Why the GOP Primary is Giving the Party Ulcers
It's nothing new. In a two-party system, the parties are necessarily going to have to be composed of disparate ideological strands, often knit together by nothing more than detestation for "the other side."
Democrats have it, too. We have our incrementalists, our visionaries, our single-issue fanatics (on a whole range of issues,) and plenty more. We've struggled, in the past, to integrate "New Left" tropes into "Old Left" complacency, to deal with visionaries for whose vision large numbers of Democrats were by no means ready, to strike balances and compromise between passionately-motivated segments with conflicting passions.
It's the nature of politics.
But rarely have the component parts of a major political party been so sharply delineated and so mutually hostile as with the three versions of Republican ideologue. And rarely have the resources and passion lined up so strongly behind each strain of ideology, fighting for the soul of the Party so vigorously that they are in danger of totally eviscerating it, leaving a bloodied corpse on the voting-booth floor.
The 2012 Primary is coming down to the wire, and the three remaining standard-bearers in the intra-Party contest show no disposition to concede and no respect for "Party Unity."
But Mitt and Newt and Rick, each cognomened in his own sharp monosyllable, are the very souls of conciliation and reason compared to their followers.
Rick's believers are doing The Will of a narrow, fanatical, vengeful God who will smite them (and all of us!), root and branch, if they continue to fail to bring about the conditions necessary for the Millenial Apotheosis.
The plutocratic Oligarchs who have been forced to take shelter in Mitt's wake have woken up to the threats of the populist resurgence, and they have unlimited money and unlimited will to throw it into The Cause.
And the neocon loons forced to make do with Newt as the last remaining and marginally credible loon in the race have long experience at all-out, total dirty-tricks political war and no inhibitions whatsoever.
From this side of the aisle it's difficult to discern which of the three might be infinitesimally less terrifying as an occupant of the Oval Office, but the followers of each have no doubts. It's Their Guy. And, by corollary, they Must Defeat The Other Two. Only their own standard-bearer holds out any hope at all to save them from the horror of more slow, incremental progress toward the re-establishment of a working economy and a barely functional body politic, a fate worse than nuclear annihilation and the zombie apocalypse combined.
Somewhere in the bowels of a few well-upholstered offices, there lurk the pitiful remnants of the conservative pragmatists who long ago lost control of their party, gnawing their fingernails and compulsively glugging down Pepto-Bismol by the liter. Excuse me-- by the quart, we don't have no truck with those Yerpeen socialist metricists.
They stitched the monster together. They strapped it to the table and poured voltage through it. They rejoiced when the creature broke its bonds and wreaked bloody chaos through the core of America's complacent, politically-unmotivated electorate, pulling waves of torch-waving, pitchfork-bearing mobs in its wake.
Now the creature has turned to devour the laboratory, smash the equipment, and leave the power cables writhing and sparking in the ruins.
Mary Shelley might have been able to muster some sympathy for the dramatic inevitability of their hubristic demise.
But not me.
grimly,
Bright
= new reply since forum marked as read
Also, we've had acrimonious primaries before, but this one's ugly. 
