When a U.S. president is using the IRS to terrify his political enemies, destroying American health care and opening our southern border to millions of future welfare-collecting, Democratic voters from the Third World, why is a dime’s worth of money being wasted on trying to replace the Republican senator from Mississippi with a slightly different Republican?

Honestly, I think these deck chairs look just fine. Maybe we should check on the Titanic’s hull, captain.

If Chris McDaniel’s supporters want to show what bad-ass studs they are, how about walking across the Mississippi River and getting Tom Cotton elected in Arkansas? He’s running against a Democrat, fellas! Or how about walking a little farther down the river, to Louisiana, and helping Bill Cassidy take out another Democrat?

Those two Democrats, Sens. Mark Pryor in Arkansas and Mary Landrieu in Louisiana, could well win re-election in red states – despite voting for Obamacare and amnesty. And tea partiers are still focused like a laser beam on making Republican senators more perfect, rather than beating Democrats.

Yes, it’s annoying to see a Republican appeal to Democratic voters to save his seat. But Thad Cochran is hardly Arlen Specter, who was a thorn in Republicans’ side forever.

At least McDaniel’s allies have a good plan. They’re going to invent a time machine and travel back to June 24 to undo the runoff election. Wait – they don’t have a time machine?

It also doesn’t look great having alleged Republican activists claiming that any votes from blacks in a GOP primary were fraudulent. It so happens that Cochran has always won a fair portion of the black vote – and the Democrat vote.

In Cochran’s last election without Barack Obama on the ticket, he won 85 percent of the vote – and Mississippi is half-Democrat and nearly 40 percent black. Even in his most recent election in 2008, when Obama was on the ticket, Cochran won 40,000 more votes than John McCain – a pretty good estimate of how many blacks voted for Cochran.

But it’s really fantastic to have McDaniel supporters out there denouncing Cochran for getting blacks to vote for him.

It’s true that most black people don’t usually vote in Republican primaries. But they do vote in general elections. And evidently a lot of them vote for Cochran. When Cochran entered politics as a Republican, he was joining the party that was fighting Democrats to redeem blacks’ civil rights.

Cochran was alive when Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt put a Ku Klux Klanner on the Supreme Court (Hugo Black).

He was a law student at the University of Mississippi when the Democratic governor prevented James Meredith from entering – until court orders and federal marshals changed the governor’s mind. Meredith, of course, is a lifelong Republican who went on to work for Jesse Helms.

Magnolia state Democrats were such rabid segregationists, they even segregated their own party! In 1964, national Democrats refused to seat Mississippi’s black delegates from the “Freedom Democratic Party” at the party convention.

Republican Charles Pickering risked his life to prosecute the Klan in Mississippi, and Republican Thad Cochran replaced a segregationist Democratic senator from Mississippi. (Ironically, Cochran’s GOP primary challenger to replace the segregationist Democrat was Pickering, for whom McDaniel later clerked.)

In Cochran’s first political campaign, he won a House seat from a district that was heavily black and majority Democratic.

So campaigning at historically black colleges isn’t something new for Thad Cochran – he’s been doing that since the 1970s. This wouldn’t come as a surprise to Republicans who knew their party’s proud history on civil rights.

Why shouldn’t Cochran ask black people for their votes in a primary? The Republican Party was once, and for some still is, the natural political home for black Mississippians.

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