Phill Kline and the JoCo DA's office

I have received a couple of emails recently asking me if I would be addressing the Johnson County, Kansas District Attorney fiasco. I really intended to, but I have been very busy lately and never got around to giving the issue the time it deserves to lay it all out.

Well, it turns out I don't have to. Diane at the In This Moment blog has done all the heavy lifting for me in several posts over the past week. She is a real journalist. All the time I lived in Wichita, she kept me informed of the goings-on in the Kansas statehouse in her capacity as correspondent for the Wichita Eagle.

Go show her some love. She deserves it.

To the National Republican Party: Welcome to Kansas

Much is being made of a civil war within the Republican party. All I can say to the Johnny-come-latelies noticing the erupting schism between the religious right wing of the party and the moderate, libertarian/business wing of the party is this...Welcome to Kansas.

The Kansas Republican party has been divided since the early 90's and it is finally collapsing under it's own weight. And not a moment to soon. I've had a front-row seat for a good part of it and even struck a couple of blows against them myself.

The revolt of the moderates has been well documented in the Kansas press. The civil war, as the local press refers to it, is between the moderate Tim Shallengerger wing of the Kansas Republican Party and the Mark Gietzen batshit-insane wing.

Let me say right now that I know Mark Gietzen and he and I were bitter enemies. My children went to school with his when we were in Wichita the second time. He and I have fought bitterly at PTA meetings and I looked him in the eye and told him when he announced his candidacy for the state senate that I would see him in hell before I saw him in the senate.

He lost in the primary in a landslide.

He went on to become the State Chairman of the Kansas Republican Party, and the seeds of the parties destruction were planted.

You're welcome.

As goes the Kansas Republican party, so goes the national party. Look at all of the Kansas Democrats who won election on Tuesday after switching parties. Paul Morrison was elected the states new Attorney General as a Democrat. He was last elected two years ago as a Republican to the Jounson County Prosecuting Attorney post.

Two elections in a row, the wildly popular Kathleen Sebelius has tapped a Republican to be her Lieutenant Governor, and both have switched parties to be her second. The new Democratic LtG-elect, Mark Parkinson, is also a former state Republican party chair.

The Kansas Republican Party is about six years ahead of the national party as far as their civil war is concerned. In Kansas it has progressed to the point where a moderate, common sense Republican can not get on the ballot in the general election. It has gotten to the point where the venerable Johnson County Sun endorsed a whole slate of Democrats this year, and it is a Republican Newspaper. For editor Steve Rose, the son of the papers founder, it was a bitter moment. The entire metro area went into shock at that editorial. Those of us who actually know Steve Rose are still picking our jaws up from the floor; and that column was printed a month ago.

Nancy Boyda was a moderate Republican who switched parties and pulled off the biggest upset in the land on Tuesday when she unseated Jim Ryun. The track star couldn't out-run the populist uprising that catapulted Boyda into the House of Representatives. Someone should have pointed out to Jim the self-defeating nature of voting against the military and veterans benefits when your district is home to both Ft. Leavenworth and Ft. Riley. More than one anonymous comment was left on this blog by soldiers at the forts who were voting for Boyda.

What happened in Kansas on Tuesday was the result of a perfect storm. It is also a harbinger of things to come for the national Republicans. Democrats, are we going to be ready to capitalize on it like the Democrats in Kansas have done?