The GOP Civil War

The first battle is being led by none other than General Karl Rove.

They've already stabbed Reagan! A bold first offensive!

He's oddly trying to do the right thing. Part of the GOP's problem is that they have lost the vision to find the right things to pick fights over. They're losing because it's become trivially easy to bait them into dumb fights like the Birth Control thing, or now GOP strategists telling the party to stop opposing gun background checks because WHAT THE HELL PEOPLE.

The questions I'm interested in are, how hard will the Tea Party fight back (will they be able to unify like they did against Scary Black Man), and how long will this last? I could see a notable impact on the 2016 elections if the Tea Party doesn't get a thorough spanking in 2014.

Duh. When you have the batshit insane leading the charge for the entire group, of course the less-batshit insane are going to get caught in the crossfire.

Toe the line, toe the line. Wait, where is the line? Oh, who fucking cares anymore. The GOP is a blight, divided, and has no idea what their own party identity is anymore. Is this a proper place to quote Ripley from Aliens?

"Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away [in the Republican Party]?" A: Yes

"They've [The Tea Party] found a way in, something we've missed"

"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

And the best one of all!

"We were brought to the planet by what our company has told us, and Kane went into this strange ship that we have found there/ But when he came back he had something attached to his face, some kind of parasite. We tried to take it off but it wouldn't come off, but soon it sort of came off all by itself and died. Kane seemed fine, we were all having dinner. I don't know what but that thing must have layed something inside his throat some kind of embryo."

It's like the Tea Party burst out of the chest of the Republican party and started dripping acid on everybody and ripping things up.

Ooh, an update!

I am totally okay with a "Todd Akin problem" becoming a thing.

I think this is one of the big problems a lot of people have. They insist that they're the "base", when they're actually just a vocal fringe minority. The real base tends to be on the sidelines keeping quiet till goaded into action.
(This holds true for a lot of MMO board warriors as much as it does political activists)
[also see recent Israel elections]

So Rove made millions in the 2012 cycle (and produced an abysmal return on investment)

...and now he is promising to help open the epistemic closure he has spent decades creating? Giant Brass Ones on Rove. I'd say he was laughing to the bank but he appears to lack the human sense of shame and dignity and is probably immune to Irony.

[/QUOTE]They've already stabbed Reagan! A bold first offensive![/quote]


I'm not worried.

The only faction that matters on this issue is the Koch brothers' checkbooks. Tea Partiers can get all indignant and fired up (because that's what they do!) but if they run out of funding their organizational ability will dry up with it.

Rove is a cretin but not an idiot. I imagine that he's already gotten some kind of tacit approval from the Koch brothers to dial back the crazy inside the GOP. If not, then it really is a GOP civil war.

I love sharpwriter's work. Hadn't seen that one before. Nice touch with the D.A.R.E. sticker on the raptor saddle.

Yes, because obviously, it's better to pander only to a small base of extremists and alienate the majority of your potential supporters. That'll work great as a long-term solution!

Politico compares the GOP purge to Fox News's own pruning. Most of the info isn't new, but the highlights are decent enough for those just tuning in.

And then Politico comes up with a rather disturbing mental image for this situation:

"Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has been running around the country warning anyone who will listen that Republicans must quit being the “stupid party” that nominates nutty candidates."

I love the implied insult of Republican voters here.

When Rove is to your left, you know you have redefined right wing extremist.

It's pretty funny comparing the Democratic party's reaction to GWB winning his second term (nothing I can even recall although I am sure they did something) and this.

To be fair, that's as much an indictment of the Democratic way of doing business as anything else.

Jethro I think it's important to recognize that what's going on in the GOP is not ideological. There really is not much daylight between Karl Rove and the Tea Party, the main difference is that Rove is a fairly ruthless operative whose primary goal is acquiring and wielding power, whereas the Tea Party are more conventional ideologues. In terms of what they'd like to do with the country, the two are largely identical.

Bill Dungsroman the best comparison for the modern-day GOP is the late 80s - early 90s Democratic party. After getting their asses kicked for a decade the Democrats wised up and made some major ideological adjustments (that whole DLC thing). The important thing is that it wasn't just the sales pitch that changed, the DLC eventually got the party to move to the center on a whole host of issues.

Are you saying what the GOP is doing now is a better way than that?

I'm saying that the pattern of passivity in the face of significant but not catastrophic failure that center-left Democrats have embraced in the absence of a real strategy is not particularly good. The GOP's problem is that it is pinned around horrible ideas and that it only understands the forms of party discipline (ie the external performances of saying all the things that tickle the base) without worrying about the purpose. But the process of self-questioning and factionalizing around important differences is not a bad thing in and of itself, once you set aside that you are talking about almost exclusively terrible people.

Absolutely. I remember reading accounts after Gore had the election stolen from him in 2000* how lots of center left folks were relieved that there wasn't any rioting or civil disturbances after the Supreme Court decision. They were relieved that everybody passively accepted that injustice. That detail infuriated me more than anything else about that election cycle. To be honest, I don't particularly fault the Republicans for doing what they did; that's all part of the game. You seek advantage wherever you can get it. But to roll over & accept that kind of bullshit? That's not part of the game.

*To be honest, I don't remember if he ended up winning in the end. All I remember for sure is that the election was called in Bush's favor before they had any right to do so.

Basically, the Republicans may take a stand on the wrong things, but the Democrats don't take a stand on anything, which isn't necessarily an improvement.

Thanks! Brevity is the soul of

But I think things like being willing to have the country's economy crash rather than compromise one bit, being unwilling to compromise on any thing for any reason, which is the philosophy of the Tea Party, is by definition ideological. Rove absolutely is all about winning, and being smart enough to know if you lose the other guys win, but he's also more pragmatic in what is required. I think Rove is a pure politician and couldn't care less in his heart about, say, forcing a Catholic hospital to provide birth control to all employees. But he'd use that as a hammer to beat on his opponents if he thought it would be effective.

Thanks for the info, guys!

And now a pic from the floor, featuring Ron Paul supporters discovering the "betrayal"