The rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) is an odd-toed ungulate, massive in size, with thick skin and a relatively small brain.  The most abundant subspecies is the white rhino, where the word “white” is mistranslation of the Dutch word “wijd” which means wide and referred to its big mouth, not color.

Regardless of their names, white rhinos and black rhinos are much the same color and that color has mostly to do with whatever they decided to roll around in that day—sun-dried grayish piles of elephant dung being a particular favorite.

White rhinos live in groups called crashes, eat grass, and mark their territory with well-defined piles of excrement because nothing says “here I am” like a neatly stacked little tower of rhino poop.  Since the word “ungulate” refers to hooved animals which generally walk around on the tips of their toes, the white rhino is a fat, thick-skinned, small-brained, shit-covered, grazing animal with a big mouth that walks around on its toes leaving piles of crap everywhere and looking for a crash.

The RINO (Republican In Name Only) is basically the same thing.

Back when the hormones of youth ruled my perception of the world and my every thought was filtered through the prism of will-it-lead-to-sex, my daughters’ mother, Nina, told me a story.  Seems her family owned a few sheep when she was a teenager, and one night she looked out her bedroom window during a thunderstorm and saw sheep running amok in the back yard.  The flock had escaped their corral.  So she quickly woke her older sister, Becky, and they ran naked into the storm to chase sheep.

I found that story infinitely intriguing.  The thought of naked Nina and her naked sister Becky running through the night, wrestling sheep in the rain and the thunder and the lightning… well, shoot, I could imagine how that must have looked.

Vividly.  I’m a guy.  That’s pretty much what we do.

Stampedes are a mysterious thing.  Sometimes you know the cause, sometimes you don’t.  Cowboys say that a herd of cattle might stand perfectly motionless through a violent thunderstorm one night, and the next night when things are quiet take off in a wide-eyed panic because somebody coughed.  I’ve watched a herd of African buffalo stop grazing and stare in the same direction for five straight minutes, and then suddenly all pivot in unison like a trained dance team and take off lickety-split for no discernible reason.

Sometimes all it takes to start a stampede is one herd member who starts moving, throwing everybody else into doubt about the wisdom of not moving.  “Hey, Elsie is mooving toward the hill, what’s up with that?  Maybe I should moove toward the hill.  What’s going on?  I better get mooving, too, I guess.  C’MON, EVERYBODY, SOMETHING IS WRONG AND WE NEED TO GET MOOVING!”  And just like that, they’re off.  Elsie sees a tasty-looking clump of grass over by the hill and next thing she knows she’s leading a stampede.

That’s how it happens.

Playing the part of Elsie in the RINO stampede is Senator Jim Jeffords (Vermont), who left the Republican Party in a snit on May 24, 2001, shortly after being re-elected.  The RINO is a critter lacking normal allotments of character, integrity, honesty, and principle, so naturally Jeffords waited until after the people of Vermont, who considered him a Republican and voted for him on that basis, had reelected him before announcing that he no longer considered himself a Republican.  The senate was evenly divided 50–50 at the time so Jeffords’ traitorous defection gave the Democrats majority control.

That was only the beginning of the repercussions.  Democrat control of the senate gave liberals the power to resist the many attempts by Republicans to fix the wildly-out-of-control mortgage market and wildly-out-of-control Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Consequently, the mortgage fiasco was left unrestrained which eventually led to the financial meltdown of 2008.  The financial crisis, in turn, probably led to the election of a far-left whacko from Chicago to the presidency simply because he offered “hope.”

Another repercussion was that Jeffords, realizing he had no credibility for his 2006 reelection, retired and left the seat available to openly socialist Bernie Sanders, thereby giving a political philosophy which is anathema to the American way of life 1% of the vote in the U.S. Senate.

Sanders is the well-defined pile of excrement Jeffords left behind to mark his territory.

Another RINO senator, Lincoln Chafee (Rhode Island), saw Elsie mooving away and asked himself, “What’s up with that?  Maybe I should moove, too.”  When he lost his re-election bid in 2006, he blamed it on conservatives who, irritated with his RINOish lack of principles, had worked against him, so Chafee spitefully announced to the world that his loss was good for the country because it gave control of the senate back to the Democrats.

And then he let everybody know that henceforth he would consider himself an Independent rather than a Republican.  Surprise, surprise.  HEY EVERYBODY, LINCOLN CHAFEE DOESN’T CONSIDER HIMSELF A REPUBLICAN!  HE WON’T BE AT THE MEETINGS ANYMORE!  Since nobody ever considered him an actual honest-to-God Republican in the first place, there was little mourning at his departure.

By the way, Chafee’s loss resulted in Harry Reid becoming Majority Leader—one of the worst calamities ever inflicted on the United States of America.

With Elsie and Chafee mooving, other members of the RINO herd got nervous and started to moove.  In 2008 Congressman Wayne Gilchrist (Maryland) lost the Republican primary and immediately stopped pretending to be a conservative—he endorsed the Democrat, who consequently won the election.  Then Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama for president even though Obama represents a political philosophy so far to the left of Republican political philosophy that Powell couldn’t possibly reconcile the two if you gave him an army of CPAs led by Norman Schwarzkopf.

In 2009 the RINO moovement gathered momentum, with Senator Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania) pulling a Jeffords and switching parties when he realized that Pennsylvania conservatives were sick to death of him.  His defection gave Democrats the 60–40 super majority which allowed them to pass Obamacare and the trillion-dollar Pork Special stimulus bill and get within a gnat’s hair of regulating our carbon output.

It’s amazing how much damage a RINO can cause.

Also in 2009, RINO Newt Gingrich endorsed RINO Dede Scozzafava in a special congressional election in New York.  Dede held political positions that were somewhere to the left of Mao but Gingrich decided he didn’t care.  To RINOs, all that matters is whether you have the requisite big mouth and small brain, and whether you roll around in elephant dung once in a while.  Dede was so thoroughly rejected by the voters of her district that she quit running before the election when polls showed that only she and her mother were going to vote for her… and her mother wasn’t committed.  Republicans in the district, because they so thoroughly disliked Dede, had started a third party called the Conservative Party with a candidate named Doug Hoffman but when Dede quit she spitefully endorsed the Democrat, à la Wayne Gilchrist the year before, and consequently the Democrats squeaked out a win in a thoroughly conservative district.

On a positive note, Republicans in New York’s state assembly stripped Dede of her leadership positions, she is retiring from politics, and there is a new word in the English language, “scozzafavaed,” which means to have your lack of principles revealed in all their sordid detail to the public.  At least that’s what I assume it means.

This year, it’s a full-blown RINO stampede.  Seeing how angry Americans have become about socialist Washington policies, wild-eyed panic-driven RINOs have abandoned any pretense about being conservatives.  We’re witnessing a stampede of small-brained shit-covered beasts seeking cover by running pell-mell to the left:

In January, Republican staffer Tom Horner announced that he would run for governor of Minnesota as an independent against the Republican, Tom Emmer, and immediately got an endorsement from former RINO senator David Durenberger.

In April, Florida governor Charlie Crist saw that he was going to lose the Republican primary for senator, so he, too, announced that he would run as an independent against the Republican, Marco Rubio.  A few months later he got a $1,000 donation to his campaign from former RINO presidential candidate Bob Dole, and just this month he was endorsed by the massive small-brained big-mouthed RINO governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In May, RINO senator Bob Bennett (Utah) lost the Republican primary to a Tea Party challenger, Mike Lee, and hurled insults at the Republican Party.

In June, the RINO mayor here in Reno, Bob Cashell, endorsed Harry Reid over Sharron Angle, giving an incendiary description of Sharron as “wild” which has featured prominently in Reid’s campaign commercials.  Also in June, RINO congressman (South Carolina) Bob Inglis lost the Republican primary to a Tea Party candidate, Trey Gowdy, and responded with typical RINO class by calling the conservative movement racist.

In July, Reno’s RINO neighbor, Sparks mayor Gino Martini, copied Reno RINO Bob Cashell (don’t try to read this sentence aloud while sober) and endorsed Harry Reid over Sharron Angle.  The Republican mayors here in Washoe County are simply an embarrassment.

In August, RINO Rob Simmons (Connecticut), RINO Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), and RINO Bob McCollum (Florida) all lost Republican primaries to conservative Tea Party Republicans and immediately dropped any pretense at being Republicans.  All waxed bitter, condemned the Republican Party, and Murkowski has mounted a third-party candidacy against the Republican candidate, Joe Miller.

In September, RINO Mike Castle (Delaware) pulled a Murkowski by losing the Republican primary for senator and acting like a spoiled brat about it.  He, too, pondered a third-party run against the Republican who beat him, Christine O’Donnell.  Then one of the RINOiest RINOs of all time, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (New York), announced that he wanted to become Elsie the cow and lead the RINO stampede by seeking out and supporting “moderates” across the nation.  He promptly endorsed former-RINO Lincoln Chafee who is trying to resurrect his political career by running as an independent for governor of Rhode Island, and also endorsed “moderate” Harry Reid.

“Moderate” Harry Reid.  You have to laugh at the bald-faced absurdity of that one.

As the RINO stampede runs amok across the land, we should sit back and enjoy their discomfort and panic.  They deserve it.  It’s hard to imagine anything more corrupt and morally bankrupt than men and women who intentionally misrepresent themselves to acquire power, cynically dashing the hopes and thwarting the aspirations of their fellow citizens who elected them.

These people are despicable.

Arlen Specter, the perfect bad example, was a Democrat all of his adult life until he wanted to run for public office the first time.  Realizing that Democrats have trouble running for District Attorney in Philadelphia, he ran on the Republican ticket while still a registered Democrat… and won, unfortunately.  Once elected on the Republican ticket, he cynically switched his party affiliation and continued his political career as a Republican until 2009 when he decided he could personally benefit by switching back to Democrat.

Clearly the man never had a principle that was more complicated than Whatever-Is-Best-For-Arlen, and in 2010 Pennsylvania voters finally realized who and what he is and rejected him.  Like the other RINOs who lost Republican primaries, Arlen got his comeuppance.  That seems to be the theme of this stampede: comeuppance.

The RINOs are in a panic for good reason.  Truth, justice, and the American way is chasing them and they damn well know it.











From Reno, Nevada, USA