THAT'S A JOKE, SON!

As you may have heard, incumbent Senator Thad Cochran won last night's Mississippi primary, and it is supposed he reversed Tea Party nut McDaniel's polling lead by encouraging black Democrats to cross into the GOP primary (as is legal there) and vote for the lesser of two evils -- a practice to which I expect they must be accustomed by now.

There have been some entertaining ravings and rendings of garments over this, but my favorite bit comes from a relatively sober report at Breitbart.com. After covering McDaniel's post-election tantrum, Matthew Boyle got an interesting sidelight from an unexpected source:

In an interview by phone with Breitbart News late Tuesday evening after the McDaniel headquarters cleared out, state Democratic Party chairman Rickey Cole said McDaniel should challenge the election results. “Clearly there was some sloppiness to say the least, and probably some failures to comply with the law,” Cole told Breitbart News. 

“I listened to some of McDaniel’s speech, and in a race this close I’m sure there are irregularities that ought to be looked into,” Cole said. “I’ve been around a lot of close elections in my life. I think the candidate owes it to his supporters to make sure that everything was done on the up and up.”

Some conservatives are already reacting as if this is excellent news for their cause. I guess they've been trolling so long they no longer recognize a troll when they see one. Let the bloody internecine battle begin!

UPDATE. With the grim hysteria of Gary Oldman as Lee Harvey Oswald yelling "This is it!" in JFK,  Jeff Goldstein declares that in the wake of Cochran's victory, "the GOP is over. Done with. Finished. Sleeps with the fishes. And we, the legal conservatives, will have no organized vehicle left by which to claim representation."

Great news, right? Hold the laughter, libtards, because Goldstein has a plan to start a new party: one that's not just made up of bitter-enders such as himself, but also "brings in Reagan Democrats," only this time they'll be lured by the charisma of Jeff Goldstein, and maybe a Reaganesque-Democratisch Republican like, say, Chris Christie -- wait, Goldstein doesn't like Christie, apparently he's not anti-homo enough for him -- so I guess it'll have to be Rick Santorum in a gimme-cap.

Our team of crack cryptographers is still trying to decode Goldstein's closing...

And we’ll be colorblind in our purging of what has become a rather dubious "big tent," to boot.

...but I'm guessing it means "if we get a black guy, you're the real racist."

UPDATE 2. Erick Erickson of Red State: "The Republicans have become the party of lobbyists..." which is like saying Earth has become a planet of oceans and land masses.

UPDATE 3. At National Review, John Fund shows his fellow wingnuts the fatal flyer with which McDaniel was Stabbed in the Black, and then offers a very strange thought experiment:

Imagine if a tea-party candidate in some state had openly appealed to registered Libertarians to help him win a close primary runoff. There would have been howls of outrage that people who didn’t agree with Republican values on social issues and foreign policy were being invited to decide a GOP race.

Really? I would expect yawns. Like most thinking people, I assume libertarians of any-size L vote for Republicans -- they sure ain't voting for Libertarians in any kind of numbers!

But I do remember somebody getting pissed when Libertarians "openly appealed" to libertarians to vote for Libertarians instead of Republicans -- namely, Republicans after the 2013 McAuliffe-Cuccinelli race. Hell, Fund's colleague Charles C.W. Cooke, one of NR's many crypto-libertarians, pleaded before the election for readers not to vote for Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis, "the supposed 'Libertarian' candidate," whom Cooke unmasked as "a social liberal. He is in favor of gay marriage, is (radically) pro-choice, and supports the legalization of marijuana. In this regard, he stands in stark contrast to the Republican candidate, Ken Cuccinelli..." It's clear who the real libertarian is here!

Oh, you know who else bitched about it? John Fund.