Conflict of interest, you say?  Why, balderdash. Twas but a simple misunderstanding, surely.  An accidental oversight. Of which we’ll be told Cantor had no direct knowledge.   PJM:

On a local website co-managed by Shaun Kenney, the newly appointed executive director of the Virginia GOP, a colleague of Kenney’s admitted last night that Kenney’s political fundraising and consulting firm is employed by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

Cantor is now campaigning to retain his seat in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District. Cantor’s challenger for the GOP primary on June 10 — Dave Brat — is politically on Cantor’s right, and is thus receiving national interest from conservative/Tea Party groups that are disappointed with Cantor’s record as majority leader.

The magnitude of the revelation can not be overstated: GOP voters in Virginia’s 7th District have just learned that the person appointed to manage the primary election season for the party is being paid by one of the candidates. And, in addition to the disqualification of Kenney as a fair arbiter of the primary, the financial ties obviously raise the question of whether Cantor, the most powerful Republican in Virginia, had Kenney installed as executive director.

Further, the article revealing the financial ties attempts to describe a longstanding relationship between Cantor and the partners at K6 Consulting. However, this appears to be irrelevant. Cantor’s own financial disclosures for 2013-2014 do not include any records of payments made to K6 Consulting or any other entity tied to Shaun Kenney. The article claims that the upcoming FEC financial disclosure will reveal that K6 is employed by Cantor.

Unless Cantor’s financial disclosures were incomplete, K6 Consulting signed a contract with Cantor just in the past few weeks or months, as Kenney was being selected as executive director.

Indeed, this matches with what I have heard from multiple sources.

Last week, I was told that in recent weeks Shaun Kenney was overheard on more than one occasion — and at two different locations — claiming that “he had landed the big fish, Cantor.” The two locations were the Republican Party of Virginia Headquarters and the Richmond General Assembly Building.

Notes Brat, in response to the article (and listed in one of several updates):

“Since no Democratic challenger has emerged from that party’s own primary process, the GOP primary election on June 10 will result in the next U.S. Representative for Virginia’s 7th Congressional District.

Yet with this revelation, any pretense of fairness regarding that June 10th election has been dashed.

We now ask Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Pat Mullins to explain how and why Shaun Kenney was appointed Executive Director.

We are also calling for an independent investigation into the financial relationship between Eric Cantor, Shaun Kenney, and the Republican Party of Virginia.”

(My emphasis)

Question:  will there be blowback — with Cantor’s establishement cronies, attendant remoras attached to one of the apex predators in the House, willing to break their sucking, sycophantic grip and form their own school of hide and retreat?  Or will they just try to ride this out as the bombast of a primary challenger who hasn’t any right to challenge one of the foremost members of the House leadership in the first place?   Because, well, that’s just not done, you see.  Regardless of how corrupt and manipulative the incumbent sonofabitch is, and regardless of how he fails to truly represent his base constituency once he makes it to DC.

He’s a sure thing, and we need to win to fight.

I know this because Ann Coulter and Karl Rove, among others, keep telling me this — just as they kept telling me that Mitt Romney was conservative, or that Chris Christie was the future of the party, whereas rabble rousers like the Jr Senator from Texas and the Jr Senator from Utah need to stop harming the party with their idealism and inexperience in negotiating the Ways of DC.

But here’s the thing about GOP establishment politicians:  make the fire hot enough, and they’ll begin to realize that they are indeed frogs in a pot, and — because they are nothing if not committed to their own political survival (the left’s pols will take one for the team, because to do so promotes the Cause) — they may just hop away.  Or swim away.  Depending on which of my metaphors you prefer.  If either.

So.  Time to turn up the heat.

I’m convinced the GOP lost the Virginia Senate race because they would rather see Terry McCauliff in the Senate than someone like Cuccinelli.  The same can be said of Richard Mourdoch in Indiana.  And countless others.  There is, after all, a reason the GOP leadership and its big money donor hold conclaves to discuss how they can neuter and defeat the TEA Party conservatives, not how they can effectively combat big government statism.  Because the truth is, they like big government statism, and they can raise money by setting themselves up as the only viable option to run against it.

It’s a shell game.  And we’re the suckers on the street corner who are never supposed to find the pea.