Wait, what's that sound?

 Just me slinking back into the room and turning on the lights. I'll open the windows and dust a bit later.

Three weeks of silence is long enough. I hear crickets in the background as I type so maybe everybody got tired of waiting and went home. Serves me right. But just in case...

Following yesterday's Most. Important. Primary. Elections. Ever. the media, never wanting to give up a good narrative no matter what the facts, is all over the anti-incumbent meme.

Hogwash.

Certainly there was some of that, but in the Big One here in Pennsylvania, the real and only issue was Arlen Specter his very own self. This was a referendum on Specter more than anything else, on his long "say one way, vote another way" career and his inescapable record as a Repugnant. Consider it this way, as a Democrat, his "incumbency" was less than one year old.

In the real Big One hereabouts, the election for the seat of longtime kingpin Jack Murtha, the race the GOP was set to herald as another "Scott Brown moment" where an entrenched Democratic seat was taken by a Repugnant newcomer, the Democrat won relatively easily. In a district which Kerry barely won in 2004 and Obama lost by a hair in 2008, a district trending GOP on all available evidence in other words, that sends out a strong message that 2012 probably will not be the big GOP sweep the media would like you to believe.

Not that they are taking sides, understand, but they set the storyline a while back and, once set, the storyline must be adhered to at all costs.

I think that the Repugs have been counting on inchoate anger, the default mode for  "we are furiously furious about things we are furious about" crowd broadly described as teabaggers, to allow them to run on nothing other than "throw the bums out" as a platform. I think they are going to realize, much too late, that you have to stand for something, you really do, when it gets down to running against the other side and not just some guy you can out-shout and out-outrage even though you both want basically the same thing.

Here's a prediction for you: Rand Paul, the ultimate tea party victor,  will not win the Kentucky general election. I think he is exactly the sort of candidate I refer to in the paragraph above, I think he will reject the move to the center most of the other teabag sorts will try (he even refused to take the congratulatory call from his defeated opponent last night) and I think he doesn't really have much to offer. Democratic primary winner Jack Conway, the state's attorney-general, drew nearly 221,000 votes to Paul's 192,000 across the state.