GOP Civil War Continues: Head of TeaParty.org Calls for Tea Party to Abandon Republicans
by Nick Goroff
"Cruel and malicious. Unprovoked. Revolting."
These are the words Teaparty.org CEO and Minuteman xenophobe
Steve Eichler used to describe the GOP's recent reaction to Tea Party
backlash over the recently struck Murray-Ryan budget deal. Stating that
the GOP has "declared war" on the Tea Party, one is inclined to wonder
if he perhaps missed his own website's declaration of war not even two
weeks ago. In his diatribe, Mr. Eichler fails to acknowledge the root of this war pitting brother-cousin against brother-cousin, stating,
In recent days, Speaker of the House John Boehner, along with other Republicans have openly scorned and attacked the Tea Party without provocation.
In his recent post
to the website he runs, Eichler bends and twists in ways that would
make circus contortionists green with envy. He lambasted establishment
Republicans -- many of whom previously praised the Tea Party as crucial
to their electoral victories -- as well as conventional GOP support
structures such as the Chamber of Commerce for having, as he sees it,
turned their backs on the fringe right wing astro-turf campaign.
Calling
the "day of elephant intimidation over," Eichler issued a spiteful and
threatening warning in the form of a question, asking where the "tens of
millions" of Tea Party patriots will channel their money if the GOP
refuses to toe the line. With their typical all-or-nothing attitudes and
ardent neoconservative policy agenda, it would seem the innate
fractures in the right wing are now truly beginning to crumble under the
weight of their own intellectual dishonesty.
In
an interview with Fox News recently, former Governor and Presidential
candidate Mike Huckabee -a man noted for his often theocratic approach
to public policy- slammed the Tea Party for their intractable nature, saying,
In politics, if you have an all or nothing, now or never mindset, you’re going to get nothing and you’re going to get it forever.
Adding,
Politics is not theology...
How
far will this civil war within the conservative base go? Could a broken
right wing electoral base create the room needed for truly progressive
candidates from the left to step forward and out of the shadows?
Possibly.
Short
of the Democratic Party's well renowned talent for snatching defeat
from the jaws of victory, Eichler's threats to advocate for the funding
of "grassroots" conservatives over that of establishment Republicans
stands to divide the right in ways that progressive political analysts
have only dreamed of.
And
should this come to pass, should the sides eat each other into
obscurity and irrelevance, will either side of the regressive right
survive? According to Eichler, his side will...
The Tea Party will survive, but can the same be said of the Republican Party?
We'll see Steve. We'll see.
No comments:
Post a Comment