{"id":2983,"date":"2010-01-05T15:21:10","date_gmt":"2010-01-05T20:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=2983"},"modified":"2010-01-19T01:57:58","modified_gmt":"2010-01-19T06:57:58","slug":"aint-no-sunshine-when-hes-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/2983\/aint-no-sunshine-when-hes-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"Ain&#8217;t No Sunshine When He&#8217;s Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From the Sunshine State today comes <a href=\"http:\/\/politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com\/2010\/01\/05\/outgoing-florida-gop-chair-hammers-party-purists\/\" target=\"_blank\">news <\/a>that Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer (one of the closest allies of moderate Governor &#8212; and U.S. Senate aspirant &#8212; Charlie Crist) is resigning from his post. The chairman came under fire from the right for his unsubtle support of Crist against the more conservative former Florida House Speaker <a href=\"http:\/\/marcorubio.com\/marco-101\/\" target=\"_blank\">Marco Rubio<\/a> in the Republican senate primary, as well as for being a bit of a spendthrift.<\/p>\n<p>The delicious irony is that Greer &#8212; a man who had been justifying his every action on the basis of creating a &#8220;big tent&#8221; party &#8212; chose to leave office with a scorched earth message:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Greer said his opponents want to &#8220;burn the house down and destroy the Republican Party.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I am not a purist,&#8221; he said in describing his vision for the party. &#8220;I have never been a purist. I believe that our party stands for principles and values and that anyone who has an interest in our party should be able to participate.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Greer&#8217;s beauty pageant eloquence aside, these statements are an intellectual schematic of political breakdown. If your party &#8220;stands for principles and values,&#8221; then you can&#8217;t strengthen it by attempting to marginalize those who take those principles and values most seriously. Too many GOP moderates seem to think that creating a big tent means pushing conservatives out of the back end. They&#8217;re going to have to learn how to be partners and not adversaries in the future. If they don&#8217;t, expect to see more centrists dethroned ala Jim Greer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From the Sunshine State today comes news that Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer (one of the closest allies of moderate Governor &#8212; and U.S. Senate aspirant &#8212; Charlie Crist) is resigning from his post. The chairman came under fire from the right for his unsubtle support of Crist against the more conservative former Florida House [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[353,354,690,615,689,352,334],"class_list":["post-2983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-charlie-crist","tag-florida","tag-florida-u-s-senate-race","tag-gop","tag-jim-greer","tag-marco-rubio","tag-republican-party"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2983"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3232,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2983\/revisions\/3232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}