On "sitting out" elections

I keep hearing people calling radio shows talking about sitting out this election, even if it means handing Congress to the Democrats. I don't understand that kind of thinking. A lot of Conservative Republicans now seem to think that the way to send a message to their representatives and senators is to get them defeated. The "logic" escapes me. Why bother sending them a message which makes them irrelevant? After they're out of office, who cares what "message" they got.

I've had Senator Hatch as my representative for about 30 years and I keep hoping someone better will come along. Hatch is more of a comic figure than what I think of as an archetypal senator, but he votes Republican. He may be a water-carrier, but he's reliable. Just don't nominate him for SCOTUS. Please!

Senator Bennett is also reliable. I like him better than Hatch. He just seems more intelligent and his background as a lobbyist, along with the fact that his father was a senator for many years, assures me that he understands how power works in a legislature and how things get done.

If one of them were John McCain, I'd vote against him in any primary, probably, and then I'd hold my nose and vote for him. He is so stubborn and has such a liberal sense of government having compassion that he's all over the lot. His support for the current Senate immigration bill illustrates what I saying. He has these ideals of what things should be like that have little or no correspondence to the real world. Did he really think that Congress would have passed his campaign finance bill if they didn't believe they had a way to get around it? He has a military officer's concern for careful spending. In one sense, the qualities that helped him survive his years as a POW are also the ones that make him ill suited to be a politician. His bullheadedness and his faith in government's effectiveness in upholding his ideals are both admirable and naive.

The only thing worse would be if he were a Democrat who would switch the balance to that party. Even a spendthrift Republican who votes for tax cuts, is better than a Democrat who wants them repealed. Politics is an incremental process. Look how long it took to get conservative judges appointed. And we are still only at the status quo.

This "I'm taking my marbles and going home" attitude is childish and one reason why it's so hard for ideologues to maintain power.