Mama Ducks eat their young

So it turns out neither Bobby Jindal's pandering nor Vance McAllister's flirtation was enough to keep the Duck Party placated. They've gone and entered their own candidate in the 5th District.

Businessman Zach Dasher, the cousin of Duck Commander chief executive Willie Robertson, will announce Monday morning that he will be a candidate in the 5th Congressional District.

The news follows Congressman Vance McAllister’s recent indecision on whether he will run this fall. McAllister, R-Swartz, had initially said he would not seek re-election after a video surfaced in April of him kissing a married aide.

“I will make my decision when qualifying opens,” said McAllister during a Wednesday interview with LaPolitics.

Also on the fence is state Sen. Neil Riser, R-Columbia, who lost to McAllister in the special election runoff last year. “I’ll probably be making a decision within the next week or so,” Riser said last week.

Also.. "Zach Dasher" is clearly a made up name, right?

Update:   Here is Thomas Frank's latest Salon column which might add some context to this no-conservative-is-ever-nutty-enough phenomenon.

Why is it that Republicans are uniquely prone to this cycle of idealism and betrayal? I think the answer is simple: Because free-market idealism is a philosophy that automatically leads to betrayal—and also to misgovernment, and cronyism, and even corruption, as we saw in the DeLay era. The movement’s greatest idealists often turn out to be its greatest scoundrels—think of Jack Abramoff, or of Oliver North, or (as Rick Perlstein has pointed out) the gang of hard-right purists who signed up to do dirty tricks for Richard Nixon. In truth, there seems to be no real contradiction between conservative morality and following the money; to be a capitalist true-believer is to sell yourself.

Free-market idealism, after all, is about applying market forces to the state. This is what everything from Citizens United to toll-road privatization is all about. To be true to such a principle means respecting incentives, answering the call of money. And it ain’t small business who has the money in Washington these days.

A number of years ago I wrote about the market-minded men of the Bush era who did the bidding of lobbyists and who filled the federal agencies with hacks and fools, and I think my verdict on them still applies: “They did not do these awful things because they were bad conservatives; they did them because they were good conservatives, because these unsavory deeds followed naturally from the core doctrines of the conservative tradition.”

So the cycle goes on, uprising after uprising, an eternal populist revolt against leaders who never produce and problems that never get solved. Somehow, the free-market utopia that all the primary voters believe in never arrives, no matter how many privatizations and tax cuts the Republicans try. And so they seek out someone even purer, someone even more fanatical. They drag the country into another debt-ceiling fight, and this time, they say, they really mean it! But what never occurs to them is that maybe it’s their ideals themselves that are the problem.

No matter how much pandering Bobby Jindal does, someone can always label him a sellout... especially now that he's a national candidate.   McAllister was the Duck darling just a few short months ago until he was embarrassed by a dumb scandal.  Suddenly he's a sellout too.  There's always an ostensibly purer guy waiting in the wings to take advantage.. and inevitably become the next "sellout" someday.