Alley Cats : A Coterie of Republican Sycophants
on Sunday, December 9, 2012
A Coterie of Republican Sycophants
by Scott Rohter, December 2012 / Updated February 2019
A coterie is defined as a loyal following of enthusiastic fans and supporters. A cattery is simply a boarding house for stray cats. These are two very similar sounding words with vastly different meanings. In Oregon there are catteries, and there are coteries, but there is only one place in the whole State where a cattery and a coterie exist together in the same location… only one organization that combines both the functions of a cattery and a coterie. This is an organization of particular interest to me because of the unique breed of cats that it houses. It is the Oregon Republican Party.
Allen Alley was once the State Chairman of the Oregon Republican Party. He sought the Party’s nomination for Governor in 2012 but he was defeated in a very close Primary race by the man who went on to lose to former Democrat Governor John Kitzhaber in the General Election. That man’s name was Chris Dudley.. Neither Allen Alley nor Chris Dudley are particularly conservative, but Dudley actually beat him in the Republican Primary fairly and squarely! Yet there were plenty of hard feelings, so in an effort to heal the Party’s rift Mr. Alley was hand-picked to become the State Chairman of the Republican Primary, but he has never given up his dream of becoming the State’s Governor. That is why he continues to appear on so many media forums emanating out of Portland.
After Alley stepped down as the Party State Chairman he launched another campaign for Governor in 2016. His enthusiastic supporters are referred to by some as “Alley Cats”. Now that he has his managed to place his own people in control of the Republican Party in most of the State’s thirty-six Counties, the Republican Party has become his own personal “cattery” or coterie. This has continued on with the election of Bill Currier as State Party Chair and his recent re-election in 2019 over Sam Carpenter who happens to be a real conservative.
Wherever I post my commentaries these days they are generally well received. Many people, sometimes even thousands of people read them, and share them on Facebook, except in my own home State of Oregon. Here I am treated like an outcast ever since Bob Tiernan stepped down as the State Party Chair. Instead of reading my pugnacious commentaries about politics Oregon Republicans readily launch into ad hominem attacks upon me for daring to state my opinion. Why is Oregon so different than most of the other forty nine States? I will attempt to answer this question.
I used to think that it was something in the water which made Oregon so different. After all we do have some of the most unique water sources in the whole world. The State’s biggest metropolis Portland is located in the northern part of the State right at the confluence of two major rivers, the Willamette and the Columbia. That’s why when Oregonians refer to RINOs the phrase has a dual entendre. In addition to meaning Republicans in Name Only it also means Republicans in Northern Oregon! The two words are synonymous.
I used to think that the phenomenon which makes northern Oregonians so different than the rest of the people in this State was caused by something in their water Bull Run Reservoir is the source of the drinking water for the entire Portland metropolitan area. Perhaps there was a liberal virus that is being spread mostly now through human contact, one which was originally transmitted by a waterborne pathogen from the depths of Bull Run .
Maybe that explains all of the bull that people from Portland are typically so full of. That would go a long way to explaining why Portland is the way that it is, and why so many people call it “Moscow on the Willamette”. But whatever is causing the people of Portland to lose what’s left of their common sense is not just limited to Portland anymore. It is spreading to other parts of the State and even beyond our borders to the rest of America. Where ever you go you can see people exchanging their common sense and traditional values for progressive ideology and looney liberal fantasies at a very alarming rate.
A few years ago the Republican National Committee Chairman was Reince Priebus. When his name was first bandied about for the position of RNC Chair he was supposed to be this staunch conservative guy from the backwoods of Wisconsin. but time proved otherwise. To our horror he turned out to be a very effective obstacle for conservatives principals.. He and another member of the Good Old Boy’s Club, the Congressional dunderhead from Ohio, former Speaker of the House John Boehner rigged the Republican National Convention at Tampa and changed the Rules to make it much harder for grass roots activists to have any meaningful impact on the Party at a national level. He also pulled various other shenanigans during his tenure as Chair of the RNC. (Read my article entitled Wisconsin Shenanigans.) http://lessgovisthebestgov.com/Reince-Priebus-GOP-chairman-shenanigans.html
When Donald Trump picked Reince Priebus in 2018 to be his Chief of Staff it was probably a sincere attempt to make peace with the political Establishment… but he didn’t last long at the White House… At around the same time John Boehner was stacking Congressional Committees with Republican sycophants who were willing to do his bidding. Boehner removed four conservatives from their positions on key Congressional Committees including Tim Huelscamp from the State of Kansas who was a real favorite of the Tea Party. If John Boehner wasn’t going to be the death of the Republican Party he was certainly going to be around to administer the last rights and attend to all of the funeral arrangements, but then an amazing thing happened. All of a sudden after meeting the Pope he found religion and resigned. For a while hope was running rampant in Washington with speculation that maybe Louis Ghomert might become the next Speaker of the House, but alas to our chagrin another RINO stepped up to take his place, and Paul Ryan did an admirable job of filling John Boehner’s less than conservative shoes. He was also from Wisconsin just like his buddy Reince Priebus…
Meanwhile back here in my own home State of Oregon Republicans are cursed with even more stupidity than John Boehner, Reince Priebus, and Paul Ryan together can administer. From the State’s top leaders all the way down to local PCPs, for over two decades this State continues to pick some of the least qualified and most ineffective people to lead the Republican Party. The situation here is much worse than it is in other States. That is why the Oregon Republican Party continues to remain irrelevant to this day.
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