Has the G.O.P. Gone Off the Deep End?

The short answer, of course, is "yup". The Gray Lady, many links:

Doherty, no liberal, is representative of the growing strength on the right of the view that the Republican Party has gone off the deep end.

“Their rigidity is killing them. It’s either holy purity, or you are anathema,” Tom Korologos, a premier Republican lobbyist and the ambassador to Belgium under George W. Bush, said in a phone interview. “Too many ideologues have come in. You don’t win by what they are doing.”

Good, but I wish they'd hurry up and lose. And shut up and go away.

The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe.

Why do the names "Hitler" and "Mussolini" come to mind? Hmmmmm...

McInturff put his finger on the problem: House Republicans are invested in their own re-election and not in the long-term viability of their party. Those who put the lowest priority on presidential politics are those most worried about a primary challenge from the right, and it is this cohort that forms the backbone of the Tea Party faction in the House — the cohort most wedded to nativism, intolerance and hostility to the poor. These are the members nudging the Republican Party over the cliff.

Follow the lemmings...

There is a striking correlation between the rise of conservative talk radio and the difficulties of the Republican Party in presidential elections.

...and take Limpbaugh et al with you...

A part of the Republican problem lies in the party’s disproportionate dependence on white Southern voters. These voters are well to the right of the rest of the nation, and they elect the dominant block of hard-right conservatives in the House. Of the 234 Republican members of the House, 97 — two-fifths — come from the 11 Confederate states, and these 97 are almost uniformly opposed to negotiation of any kind with Democrats.

It is the Southern conservatives who, along with their Northern Tea Party colleagues, seek to kill immigration reform and who insisted on removing the food stamp program from the recently passed Farm Bill.

These members of the House are what Feehery describes as “nostalgia” Republicans who define conservatism as “the ability to fight progress.” They produce a flood of statements and declarations that Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, calls “offensive and bizarre” and that he claims are turning his party into “the stupid party.”

And a fine mess they've made of it too.

The Republican Party is struggling to resolve the conflict between its pragmatic establishment wing and its ideological-suicidal wing. Speaking right after President Obama’s re-election, Haley Barbour, a former governor of Mississippi and a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, summarized the party’s problem succinctly. At a meeting in Las Vegas of the Republican Governors Association, Barbour said: “We’ve got to give our political organizational activity a very serious proctology exam. We need to look everywhere.”

Heh. Sorry 'bout the visual. Shoulda warned ya! Good luck for them to find someone with a strong enough stomach to do that! I'll wait for the autopsy. Soon, I hope.