IT'S NEVER A STALINIST PURGE IF YOU'RE A REPUBLICAN

Lisa Murkowski must be sent to reeducation camp:

Alaska Republican party leaders plan to consider whether to reprimand U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski for opposing Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

The party has asked Murkowski to provide any information she might want its state central committee to consider.

Party Chairman Tuckerman Babcock says the committee could decide to issue a statement. Or he says it could withdraw support of Murkowski, encourage party officials to look for a replacement and ask that she not seek re-election as a Republican.

He says the party took that more extreme step previously with state legislators who caucused with Democrats.

I'm so old I remember when rank-and-file Democrats dared to back a primary challenge to pro-war senator Joe Lieberman in 2006. Upholders of moral decency detected the sound of jackboots:

The New York Times columnist David Brooks writes that Kos “fires up his Web site ... and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way.” The New Republic senior editor Lee Siegel (now suspended) warns portentously of the dangers of “blogofascism,” a movement bearing worrying similarities to the Fascist forces that transformed post–World War I Europe into a “madhouse of deracinated ambition.” When the netroots aren’t Nazis, they’re proto-Stalinists: Jonathan Chait sees them as heirs of the “McGovernite New Left,” possessed of the same “paranoid, Manichean worldview” and “humorless rage” as extreme-left radicalism.

Elsewhere, Brooks referred to the anti-Lieberman campaign as "a liberal inquisition" conducted by "semi-nuts" who "insist on a Stalinist line of discipline."

No one ever says anything like that about Republican attempts to impose purity. They didn't say that during the multiple Tea Party primary challenges in 2010 (including a successful challenge to Murkowski by a gun-crazed nutjob whom Murkowski subsequently beat in the general election by running as a write-in candidate) and they're not saying it now, when swearing allegiance to the true Trumpian faith is the convert-or-die demand of the party's mainstream. As in most things, purging the ideologically incorrect is OK if you're a Republican.