Dana Milbank, everybody, waking up to the idea that vast swaths of the Republican electorate would rather kick Democrats in the junk than do just about anything else including any type of governing at all.

Mourdock hits Lugar for voting in favor of Obama’s two Supreme Court nominees (he also voted for all five court conservatives). Mourdock condemns Lugar for supporting the START Treaty, the assault weapons ban and the immigration DREAM Act (Lugar also voted against Obama’s stimulus, health care plan and financial reforms). “His bipartisanship, his willingness to push the Obama agenda, has caused him to be labeled President Obama’s favorite Republican senator,” Mourdock falsely alleges in one ad.

As Mourdock piles up support from the likes of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Grover Norquist, Lugar is still clinging to the notion that substance matters. Last week, his office issued a news release titled “Lugar announces elimination of weapons of mass destruction through Nunn-Lugar.”

Some Democrats hope that Mourdock beats Lugar because it would increase the likelihood that Democrat Joe Donnelly will win the seat in November. But that’s not why Hoosier Republicans should reject Mourdock. They should reject him because they still believe that national security trumps partisanship.

Dana Milbank, who has spent a good deal of time echoing Bush administration falsehoods,  repeating wingnut truisms and mocking liberals, is now amazed that Republicans might put partisanship above national security.

Well, hon, this is kind of what all those filthy hippies were talking about all those years, you know, while you were writing columns about how stupid and mean and unfair we were, making fun of and/or condescending to the issues we cared about, and telling everybody in the Washington Post’s vast readership that we were not anything that anybody needed to listen to.

The mewling of longtime Republican incumbents and their reporter fanboys gets limited access to my sympathies. I think the tea party is a bunch of clowns, but even more clownish is the idea that they’re any less entitled to choose conservative candidates for office than any other bunch of clowns. If teawads can get enough votes in a primary to knock out Dick Lugar then that’s exactly what they deserve to have happen, and maybe next time when somebody warns that this new and shiny movement is in fact made up of short-sighted regressives they won’t be shouted down as unserious.

These have always been your people, guys. Take a good long look. These will always be your people. This is a 30-years-long trainwreck and everybody warned you, but you just had to keep hurtling full throttle toward the burned-out bridge, luggage and chickens and goats and crates of melons flying off the cars at every turn. You can’t stop it anymore. Enjoy the crash.

A.