Voinovich: GOP has too many southerners

By Rick Moran

Retiring Senator George ("Weepy") Voinovich has it all figured out. He thinks the problem with the Republican party is that there are too many senators like Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn:

"We got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns," Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) told the Columbus Dispatch. "It's the southerners."

Voinovich, a native Clevelander who retires after the 2010 election, continued after the southern elements of the GOP.

"They get on TV and go 'errrr, errrrr,'" he said. "People hear them and say, 'These people, they're southerners. The party's being taken over by southerners. What they hell they got to do with Ohio?'"

Voinovich has broken with his party at several significant points during his two terms in the Senate. He bucked leaders to vote against a dividend tax cut pushed by President George W. Bush earlier this decade, for instance, and only last week voted against an amendment sponsored by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) to expand Americans' ability to carry concealed weapons.

Voinovich, along with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), voted against Thune's amendment, providing the key swing votes preventing it from passing.

The Hill's blog post by Michael O'Brien reveals a dumb brute cluelessness on the part of Voinovich that makes us happy and relieved he is retiring.

Smearing an entire region of the country is what's wrong with the GOP. Not standing for first principles like Second Amendment rights is what's wrong with the GOP. Senators who wish to shrink the party by wishing for fewer members from the one region of the country where the Republicans are viable is what's wrong with the GOP.

Voinovich weirdly broke down and cried during the debate over keeping John Bolton as UN Ambassador. He has nearly lost it on several other occasions as well.

In cases like his, psychologists usually recommend Xanax or some other anti-anxiety drug. Perhaps it would suffice if we simply ignored him and allowed the weepy weirdo to return to Ohio and cry about Ohio State missing the Rose Bowl rather than bother the grown ups in Washington with his emotional outbursts.