Rachel Jumps Into The Controversy Over Which Republican Is The Craziest... Or Most Dangerous

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Republican Party is a top down organization and they rarely have problems with their "professional right." Their key operating core is organized around keeping wealth and power in the hands of a few families-- and those families finance the party's operations. From time to time the GOP has had to make alliances with grubby populist groups-- racists, xenophobes, religious fanatics, homophobes, Know Nothings, teabaggers, etc, who have little in common with them other than a will to power. This year their Establishment has been thwarted time and time again in trying to nominate plausible conservatives for congressional office.

In the video above Rachel looks at the lunatic fringe Senate nominees that the NRSC and RNC have been saddled with-- largely because of now out-of-control grubby populist groups. There are kooks and nuts like Pinochet-Republican Sharron Angle (NV), Marco Rubio (FL), Rand Paul (KY), Ken Buck (CO), Mike Lee (UT), Linda McMahon (CT) and Pat Toomey. (The ringmaster of the extremist faction in the Senate, Jim DeMint of South Carolina, makes it easy to remember who the worst GOP candidates are.)

Even a sprinkling of purportedly respectable, mainstream candidates, like Carly Fiorina in California, have had to do backflips to cater to the party's extreme right and are now stuck with untenable positions hanging around their necks like albatross. (As you can hear at the link, Fiorina is promising to vote to overturn Roe v Wade, an extremely unpopular position in California, even among significant numbers of Republicans, let alone Independents, who are mortified by her blatant pandering to dangerous fanatics.)

Rachel just covered the Senate, but it's actually even worse in the House, where crazies really have taken over the asylum. In yesterday's Washington Post Greg Sargent covered one case of a high-profile Republican candidate with huge backing from Pete Sessions' NRCC, Bill Flores, who doesn't think John Boehner is sufficiently extreme and won't commit to voting for him as Speaker! And Flores isn't the only one with those feelings-- just the only one willing (or stupid enough) to talk about it in public. Boehner is viewed by movement conservatives as a lazy drunk more concerned with his tanning and golfing than with their extreme agenda. They remember-- even if the idiot DCCC doesn't-- that it was Boehner who engineered passage of Bush's 2008 Wall Street TARP bailout and they want to replace him with the more right-wing and ideological Eric Cantor (who also helped engineer passage of Bush's 2008 Wall Street TARP bailout).

And all over the country energized right wing extremists have supported unelectable fanatics or similarly flawed candidates who may be able to triumph in a Republican primary but will have virtually no chance in a general election. Look at the western part of Miami Dade (FL-25) where the GOP could have gone with a mainstream, even moderate, candidate similar to Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Marili Cancio) but are instead picking a corrupt sociopath best known for beating up women and lying to the media! This one, David Rivera, happens to be the NRCC's favorite candidate to replace Mario Diaz-Balart (who's fleeing the demographic realities that have made this a Republican-unfriend district). Rivera has been plagued by allegations that he's listed in the Miami Dade County Clerk of Courts website as a repeat domestic violence offender. The chairman of the Florida State House Budget Committee and chairman of the Miami Dade GOP recently had his campaign send a fundraising letter to all 4,000+ employees of Florida International University reminding them he appropriates their paychecks. If you think Rivera's ethics scandals and history of abuse is bad, just look at his voting record. He opposed a very popular smaller class-size amendment, supported allowing oil companies to drill three miles from Florida's shores and supported the extreme right's crusade to ignore the wishes of Terry Schiavo's husband. Combine all of this with the fact Rivera, who calls himself a "fiscal conservative," ran what Florida newspapers called "the most irresponsible budget in the history of Florida" while voting for tax-cuts for luxury yacht owners, and you have one of the looniest Republicans in the country.

The Republicans have one thing going for them-- the Democrats, particularly really bad leadership from clueless dim-wits like Debbie Wasseman Schultz, who seems to think a record of abject failure will propel her into the chairmanship of the DCCC, and Bob Menendez who is busy racking up the worst record of a DSCC chairman in history. But then, of course, the Democrats having something going for them too: the Republicans. And not just this one: