Tea Party conservative Christine O’Donnell knocked off longtime Republican insider milquetoast Mike Castle in the Delaware Republican primary Tuesday for the Senate seat once held in a lockbox by Vice President Joe Biden.

It’s another victory for the GOP rank and file, whose party leadership has abandoned them in recent years on its great detour into the wilderness of big-government leftism.

One of the lessons that leaped out at me in recent days, as O’Donnell stormed from out of nowhere to win, was the symbolic difference in the two candidates:

O’Donnell: pretty, young (41), wide-eyed, smiling and bright, marching off confidently from appearance to appearance with a strong conservative message. The very image of the girl next door.

Castle: old (71), weathered, worn, dour and gray, walking lamely and slowly. The very image of the tired old white-guy GOP that has turned off young voters at least since the days of Reagan, and maybe longer, pitching leftist policies from his RINO perch.

GOP leadership wants to cling to its tired, old, go-along-to-get-along image. The GOP rank and file, in primary after primary, is very clear in what it wants: young, new, vibrant, and conservative! They don’t want to go along to get along with big-government statism. They want to fight. They want to take back their country.

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Yes, it’s true my home state of Massachusetts is the native habitat of that frigthening political specter, the moonbat.

But not everyone in the Bay State is lefty loon. Some are downright proud to be American, and enthusiastically support our veterans. Consider the story of Kimberly Rogers and Paige Haley, two friends from the town of Pepperell who just introduced 50 Back lager — half the profits are given to veterans charities.

Among the organizations they support are the USO and Homes for Our Troops, a Massachusetts charity that builds handicapped accessible homes around the country for wounded veterans.

We wrote about them today in The Boston Herald. Right now the beer is available only in Massachusetts. But I thought the nationwide Big Government community would like to hear their story. If the beer catches on, as I imagine it will, then the sky’s the limit.

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I was in Normandy in June 2004 for the 60th anniversary of D-Day when I picked up a souvenir front page of the New York Times from June 7, 1944, which reported on the invasion of the day before.

I keep a copy of it in my office (and the PDF on my website) because it’s a fascinating and illuminating piece of American history.

One, it provides a clear window into the role that Christianity and Judeo-Christian values played in American culture on that “Day of Days.” Two, it proves, in no uncertain terms, how radically the New York Times, the Democrats and their kindred political spirits have shifted to the left in the 66 years since our nation’s finest hour.

The Times’ lead story in the left column of the June 7, 1944 edition was headlined “Country in Prayer.” Reporter Lawrence Resner wrote: “Led by President Roosevelt, the entire country joined in solemn prayer yesterday for the success of the United Nations armies of liberation.”

We learn in the piece that church bells rang across the land, including in Boston’s Old North Church, and that Americans flooded their houses of worship. New York governor Thomas Dewey attended services at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Albany, while in Manhattan, some 50,000 people jammed Madison Square for a prayer led by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.

It pays to remember that D-Day was a Tuesday.

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We Bostonians fancy ourselves a sophisticated, intelligent type of folk, even if it manifests itself in a quirky local vernacular, foul-mouthed self-righteousness and a self-absorbed elitism built upon the glory days of 1775, back when we ruled the school.

New Englanders, for example, boast t-shirts and bumper stickers which tell us that the “Yankees suck” — despite the 27 World Series rings for the Bronx Bombers and the seven for the Red Sox that would seem to indicate that we, in fact, are the ones who suck.

We also call Boston The Hub, as in the Hub of the Universe. That’s right. Our tiny little city’s got megalomania issues … which probably explains why 90 percent of  diversity-loving voters in Brookline and Cambridge pulled a lever for Obama in November 2008. No Bostonian worth his chowder, by the way, has ever called the city Beantown.

The intellectual elitism is so profound here that the average plumber in Boston — and I come from a long, proud line of Local 12 guys — thinks that he’s wicked smaht, smahtah even than a brain surgeon from Alabama. It’s just the way we’re raised — snobbish old blue-blood Brahminism adopted by everyone from Boston’s nouveau riche to the old Irish-Catholic working class.

So the arrival of Sarah Palin in Boston Wednesday was like a visit by an alien being from the planet of idiots in the eyes of the local so-called intelligentsia.

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In my other life, I’m a food writer for The Boston Herald – a cultural raisin in the sun in the far-left world of food journalism here in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts.

Voltaire

So I was shocked, during a dinner the other night with a bunch of folks in the biz, when one local restaurant critic declared that he had “a very illiberal” view of abortion: he was pro-life! Several table-mates nearly spit up their merlot and brie.

I stood by his side, but not by his phraseology. “It’s a liberal view if you’re the baby,” I said, making my point but not many friends in the process.

The incident highlighted an issue that’s been eating at me for quite some time: the misuse of the word “liberal” in the current political lexicon.

As you know, the American cultural divide is defined by two terms: on the right we have “conservatives” and on the left we have “liberals.”

There’s only one problem: the leftists are anything but “liberal.” In fact, I stopped using the term “liberal” to describe leftists quite some time ago. I call them what they are: “leftists,” i.e., people who espouse weakness in the face of dictators overseas and favor a dictatorial big-government doctrine here at home.

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The left has been at war with traditional American values for decades: the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, free enterprise, Christianity. All are objects of scorn and ridicule by those who hope to “remake America” – to use President Obama’s phrase – into some sort of leftist utopia on the model of those that have already failed all around the world.

The war on Christianity is a particularly disturbing fight. The battle has been lowlighted over the years by leftists who twist themselves into intellectual knots in an effort to remove Christ from Christmas – which is like trying to remove the wet from water.

But the fact that they’re trying to defy the laws of physics doesn’t stop leftists.

Their war on American culture took a new turn this week, when the city of Davenport, Iowa, at the urging of its civil rights commission, decided to rebrand Good Friday as the “spring holiday.” A certain Baptist minister from Montgomery, Alabama might be shocked to find that civil rights activists these days are devoted to striking Christ from the public lexicon.

The decision sparked a national firestorm – Good Friday, after all, is merely the day that Christians around the nation and the world mark the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The city finally had to reverse its decision.

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Misguided leftists can learn a lot from American history. They can learn a lot, specifically, from the lessons provided us by the Pilgrims clinging to life on the Massachusetts coast in 1623 and by the wide-eyed British invaders who set foot on the New World in 1776.

Just ask Nathaniel Philbrick and David McCullough, two of the nation’s most popular contemporary historians.

I couldn’t help but notice very illuminating (and perhaps unintended) odes to traditional conservative values in recent works by each author about pivotal moments in American history.

The first illuminating passage came in Philbrick’s spectacular book, “Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War.”

He does an incredible job of taking the pop-culture caricature of the Pilgrims and bringing their real story to life – real humans with real struggles and hopes and dreams.

You know the basic story of the early days of the Plymouth Colony. The settlers had trouble feeding themselves in the first few years, to the point that starvation was a very real problem. But they quickly found a solution.

Here are Philbrick’s words:

“The fall of 1623 marked the end of Plymouth’s debilitating food shortages. For the last two planting seasons, the Pilgrims had grown crops communally … but as the disastrous harvest of the previous fall had shown, something drastic needed to be done to increase the annual yield.”

So here’s what happened:

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One way that leftists have managed to keep alive their dead, defeated, bankrupting theories on issues like so-called health care is by perverting the definition of very basic terms.

The word “right” is one of the most glaring examples of a definition that’s been distorted by the intellectual house-of-horrors mirror that is leftist theory.

Image: CATO Institute

Every American has the “right” to health care they argue.

They’re right. Every American does have a right to health care. In fact, they have that “right” right now. They have the right to buy insurance. They have the right to not buy insurance. They have the right to pay out of pocket. They have the right get a second opinion. They have the right to rub a little dirt on it and suck it up. They have a right to help out  a friend in need.

What they don’t have is the “right” to health care in the perverted leftist sense of the word.

A “right,” in the traditional American lexicon laid out by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, is something that exists by virtue of our humanity. It is “inalienable” and we are endowed with these rights by our creator. No government or institution has the power to take away these rights. You exist, therefore these rights exist.

In the leftist sense of the word, though, a “right” is something very different. In fact, it’s not a “right” at all: it’s a handout provided to you by government, often at exorbitant costs to society.

“I have the ‘right’ to health care!” the leftists demand angrily. “Therefore, the government must provide it for me!”

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