opposing tax cuts.

Stop complaining about taxes -- just live off your trust fund like a normal person! Taxes, I note, have virtually no bearing on someone who is not currently earning an income but living off incomes earned generations ago by better men than he.

Chafee even voted against Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court.

Republicans are always told we're supposed to vote for Fidel Dumbo if he has an "R" after his name so Republican nominees will be confirmed to the Supreme Court. That is true: Save terrorism, there is no more important issue than a president's Supreme Court nominees. But Bush had two Supreme Court nominees and Chafee voted against 50 percent of them, so Chafee doesn't even have that argument going for him.

Chafee explained his vote against Alito -- but for John Roberts -- by invoking the Democrats' idiotic talking point about maintaining "balance" on the court.

"Balance," like "meaningful consultation with the Senate before choosing the nominee," means precisely one thing: a Republican is in the White House. Democrats subscribe to the Brezhnev doctrine: "What we have, we hold." Their interpretation of elections they win by a plurality is that they have a mandate for Ruth Bader Ginsburg; their interpretation of elections they lose is that this means they get to block all Republican nominees.

Steve Laffey is the molecular opposite of Chafee: He is smart, self-made -- and a Republican. He is one of five children and was the first member of his family to go to college -- Bowdoin College, and then on to Harvard Business School. He was president of a brokerage firm, a position he acquired by hard work and native talent, not by attending his father's funeral.

Laffey is the sort of decent, talented person that makes you wonder why he would bother entering an irritating profession like politics. But he did, becoming mayor of Cranston, R.I., when the city was near bankruptcy. Within two years, Laffey had raised Cranston's bond rating from the lowest in the country to investment grade, earning him the sobriquet "the anti-Dennis Kucinich."

True, Rhode Island is an overwhelmingly Democratic state, and the chances of any Republican winning the general election are slim. But that's no reason for the Republican Party to debase itself by running someone dysfunctional and illiterate enough to appeal to Democrats.