Nebraska Senate Contest: RedState Outs A RINO - By Dog-Whistling?
05/06/2012
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Bruning

Nebraska GOP Senate Hopeful Bruning: Possibly a RINO. Definitely a NeoCon target.

I have respected RedState’s Erick Erickson ever since I saw him break ranks to call for a Filibuster on Elena Kagan – I wish he would write again on the Eric Cantor problem.

RedState itself is questionable. Commissar Leon H. Wolf not only hysterically denounced John Derbyshire but I hear also vigorously banned dissent from the RedState comment thread. (So much for the Free Speech tradition.)

So I am in two minds in reading Erickson’s essay Jon Bruning Loves Eric Holder. Ronald Reagan and the Boy Scouts? Not Exactly. RedState Thursday May 3rd 2012.

This makes a powerful case that Jon Bruning, the front-runner for Nebraska’s GOP Senate nomination, is at best a nest-feathering RINO, and very possibly a closet liberal:

Bruning signed a letter stating, “We believe that Mr. Holder has the knowledge and experience necessary to run the Department of Justice and work with us to enforce our laws.”

…Bruning supported radical attorney Thomas Perez who is now leading the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Texas’ voter ID law

…Project Vote Smart asked “Which of the following state agencies should take race and sex into account when making employment decisions?” Bruning only replied NO for “Public Employment” and “State Contracting” leaving “College and University Admissions” blank indicating his continued support for race based admissions in Nebraska

The most damning information deployed by Erickson comes from an very leftist article Bruning wrote some 20 years ago as a second year law student Conservatives, come out of the closet (pdf).
I believe in affirmative action. If a woman or a black person takes the place of a white male in a law school entering class, we’re all better off.
Erick Erickson I think is justified in taking this seriously. Bruning, living in Nebraska, subsequently had every incentive to move Right. In DC, those incentives reverse.

The problem from a VDARE.com point of view is that the candidate for whom RedState has been working so hard, Don Stenberg, is heavily backed by the Open-Borders Plutocrats at  the Club For Growth. While Bruning has a pretty adequate Illegal Immigration page (burdens the taxpayers, focus on border security, blah blah) on his web site, Sternberg has a very minimal “Secure Our Borders” entry which weasels:

…we should provide for levels of legal immigration that will meet our economic needs, and be consistent with the social needs of our country.
This obviously designed to deceive immigration patriots (who think immigrants are not needed for the economy and have no social utility) while at the same time leaving to door open to the Cheap Labor Lobby.

I am afraid that raising the Affirmative Action issue – which Stenberg mentions nowhere on his site – confirms that this is another example of Neocon Dog-whistling – trying to attract support by talking about emotive issues they in fact intend to do nothing about.

Nebraska is being ill-served here. Greedy Meat Packers and others have made immigration a problem in the state. Why can’t Nebraska produce statesmen like Iowa’s Steve King?

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