The current inability to replace John Boehner ([The speaker chase: Who’s next?) is just another nail in the GOP coffin.
It is clear that the GOP is demonstrating their inability to function as a national political party.
Unfortunately for the GOP they are so blinded by their own media brainwashing that they don’t even know they are dead. They are continually told that their problem is their leaders. They have come to believe that their message is still a great message and the only reason more people don’t buy into their message is their messengers. So, they direct their anger at everyone else.
There are a few rational voices still in the GOP. Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) correctly observed that, “it is total confusion — a banana republic,” said . “Any plan, anything you anticipate — who knows what’ll happen? People are crying, they don’t have any idea how this will unfold, at all.”
Looking at the leading GOP Presidential contenders, it is clear that none of them have any desire to bring order and direction to the increasingly dysfunctional party. If anything, Trump and others are throwing gas on the bonfire that was formally the GOP.
No One to Blame but Themselves – So they do.
The right wing media cartel has brainwashed their listeners to believe that “Right Makes Might.” And since their message is clearly “Right” the only reason they are not getting more legislative victories is that the GOP leaders are, as Trump would say “weak” and “losers.”
Like “Fragging” in the Viet Nam War, the GOP base has turned their utter disgust with their leaders inability to deliver on their campaign promises to return to the 1950’s to training their fire on their own commanders.
The key foundational driver of this circular firing squad is their fundamental contempt for compromise.
And it is clearly the media cartel that has to take the blame for the result we see. Limbaugh, Savage, Levin, and most others have convinced the GOP base that “Compromise = Weakness.” I personally cannot fathom this world view. But, clearly the GOP based has bought into it, and it has obviously proven that they can actually not govern.
Former Senate Republican leader Trent Lott (Miss.), who was also once part of the House GOP leadership said, “This hell-no caucus — the degree of purity that they’re looking for doesn’t exist.” He gets it. Unfortunately for the now defunct GOP, the base does get it.
What’s funny to me is that the same 21st Century values that GOP base wants to retreat from – diversity and lack of authority – are the very same values that are driving the GOP implosion. In the old days junior members of Congress would have known their place and would have had to seek the favor of more senior ones to rise through the ranks. However, today, because of the 21st Century tools available, most notably 21st Century Communication tools, even the most junior representative or the most outsider, has the power to connect directly to a national audience — as first-term senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and the Donald have so visibly demonstrated.
(Cruz recently went way off the reservation and called Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) a liar on the floor of the Senate. In the old days, that kind of breach of decorum would have been unimaginable. But, it was actually applauded by the GOP base.)