politics

What the tea party should do is form their own party. But they know they will not stand a chance without riding the GOP coat tails.

The Democrats did not have a strategy of "divide and conquer". This is a pure Republican issue of fighting within the Party. The Tea Party bunch will not get along with any moderate Republicans (or moderate anyone) and the conservatives have shifted so far to the right that they are causing Republicans to fear them.

What is the Republican Party now? I remember what it used to be and what it stood for, but now it is so fractured and divided on what its goals are that it confuses me. The "party of smaller government" keeps coming up with new ways to increase the reach of government into our private lives. The "party of fiscal responsibility" won't admit that our military is too big and too expensive for what we need. The "party of social values" is trying to legislate who can get married and eliminating contraception.

There is no leader for the Republican Party, and George W. Bush certainly didn't lead the GOP. He was just a figurehead and now he's even more out of sight than Romney. Boehner is going to start smelling like burnt toast the way the House Republicans are fighting among themselves, and McConnell is off in anti-Obama-land. Over the next several years I expect the Republicans to become even more divided as they fight for control of their own party. And as they drag each other down the Democrats will quietly fill the void, without having to do anything at all.

This internecine warfare would be funny to watch except for its disastrous effect on the country!

The true downfall, for now, of the republicans is when they joined the democrats in their concern for votes overtaking their concern for the country. Having the house pass the senate "deficit reduction bill" that was so full of pork that it cost more than the tax increases brought in was a huge mistake.

I remember, after Watergate, when the Minnesota GOP changed it's name to the Independent Republican Party. Then Reagan came along and they dropped the Independent part. I used to joke that they went from Independent to Codependent. This is what happens when a codependent family loses it's controller. It becomes estranged. During the Cheney years they were lock step. Now they're lost. Good.

Can the GOP/TP be any more disorganized right now? I think not. They totally blew their only chance for 2014 when the House collapsed in a poor attempt at trying to craft a bill for the cliff. They are toast in 2014 yet are too foolish to even figure that out. Absolutely clueless...

I don't dare vote for any Republicans any more, because of the Tea Party. It's become too risky, and as more of them get into the House, the worse the gridlock becomes. That's a shame, because I've always preferred a mixture of both parties. Each has it's good and bad points, and it used to be that having them sort it out together led to reasonable compromises. But it's now glaringly obvious how dysfunctional things really are, now that Christie has had to beg his own party for disaster relief. It was even more horrifying once I started reading and discovered that the House was blocking disbursement of flood insurance claims of people who had been paying for flood insurance. The Tea Party is full of crooks...people not willing to uphold their obligations and see to their responsibilities. The lack of basic integrity and good faith is disgusting. Yet people keep voting them in. Why?

The Tea Party's influence on the GOP has been fun to watch in a slow motion train wreck kind of way. - And the fun isn't over yet! They're just getting started.