Grifters, Activism, and Thomas Massie

This isn’t a column about Thomas Massie. Not really. But he does figure into the analysis, especially since the voters of his Kentucky congressional district decided they’d had enough of him and voted him out of office in the Republican primary election Tuesday night.

The Federalist’s Sean Davis had a pretty good take on why:

It might take a while to surface, but people can generally spot insincerity. And they spotted it with Massie.

Something I’ve noticed is that people on the Right tend to sniff it out a little faster than the ordinary folks on the Left do — which is interesting to me, because the political “insiders” I’ve met on the Left are a million times more cynical and conniving than the ones on the Right are. In fact, there is a problem with naivete among Republican pols that drives me insane when I see it manifested — Bill Cassidy, who was torched by his own party’s base voters in Louisiana on Saturday, is a great example of a born political sucker who has spent the better part of two decades being treated as a mark in Washington, D.C., without learning a thing.