Steve Israel

Yesterday Steve Israel was crowing on Twitter how 4 powerful senior Republican committee chairmen are retiring (Doc Hastings, Mike Rogers, Buck McKeon and, now, Dave Camp). What his tweets conspicuously left out, of course, is that Israel didn't recruit any candidates against them and actually undermined candidates who ran against Rogers and McKeon last cycle.

With Climate Change, energy policy and environmental protection shaping up as one of the most important cache of issues facing America's political elites, I've been trying to figure out why DCCC chairman Steve Israel would recruit so many awful candidates with views on the environment identical to Republicans.

I don't expect lazy Beltway reporters to dig this deep, but the real story of yesterday's DCCC Red-to-Blue announcement was less about a bunch of lame recruits like Blue Dog Gwen Graham (FL) and "mystery meat" no issues candidates like Domenic Recchia (NY) and Ann Callis (IL), than it was about which candidates and which districts got left out again.

Here we go again-- because losing once is never enough for a discredited strategyThe demise of the furthest right faction of Republican wing of the Democrat Party, the anti-Choice, gay-hating, gun-loving, Austerity champions know as the Blue Dogs, has been widely exaggerated.

I'm not saying Long Island Congressman Steve Israel is involved in the Mafia, the way Staten Island Congressman Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm is. Israel, not exactly a brain surgeon, is far more subtle than Grimm will ever be-- which doesn't take much. Remember, in his very first meeting with Speaker John Boehner after being elected, Grimm, a violent criminal, insisted Members be allowed to pack heat on the House floor.

Drunk? Stoned? Stupid? Draw your own conclusion but Steve Israel likes what he seesMore than a few congressmembers have been pissed off enough about Steve Israel's shady behavior to mention it to me. Maybe it's just the ones who I talk to but there sure does seem to be a consensus among normal Democrats that they guy is a one sleazy, untrustworthy character. And everybody just wrings their hands.

Pete Aguilar, another Steve Israel recruitLast cycle, Israel managed to do the seemingly impossible., losing a majority Latino D+5 district, CA-31 (the Inland Empire) in a spectacular debacle. President Obama won the new district 118,043 (57%) to 83,822 (41%) but on that same day-- thanks to Israel's bungling incompetence-- those 118,043 Obama voters had no Democrat to vote for on that same ballot-- just two unsavory right-wing Republican corporate whores, Gary Miller and Bob Dutton.

You probably missed it, but a few days ago the Washington Post ran some hopeful polling numbers that show the corrupt dirt bag Steve Israel could be beaten. Although they neglected to update the new PVI-- even instead of D+2-- this is what they came up with:

Inauthentic in every waySteve Israel made a lot of really bad choices this cycle. His Jump Start program is a compendium of most of the worst, most reactionary corporate shills running as Democrats this year. Not all of them, but almost all of them are not worth voting for even against Republicans. Remember, the lesser of two evils is still evil.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and the "candidate" she picked to run against herThere was a time that Ileana Ros-Lehtinen represented a safely red district. But that was quite some time ago. The old 18th CD-- the boundaries of which she helped draw when she was in the state legislature, was an R+4 district and filled with anti-Castro reactionaries. Many of those reactionaries are dead and Ileana's new district (FL-27) is a blue district.