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" I&amp;#039;m sorry, but I can&amp;#039;t take all this talk about a &amp;quot;civil war&amp;quot; within the Republican party seriously when all it seems to be about is not nominating people who lose, and not saying the words &amp;quot;rape&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;wetback&amp;quot; out loud. I know it&amp;#039;s all that the cool kidz in DC want to chat with me about, but the problem with the Republican party is the monster that the modern conservative movement has made out of it, and until the monster gets killed and buried, any attempt to show that the party has changed is bound to be little more than a short-term grift in service of a long-range con. (And, I&amp;#039;m not buying this at all: The escalating battle comes amid a dramatic post-election shift among congressional Republicans away from ultraconservative orthodoxy. House GOP leaders have sidelined some of their most far-right members from key committees and are moving away from using the threat of crisis as a bargaining chip to achieve their ideological goals. They&amp;#039;re even entertaining the prospect of stricter background checks for gun purchases and supporting normalizing the status of illegal immigrants - both unthinkable just months ago. &amp;quot;Entertaining the prospect&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#039;t get you a cookie. Until I see them actually vote on these things, and until I see them pass, I&amp;#039;m siding with St. James as regards the worth of faith without works.) No matter who &amp;quot;wins&amp;quot; the battle between Karl Rove and the Tea Party -- which is to say, the battle between the corporate interests who are paying Rove&amp;#039;s salary and the corporate interests behind the other passel of marionettes -- nothing is going to be solved until the party commits itself to wringing out the crazy from its institutions at every level, and nothing that happens in Washington is going to do that. For example, we have the latest extravaganza out of the Iowa legislature. Iowa Republican lawmakers are introducing legislation that would outlaw abortion and allow prosecution of doctors in Iowa. Rep. Tom Shaw, of Laurens, says he&amp;#039;s trying to protect human life, whether &amp;quot;you&amp;#039;re a zygote, an infant, a teenager or an adult.&amp;quot; The bill he introduced Wednesday would prohibit abortion from the moment of conception. Doctors who perform abortions could be charged with murder. Nothing done in Washington matters a damn if Republicans in the states keep voting for people like this. This is where your next generation of Republican congresscritters will come from. These are the ideas that animate your party at the local level. These are the people who hold the signs, and stuff the envelopes, and stand out in the snow, collecting signatures. The guy who stepped up and smacked Rove the other day in the space provided by Tiger Beat On The Potomac? Yeah, he&amp;#039;s a real prize, too. But he&amp;#039;s a man of more influence out in the country than either Rove or Matt Kibbe. He&amp;#039;s a man of influence because he has a constituency -- a substantial constituency -- among voters without whom the Republicans cannot win, given the current galaxy of policy ideas the party is pushing. If you have a substantial constituency in your party that believes that Karl Rove is not conservative enough, then the right choice is to wonder exactly how far from the pack your ideas have caused you to stray. It&amp;#039;s the ideas that are the problem, not the people who hold them. Whoever wins the current DC pissing match between corporate-backed independent organizations will have no influence over these people whatsoever. This is an idea that should not even arise in the mind of a sensible Republican politician, let alone become an actual bill that has to be debated. If there has been proposed a systemic approach to stopping the way bad (and unpopular) policies bubble up in the Republican party, I haven&amp;#039;t seen it. All I see in Washington is two rich guys fighting over who gets to run Marco Rubio. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a17427/pay-no-attention-to-those-men-inside-the-beltway/>