How Fast Is The GOP Running Down The Road To Extinction?

I suspect most regular readers of this blog care more how much collateral damage the Republican Party will cause to normal Americans and to our country in the process than how soon they'll go the way of The Whigs... and the Dodo bird. In the video above, for example, Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes discuss how the rest of the world, cognizant of how dysfunctional Republicans have now become that, U.S. international commitments are now looked at askance. Hillary Clinton, on her last day in office, referred to these Republicans and their supporters in the right-wing propaganda machine when she said, "There are some people in politics and in the media who can't be confused by the facts. They just will not live in an evidence-based world." It's now virtually impossible to be a Republican elected official and live in an evidence-based world. They have their own evidence... and they pull it right out of their asses and repeat it to each other until they all believe it.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Cynthia Tucker discussed how the rabid right is leading their party down the road to ruin. She decries the example of arch-conservative Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss who is being hounded out of office for not being conservative enough.

Last year, Georgia blogger Erick Erickson, a leader of the right-wing faction, wrote: “Saxby has consistently stabbed conservatives in the back and it is time to take him out.” By the time Chambliss voted in the earliest hours of New Year’s Day to support a tax hike on Americans earning more than $400,000 a year-- a deal which, by the way, cemented in place George W. Bush’s tax cuts for everyone else-- he was doomed among the absolutists.

Chambliss has said publicly that he’s not running from a primary challenge, but instead leaving a Congress that he finds dysfunctional.

But he is disingenuous-- “The one thing I was totally confident of was my re-election,” he told reporters last week-- in suggesting that the prospect of a primary challenge didn’t factor into his plans. He might have won, but he would have been forced to defend his decision to employ negotiation and compromise with his Democratic colleagues, strategies Republican extremists despise. He would have encountered rabid challengers willing to accuse him of grotesque crimes against party dogma. And he may have been forced to renounce the statesmanlike image he has spent the last few years building.

The senator is right about this much: Politics has become ugly and ruinous, especially inside the Republican Party. He joins a list of towering conservative figures who have left office-- or been run out-- after encountering the lunatic ravings of the crazed ultra-right. That includes Bob Bennett of Utah and Richard Lugar of Indiana, GOP stalwarts who lost to challenges by ultraconservatives.

And who might replace Chambliss? Several Georgia Republicans are eyeing the race, including U.S. representative Paul Broun, who told a church audience last year: “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.” Broun, by the way, is a physician who sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

Obama and other Democrats-- as well as many moderate Republicans-- have wondered how long it will be before the raging fever breaks on the rabid right. Well, by the time it does, the patient-- the Republican Party-- might be dead.

Since we started with Rachel, let's end with her as well-- and the future of the Republican Party. Let's hope it isn't all of our futures. I for one, am giving up Verizon as my telephone company. Watch the video and you'll know why: