Is the GOP finally imploding?

It’s certainly been…entertaining at times, to watch the nascent GOP intra-party civil war.

On the one hand, we have the Republicans in Congress and elsewhere who simply want to be in charge and to have their policies implemented. Ruthless up to a point, but within limits. The ones who are happy to go on “making sausage” as the old saw goes, with respect to legislation, policy, and budgets. In recent years, they don’t like to compromise, but they will when they’re forced to. Besides, it keeps the pork-barrel spending going.

There’s also a baseline sense of civil responsibility among many of them. I personally don’t like John McCain, but he seems to me to typify this type of Republican. He and others like him won’t refuse to participate in the government just because they can’t get 100% of what they want. Sure, there are lots of us who feel what the McCain Republicans want is unreasonable, ill-advised, and often plain wrong — but that’s what elections are about. Even they still respect those, to enough of a degree to make a difference and keep the whole country from falling apart.

Then there are the Tea Party Republicans. Not only do they hate anybody who isn’t them, half the time they can’t even agree on what it means to be an ideologically “pure” Tea Party member. Just witness the intra-party sniping over Senator Ted Cruz’s “Fauxlibuster” this past week. He really is not liked among most of his fellow GOP Senators, and if reports are to believed, they’re miffed that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid let Cruz be the public face of the Republican party for an entire news cycle.

The Tea Baggers, as I prefer to term them, using their own original name for themselves, actually don’t care about elections; all that matters is winning. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, outright theft of elections when it can be gotten away with — it’s all cool. The ends justify any and all means, to them. Losing an election also doesn’t matter; it’s just an obstacle to be overcome.

And their ends aren’t just unreasonable or ill-advised — they’re often monstrous. Like cutting food stamps. Or no disaster aid to stricken communities (especially if they didn’t vote GOP). Or insisting that the free market is just fine for poor, sick people without insurance. A lot of them will deny what they have in mind is a disaster in the making, but when you can get them to admit it, it’s like, “Yeah, that’s not a bug — it’s a feature.”

Irrationally, the Tea Baggers want the United States government to shut down and to default on its public debts. For some reason, they don’t think it’ll result in a global economic disaster that’d make the Great Depression look like a mild head-cold.

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