Frank Rich: Eric Cantor is positioning himself to be the tea party's speaker, and his lust for power

[pampango]

may well make him willing to risk default, however politically self-destructive that may seem to those who remember the Gingrich shutdown fiasco. Meanwhile, Boehner and McConnell, whatever their public praise of the tea party or Cantor, are the establishment GOP and must answer to the corporate/financial interests that bankroll the party, are frightened of right-wing populism, and want the debt ceiling raised, pronto. (Don't forget, McConnell backed the candidate opposing tea party hero Rand Paul in the 2010 Kentucky senatorial primary.)

But Rick Perry, should he get in, might be the real right-wing threat to Romney. He's beloved by the religious right and is far closer to the tea partiers — remember, he at one point suggested Texas might secede from Obama's U.S. — than to the establishment. (Perry has further riled the Bush wing of that establishment, exemplified by Rove, by dissing W.)

If Palin does not get in — and doubly so if Perry does not get in — she (Bachmann) could well be in a position to hold a potential nominee like Romney hostage to tea party demands in much the way Boehner has been humbled, if not castrated, by the party's congressional tea party wing (including Bachmann) in the D.C. negotiations over the past couple of weeks. It could make for a hell of a convention drama.

But basically, we still do have about a quarter of the country (according to polls) that refuses to believe that Obama is a "real" American — a group that includes not just birthers (from Donald Trump on down) but also conservative "intellectuals" like Dinesh d'Souza who (in Forbes) railed about Obama's "Kenyan anti-colonialism." These attempts to delegitimize Obama's American bona fides, to portray him as "foreign," are all encoded racial animus. We'll wait for history to weigh in, but this race-obsessed minority may do more damage to the GOP that houses it than to Obama over the long run.

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/07/frank_rich_adam_moss_alpha.html

[smaug]

1. Popcorn -

Time to buy stock in Orville Redenbacher's before the 2012 reTHUGLICAN convention!

[Bozita]

2. K&R