Foreign Relations gathering in Washington after they returned, “If anybody has ever accompanied Sen. Lugar on a (foreign) trip, you know that he is a rock star wherever he goes,” but Lugar’s foreign policy focus wasn’t the asset at home that it was in Washington, D.C. Suffice to say rock star has not been mentioned when speaking about Diane Feinstein.
In closing a recommendation coming from the beleaguered president would be as helpful as the captain of the Titanic telling the reader to forget the life boats and grab a deck chair.