You view Castle through the prism of an honorable figure, I do not. What I’ve seen as I’ve gotten older is a real concerted effort by RINOs to collude with Democrats to the point that they are a common enemy and proponent of creeping Socialism, and an attempt to have liberals in control BOTH parties. I didn’t mean to say Castle would immediately switch and resign, but he would do so at an appointed time designed to maximize damage to the Conservative movement (Mark Kirk in IL will do the same, one reason he must be defeated in favor of the crook).
I am no longer an automatic vote or supporter of Republicans if they don’t favor open, reformist Conservative causes, and Castle is NOT our ally and I won’t merely support or endorse him on the fallacy that “only he can win.” OK, he wins, then what ? Have a guy in there who literally HATES Conservatives and reformist activists ? If electing Republicans like that is our only viable option, there’s no need for this party to exist. We should stop with the subterfuge and have these folks admit they’re both in the same boat. Better to have Coons and face the enemy head on than have Castle standing behind us with knife in hand ready to shank us at a key moment. Or have Jeffords, Specter, Chafee, Crist, Lisa Murkowski, et al taught us nothing ?
I don’t view Castle as an honorable figure at all; I view him as a selfish liberal (but I repeat myself). It is indeed because I consider Castle to be a selfish liberal that I do not think that he would ever resign in favor of the Spawn of Biden unless he got something even better in return (and at his age, and with what little is left in the Obama administration, there is nothing that they could offer him that would be better than a U.S. Senate seat), and that he will not switch to the Democrats unless the wind was blowing in the Democrats’ direction and he had something to gain by switching (which for a Senator I don’t think could possibly happen before 2016, since the Democrats will continue to lose Senate seats in 2012 and 2014).
But before that situation could possibly develop, Castle will have to face reelection in 2014. If Castle stays a Republican, we can run a young, qualified, experienced conservative against him in the GOP primary; and if he switches to the RATs for the 2014 election because he knows that he can’t win the GOP primary, we can run a young, qualified, experienced conservative against an old, liberal traitor in the general. I would also posit that it would be more difficut to defeat Coons as a 50-year-old four-year Democrat incumbent in 2014 than it would be to defeat Castle in either the primary or the general as a 75-year-old four-year incumbent.