Bigots, Zealots, and Cranks.

This is a little wonky for me, but tomorrow being an election day, I suppose some hard politics is in order. And there's a really interesting race that will be decided tomorrow in upstate New York's 23rd congressional district.

The moderate Republican incumbent, Dede Scozzafava, just got taken down by far right Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman. Over the past few weeks Hoffman, with the help of Freedomworks.org (the PAC of the Tea Party movement) president Dick Armey, was able to successfully exploit Scozzafava's support for abortion rights and gay marriage in order to drive her out of the race.

What's really surprising is that this happened even against the wishes of traditional Republican power players like Newt Gingrich, who endorsed Scozaffava despite her handicaps, so to speak.

Now Scozzafava has turned around and endorsed the Democratic challenger, Bill Owens. Though, it did take FOX a little while to face reality:



Now, I don't care who this Hoffman guy is (he's kind of a stiff) or even who wins the election. What's interesting is the power dynamic that's happening between the moderate and extreme sides of the conservative movement. There's a very telling moment at the 6:50 mark of this interview between Chris Matthews and Chairman of the New York Conservative Party, Michael Long:



So at this point the far-right of the conservative movement seems to be willing to sabotage Republican candidates who don't pass their litmus test, even if it means losing the seat to a Democrat. They have balls, I'll admit that.

Brains, on the other hand, may be in shorter supply. It seems like a losing strategy to me, but hey -it's their party. If they want it populated solely by bigots, zealots, and cranks, they'll get their wish. At least then I'll never run out of wonderful clips like this: