Jack Kimball in the Crosshairs

Yesterday, the New Hampshire Journal reported that former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party Jack Kimball sent an email to multiple recipients claiming some of his family members saw a convoy of white vehicles on a highway. In it he speculated whether or not they were United Nations trucks.  He called his email a "heads up."

The NH Journal claims that it "intercepted" the email. It doesn't say how it intercepted the email, or why it's bothering to report it, but, because of the report, Mr. Kimball has felt forced to make a statement saying that he doesn't believe that the United Nations is invading the United States.

In late August 2011, Mr. Kimball resigned from his job as NH GOP chairman after a firestorm when he said that libertarians should be allowed to compete in NH politics as a third party. (Libertarians currently identify as, and caucus with, Republicans.  Making it easy for them to run independently on their own would split the GOP's vote and give Democrats a bigger advantage.)  Many Republicans were unhappy with his statement, which forced his untimely resignation.

Mr. Kimball is identified as a leader in New Hampshire's tea party movement.  His outspokenness against the bank bailouts of 2009 was how he won his position as the chairman of NH's GOP in 2010 during the wave election backlash against the shock of the 2008 recession when the tea party movement leaped to prominence in the Republican Party as the main thrust of the opposition against the White House.

Fast-forward to today.  Right now, public opinion of the Republican Party is in the dumps partly because of the recent government shutdown in October and the perception that tea partiers in the GOP are to blame for it.

Apparently, the GOP establishment and Republican-leaning business interests are agreeing with the mainstream interpretation of that. The government shutdown is estimated to have cost the U.S. economy $25 billion.  It seriously damaged the Republican brand.  Business Republicans (the establishment) are now out to get the tea party any way they can in order to reestablish the GOP's credibility as a political alternative to the Democratic Party.

The New Hampshire Journal is identified as conservative.  So is the Republican Party.  If you're a Republican, then chances are that you identify yourself as conservative.  If you're a conservative, then chances are you vote Republican every single time.  If establishment Republicans think that the tea party element in their ranks is to blame for their poor standing then they will turn against the tea party.

The editors of the New Hampshire Journal reported Mr. Kimball's email because they think it discredits him, and Mr. Kimball recognizes the potential for embarrassment, which is why he made his statement to distance himself from anti-U.N. conspiracy theories about the loss of American sovereignty because those ideas are generally thought to be nutty.

The New Hampshire Journal thinks that tea partiers like Mr. Kimball are a liability.

The tea party's enemy isn't big government anymore. Their enemies now are establishment Republicans allied with business interests like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The daggers are drawn, and there will be blood.

Tea partiers, join the libertarians.  The Republican Party will take your votes, but you can keep your ideas to yourselves.

"Get in line and toe the line.  Salute and execute."  You are pawns.  You have no home.  You are men and women without a country.