Dick Lugar's Loss: What Does It Mean?

In last night’s Indiana Senate primary election, longtime Indiana Senator Dick Lugar lost his bid for a seventh term in the United States Senate.

At 80 years old, Lugar is the senior Republican in all of the United States Senate. His leadership on foreign policy alone is what the Senate will miss in his absence.

In a written statement following his concession speech last night, Sen. Lugar has some scathing words when it comes to his opponent, Richard Mourdock. I don’t blame him one bit. In fact, I applaud the senator all the more for his scathing critique.

Mourdock is of the tea party wing of the Republican Party, meaning he is so far to the right that he would rather alienate moderate Republicans and lose votes to Democratic opponent Joe Donnelly, a moderate.

This is all a whole lot worse when you factor in what Dana Milibank wrote about last week in The Washington Post. What we have seen from this Congress is an absolute disgrace. An outrage, if you will. Nothing has gotten accomplished, and the things at have? They came after the threat of a government shut-down.

It gets worse when you look at not just the state of the economy but how much tuition is going up for college—and Republicans are not moving from their stance on the increase of the student loan interest rates that go into effect on new loans, starting on July 1, 2012.

Senate Republicans that are in favor of increasing the burden on the next round of college graduates should look at their views on student loan interest rate as political suicide. It should be viewed as an elected official voting to re-instate the draft or voting to screw with Social Security.

At the same time that Lugar was defeated, the citizens of North Carolina decided that it was more important for Kim Kardashian to make a mockery of the sanctity of marriage than it was for same-sex couples to either marry or have a civil union. What the press really doesn’t tell the simple folk is that these sort of amendments hurt straight couples that have a “common law marriage” but not a “civil or religious ceremony” to honor their commitments to each other, til death do they part.

This afternoon, it was announced that President Barack Obama has announced that he is in favor of same-sex marriages. It came only a few days after Vice President Joe Biden made similar remarks. While the Democratic leadership is in the 21st Century, as Sheppard Smith commented, the Republican Party wants the government in and out of the bedroom.

It’s funny, too, because Republicans are in favor of lesser government but at the same time, they want the government in their bedroom. This is one of those things that will never be understood. Religious conservatives don’t even vote on domestic or foreign policy matters. Rather, they vote on social issues. They do so in droves. Interestingly, these social conservatives are by no means a fan of their nominee for president, Mitt Romney. We shall see what happens come November.