The Congressional GOP is destroying itself: Why its reliance on extremists is slowly poisoning it to

[applegrove]

The Congressional GOP is destroying itself: Why its reliance on extremists is slowly poisoning it to death

by Bob Cesca at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/28/the_congressional_gop_is_destroying_itself_why_its_reliance_on_extremists_is_slowly_poisoning_it_to_death/

"SNIP..............


Party leadership didn’t appear to anticipate the corrosive power of Tea Party’s slow-motion coup d’etat of the GOP, culminating in the flummoxing of the speaker race. By the time the RNC and the GOP caucus realized what it’d gotten itself into, sometime around the unseating of party celebrities like Eric Cantor, it was too late. Once again, the GOP traded short-term political gains for long-term headaches, not unlike Karl Rove’s political calculus during the Bush years, leading in part to the Iraq War — a plan that was partly intended to help re-elect Bush in 2004, but which eventually helped to doom his legacy.

The loudness and temporary popularity of the Tea Party during its 2009-2010 prime was perceived by the establishment GOP as golden ticket to longer-term success, and the 2010 midterms seemed to confirm it, even though structural factors were equally significant in delivering the House to Republicans. The GOP, backed by Fox News and the conservative press, assumed the tea party represented the future of the party, combining conservative orthodoxy with grassroots support from “the folks.”

In other words, the GOP’s love affair with an attractive new political movement gradually devolved into an ugly marriage. Now, even as the movement’s popularity wanes, it has nonetheless managed to bring the establishment down with it, devaluing the brand and opening the door for outsiders like Donald Trump and Ben Carson.

The Tea Party has never really cared about coalition-building or compromise, both necessities of, you know, actual governance. Instead, it’s all about political domination, even though, to the rest of us, its positions seem incoherent and contradictory.




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[Tarheel_Dem]

1. And this is exactly what I DON"T want to happen to the "Democratic" party.