Oh boy, this is going to be great!
"There is now an out in the open civil war within the Republican Party," conservative Iowa radio host Steve Deace wrote in a Politico op-ed this week.
He's right.
Karl Rove has launched a new group, the Conservative Victory Project, which will aim to select GOP Senate candidates, weeding out future Todd Akins and squashing the prospects of anyone deemed unelectable.
It's not sitting well with conservatives. Its first purported opponent is Steve King, a very conservative congressman with a history of colorful comments, who may be considering a run for Senate in Iowa.
After pantheon of Tea Party campaign groups (The Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and Tea Party Express) bashed the new effort, on Wednesday a cluster of conservative leaders demanded the new organization fire its spokesman, Jonathan Collegio, for calling Brent Bozell, a pundit who runs the conservative Media Research Center, a "hater" in a recent radio interview. Collegio had alleged that Bozell, a critic, has an ax to grind against Rove.
As the song from Evita¹ goes, "Dice are rolling, the knives are out/Would-be presidents are all around/I don't say they mean harm/But they'd each give an arm/To see us six feet underground."
The tension between the far right nutbag headcases and the "moderate" corporatist Republicans is about to come to a head. Someone's going to be very angry at the end of it all.
Indeed, Joe "YOU LIE!" Walsh has created his own super PAC to go up against the Conservative Victory Project, in an attempt to save his own ass, since he's embarrassed the party time and time again.
Rove's idea is to fund incumbents and slightly more sane Republicans to run against bugeyed trollbait candidates who would ruin the chances for the GOP to gather more members from outside the old white male demographic.
Let's face facts: every time a Teabagger screams about rape, that's probably four votes out of a hundred the GOP loses. The only way they are even relevant any longer is through gerrymandering.
It sort of comes to a head here, doesn't it? Or at least, it should barring a major intervention by a figure of unimpeachable authority in both camps.
After all, thirty -- no, forty -- years of the corporatist wing dangling the social conservatives like puppets on a string while picking their pockets of both votes and tax money has probably created a monster that will eat the party from the inside like in one them Alien movies.
Rove is trying to prevent this. His track record is not particularly good when it comes to this kind of thing. He can ram through a bad President on an unsuspecting nation, but he seems to lose focus when he has little prizes littering the landscape. Remember his boast of a "permanent Republican majority"?
He never even came close to any of that. Well, maybe "majority" for a couple of years, but even then, intermural fighting made it impossible for President Bush to effectively pass any meaningful legislation. Even his precious tax cuts had to be rammed through...three times!...on reconciliations, which limited their destructive force.
Rove spent a lot of Bush's "political capital" in building the majority he so desired and then saw it all melt away by 2008. In doing so, he dipped into a well of derp that seemed bottomless, but that was more because no one ever imagined anyone would be crazy enough to go that far off the rails to find candidates.
It seemed bottomless the way a root canal seems endless.
The GOP's problem is pretty simple to sort out: their base is bugshit crazy. Rather than change the base, encoura ge engagement by people with at least one foot on planet Earth, they prefer to force this asylumist wing into a cage. They are quite literally riding a tiger, which means they'd better not get off.
¹ "New Argentina"
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