The Great Unraveling: The GOP examines itself in free fall

[kpete]

The Great Unraveling: The GOP examines itself in free fall

Joe Biden got some excellent news yesterday. For the first time in more than two years of ABC/WaPo polling, President Obama topped the 50 percent approval mark in job performance. “That compares with 71 percent disapproval of the Republicans in Congress,” reports ABC News, “with six in 10 calling their struggle to select a new House speaker a sign of dysfunction within the GOP caucus.”

I don’t know which is more uplifting: that Obama is back in the black or Republicans are drenched in red. On the surer side of knowability, though, Obama will still be his solid self in 2016 — which is particularly good news for a legacy presidential candidate — while congressional Republicans will have further ulcerated into bleeding chaos. By winter, they will have hauled us to the edge of national catastrophe several times. Thus the happiest days will be here again, for the GOP’s current 24 percent approval rating will, by then, be cause for internal nostalgia.

The electorate is beginning to figure this out, and conservatives are freaking out. Their party is an incurable blight, a wasteland of fringy frivolity and crackpot extremism. The Republican House is a thunderdome of bloody imbecility, the Republican Senate is a hothouse of pornographic presidential hopefulness, and the party’s leading contenders for the republic’s highest office are two very implausible wombats.

The spawn of strategic Bill Buckley’s baby, National Review Online, wailed yesterday that “members of the Republican establishment are starting to give voice to an increasingly common belief that Donald Trump, once dismissed as joke, a carnival barker, and a circus freak, might very well win the nomination.” If so, the carnival-barking Trump will be embraced by much of the establishment, which the electorate will then dismiss as the real joke.



more:
http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2015/10/the-great-unraveling-the-gop-examines-itself-in-free-fall-.html

[frizzled]

1. You could also see this as a realignment towards populism; it's the old guard freaking out

Republicans will also control Congress forever thanks to gerrymandering, so even in the very worst case they're hardly imploding. Unfortunately.