There must be blood

I love the smell of internecine napalm in the winter:

Even as they breathe a sigh of relief about Romney’s apparent Florida turnaround, some party establishment types are nonetheless bracing for a protracted and ugly fight between factions that the GOP hasn’t seen for decades.

Thus writes Politico, whose last several words leave one groping for clarity. Which decade would that be? When has the GOP ever experienced such an internal brawl? The H.W. Bush-Buchanan spat was a Sunday garden party compared to the current blowout, and Goldwater was but a desperate shot in the dark against an altogether unbeatable incumbent.

No, this time, for the GOP, these are, potentially, the End Times.

Although some tea partiers will no doubt scandalously support Mitt the Inevitable out of partisan reflex, an appreciable number will not. And if we've learned anything about the vintage Tea Party Personality, it is this: it is absolutist, it is nihilistic, it is motivated and it is hideously outsized. Roll those first two destructive features into the last two of insurgent mobilization, and you get quite the bloody purge -- or at least a fanatical, even suicidal attempt at a bloody purge. The tea party is the atavistic, "Better Dead than Red" faction that will never bow to the pragmatic, nor will it ever -- that most detestable of words -- moderate, nor will it ever settle for anything less than how it sees itself now: as the GOP's Final Solution to Ideological Purity.

Deprive the tea partiers of their way, and there will be blood. Which means there must be blood, soon, and lots of it, since "some party establishment types" comprehend that they will never survive these lunatics as one of the two major parties.

Comments

[priscianus jr]

I guess this is a good place to point out that the Tea Party types have always been around. These were the people that seriously believed Dwight Eisenhower was a communist. They believed the government was poisoning our precious bodily fluids.
They just never had very much influence.
In the context of mainstream 1960s America, Goldwater was considered an extremist, even by many Republicans. But Goldwater was a moderate compared to these guys.