It is within the Republicans power to obstruct and, by doing so, make the president look weak and ineffectual. That’s the path they’ve chosen. However, the collateral damage has been enormous and the voters seem to have noticed.

People now are much more likely to tell pollsters that they want to see the president take a confrontational tone with Republicans rather than cooperate with them. That plays right into Obama’s hands as he shifts to campaign mode.

Attending a community leadership training seminar last week, I heard a Republican city council member from Huntsville tell the room he was a Republican, but not a tea party Republican — and with exactly that kind of emphasis. Indeed, tea parties have huge and growing unfavorable ratings these days, as the public understands what lies behind the label is nothing new.

But is the House GOP leadership prepared to backpedal? Evidently not, and in part that is because tea party Republicans are the most engaged on these issues. It’s not that they’re unaware of the polling — take Eric Cantor, for instance, who recently told his caucus to avoid taking things to the brink again:

The message from the majority leader is an effort to prevent the kinds of fights over government spending that could lead to government shutdowns this fall if Congress cannot agree on legislation to fund the government.

It suggests Republican leaders worry they could take a political hit if there is a government shutdown from voters already irritated over the contentious summer talks on raising the debt ceiling.

Instead, House Republicans want to use the crisis to pursue further ecocide and wage-destruction as “jobs bills:”

The Cantor memo provided additional details on the regulatory focus. The week of Sept. 12, House Republicans will try to overrule an NLRB ruling that restricts Boeing’s effort to transfer an assembly line from Washington state to South Carolina. Business leaders accuse the Obama administration of interfering to try to help their labor allies, because South Carolina is a right-to-work state with fewer unions. Labor leaders say the aerospace company is seeking a spot for cheaper labor.

The next month or so will focus on EPA regulations. House Republicans would pull back an effort to regulate coal ash in mining-heavy states that they say would hinder concrete production and cost more than 100,000 jobs. Through the fall and winter, Cantor said, the caucus will vote on at least 10 regulations that committee chairmen have identified as “costly bureaucratic handcuffs that Washington has imposed upon business.”

That is virtual boilerplate from the producerist manifesto. Coal ash regulations do not threaten anyone’s job, much less 100,000. On the other hand, Cantor’s party wants to kill transportation and infrastructure funding that supports hundreds of thousands of actual, real, not-imaginary jobs. If Cantor cared about the concrete industry, he would want to fully fund the maintenance and improvement of roads, bridges, and dams. But that’s not what he wants.

His goal, and that of his majority in the House, is to make sure the president cannot improve employment numbers before November of 2012. They don’t care how many of us are put out of work to accomplish that.

Whether or not Democrats, much less progressives, capitalize on this is another question altogether. I’m pretty sure the president plans on doing so as he “shifts to campaign mode,” because at this point he has every permission to go on the offensive.

With $11 million on hand at the end of June — and about $2 million in reported debt — the RNC’s paid get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort will be limited to just targeted House races, POLITICO has learned.

The same web publication reports that tea parties are ambivalent at best about fundraising:

“When you start chasing the money, you start having to compromise, and that’s where a lot of D.C. organizations go wrong,” said Everett Wilkinson, a South Florida financial adviser who runs two of the biggest tea party groups in Florida. “If we stay trim and we keep our overhead small, we won’t have to raise a lot of money and we won’t have to compromise. No one owns us.”

See, these people think democracy just pays for itself with a magic invisible hand. The tea parties were supposed to reinvigorate the moribund Republican Party, but they are instead leaving candidates cornered by their own base. Many Republicans will stay in office out of sheer inertia; no doubt some new ones will be elected, but not by the tea party.

I said this would happen. When you attempt to build a movement on quicksand, you get a Maine meltdown:

“Amy Hale is a liability to the Tea Party Movement,” Cucci wrote. “Amy Hale has been alienating people by prideful statements, pirating ideas, controlling statements and actions, manipulative actions, shunning advice and giving untruthful advice, which in some cases has resulted in no participation or refrained participation in the Tea Party Movement by those affected.”

Cucci says Hale’s rallies “are nothing more than a GOP promotional with little or no understanding gained for participants as to what the Tea Party Movement is about.” The worst sin, according to Cucci? The tea party rally Hale hosted in Dover, Maine, “was boring, not motivational as claimed by several participants.”

And then there’s Tom Tancredo:

It’s not like Republicans needed any help screwing up in Colorado. They were doing just fine on their own. But Tom Tancredo’s third-party gubernatorial bid has pretty much sealed the deal. Polls — and even some Colorado Republicans — suggest that barring some highly unforeseen circumstance, Tancredo’s presence in the race will all but hand victory to Democrat John Hickenlooper.

I’m going out on a limb now and laying a stake on the trifecta: Michele Bachmann, Sharron Angle, and Rand Paul will ALL LOSE thusly:

Conway came out swinging, mocking Paul for his early gaffes on the campaign trail and attacking Paul as “a waffling pessimist who wants to be the prince of cable TV.”

“There seems to be an emerging theme for Rand Paul and the Republicans this year,” Conway said. “And that theme is, ‘accidents happen.’”

So began a call-and-response routine with the crowd at the event that called for them to repeat the phrase, which came from Paul’s infamous explanation for the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Paul is currently leading by five points in Kentucky, but polls are lagging indicators. It’s only August, Conway has just begun, and having seen previews of his ads in Vegas I am convinced he will beat Paul with or without the latter’s college kidnapping-and-dope scandal. More importantly, candidates like Paul and Bachmann and Angle cannot help themselves: they are gifts that keep on giving.

In these battleground states, it seems, Democrats have not forgotten how to attack; but  even Beltway Dems are beginning to see the tea party as a wedge between Republicans and their base:

Kaine portrayed the November elections as a choice between his party, which under President Barack Obama has put into law a health care overhaul and tougher Wall Street rules, and a GOP-tea party combination that wants to roll back Democratic accomplishments.

“The Republican Party agenda has become the tea party agenda, and vice versa,” Kaine said.

If the GOP were to retake the House and Senate, they would try to privatize Social Security, end Medicare and shutter those two federal agencies, he said.

Democrats cited tea party activists’ statements and GOP support as they introduced a “Republican-Tea Party Contract On America,” a send-up of the 1994 GOP Contract With America that helped Republicans win control of the House for the first time in four decades. Kaine said the Republicans would repeal President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul and the recent Wall Street regulations. (Emphasis mine)

Given a shifting demographic landscape, the GOP has chosen to double-down on its previous strategy: exciting white, middle class people to vote against their own interests. The problem is that, while the tea party was noisy, it was never really all that substantial. Ironically, the tea party itself is very much like the incompetent characters portrayed in Atlas Shrugged.

I repeat my prior assertion: if the Democrats seize this opportunity, there is no reason why November cannot be a progressive storm.

URLs to the website-that-must-not-be-linked:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/40772.html

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/40800.html

On four occasions, Graham met with Tea Party groups. The first, in his Senate office, was “very, very contentious,” he recalled. During a later meeting, in Charleston, Graham said he challenged them: “ ‘What do you want to do? You take back your country — and do what with it?’ . . . Everybody went from being kind of hostile to just dead silent.”

Quote the Second:

“Like maybe I’m having a clandestine affair with Ricky Martin,” he said. “I know it’s really gonna upset a lot of gay men – I’m sure hundreds of ‘em are gonna be jumping off the Golden Gate bridge – but I ain’t available. I ain’t gay. Sorry.”

Like anyone would want to have sex with someone who says they shouldn’t be free to have sex.

I’m predicting more of this between now and November. For those of you who’ve forgotten, here’s Graham meeting the “teabag terror”:

There have been others. One name to watch is Mike Castle of Delaware. By September, we’ll have a leading indicator on the depth of the teabagger fail.

Kudos to Rachel Maddow for recognizing that tea party extremism is essentially leftover reaction to the Sixties. The word she’s looking for — the noun that describes this kind of regressive politics in which history is re-fought, from Texas schoolbook boards to Kentucky Senate races and passing through the town halls of August 2009 — is Kulturkampf. I prefer the German term because I’m a political scientist, and it sounds far more scientific than “culture war.”

I refer now to a post I wrote years ago, back at the beginning of this particular blog:

Kulturkampf is never a call to conversation; Kulturkampf stops all conversation. Kulturkampf is not a call to debate; it is The End of Debate. Negotiation and resolution are impossible — all that remains possible is annihilation of the other side. The only thing left to say is that “they” are wrong.

And on the related subject of “Lost Cause” mythology in February 2009:

In that dialectic of Kulturkampf, Obama destroyed the unspoken bastion of the GOP’s political theology just by being elected. The GOP sees his agenda — health care for all, peacemaking abroad, and active, competent governance — as a threat to their very ability to wage Kulturkampf. Not for nothing have they fostered mistrust of the very word ‘government’ and conspired to “drown it in a bathtub.” There was no coincidence in the Bush doctrine of incompetent government.

Kulturkampf is both means and end to the Culture Warriors. It is no coincidence that their target demographic has bought 60,000,000 copies of the apocalyptic Left Behind series: this is their political End Times.

The Bush era ended with conservatism in collapse. The tea party was an attempt to create a new American right, but what the astroturfers have actually done is resurrect the settled issues of the past. Rand Paul may be walking back his position on the Civil Rights Act, but he cannot help himself; between now and November he will be the gift that keeps on giving. David Frum describes Paul thusly:

Thus far, Democratic efforts to create a vote-enhancing villain had failed. Now Rand Paul has contrived to volunteer himself. It’s as if his mission had been to walk across an empty room without tripping. Instead, he stepped out of the room, rummaged through a hall closet, found a vacuum cleaner, plugged it in, extended the wire, took a dozen steps backward, and then raced forward to catch his ankle, plunge face forward and break his nose. As unforced errors go, this may be one of the most impressively self-destroying in recent U.S. electoral history.

As a libertarian, Rand is likely in favor of the right of suicide. But thanks to him, the damage will now be felt by others too, who will now be called upon to explain where they stand on every fruitbat idea ever aired in back issues of the Ron Paul newsletter.

And how. Even worse than Paul will be the Paulites. Argue with them, and you’ll find yourself rehashing the Civil Rights Acts, the gold standard, and the question of a central bank that was argued and re-argued throughout American history until the creation of the Federal Reserve. They want to undo history; they are all about going back to some mythical, golden utopia of their imagination. Along the way, they would undo every advance of American society and politics.

Lest you think I exaggerate, look at who Rand Paul hangs out with.

This ad has started showing up all over Huffington Post lately. Click it and you’ll visit Ron Paul’s Campaign For Liberty, otherwise known as C4L, where a set of Frank Luntz and Paulite talking points contains the following call to action:

Call Senator Shelby at (202) 224-5744 and insist he support Ron Paul’s Audit the Fed Bill and demand he oppose empowering the Fed.

You would think there was little daylight between Paul and Shelby, but you’d be wrong. Paul, you see, would do away with the Fed altogether; Shelby only wants to strip the Federal Reserve of oversight authority:

“We agree that the Federal Reserve should have a limited range of responsibilities and that its main focus should be on conducting monetary policy,” Shelby said in November.

Alabama’s senior senator blames the Fed for the 2008 financial crisis. While the Fed had a role inflating the housing bubble, its biggest contribution was an institutional failure to regulate. Rather than fix the mismanagement or question the deregulatory zeal that led to the AIG debacle, Shelby would like to engage in disaster capitalism by disestablishing the regulator.

It’s no secret why. His number-one patron from 2005 to 2010 has been the Securities & Investment industry. At $554,888 in contributions, banks and financiers are way ahead of the insurance industry, which only gave him $325,749. They would like a world free of constraints, and Shelby would be happy to give it to them.

Ron Paul, on the other hand, is an ideologue. He actually wants to bring back the gold standard. So what you have here are two ideologically similar Republicans, one holding an extreme position and the other totally owned by banks. It reflects a deeper split between the activist GOP base and Republicans in office — the very place that Democrats are inserting a wedge by forcing the financial reform vote.

If this reminds you of when the firebagging Jane Hamsher tried to pressure Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders to vote “no” on a health insurance reform bill with no public option, then congratulations — you’ve got it.

As to why Ron Paul and C4L would advertise on Huffington Post, your guess is as good as mine. With extremists, triangulation often becomes trigonometry; trying to figure them out can make your head hurt.

Senator Lindsey Graham explains his holdup of the bipartisan climate bill:

“Moving forward on immigration — in this hurried, panicked manner — is nothing more than a cynical political ploy,” Graham said. “Let’s be clear, a phony, political effort on immigration today accomplishes nothing but making it exponentially more difficult to address in a serious, comprehensive manner in the future.”

Holding up a climate bill in the face of melting ice? Not a phony political effort to stop reform. Because comprehensive immigration reform might actually address the issue in a serious, comprehensive manner, and Republicans cannot allow that to happen.

Mind you, they know it’s important. Graham and the Republicans also know how bad the optics of the issue are right now, with Arizona jailing brown people who don’t have a copy of their birth certificate with them:

Abdon was told he did not have enough paperwork on him when he pulled into a weigh station to have his commercial truck checked. He provided his commercial driver’s license and a social security number but ended up handcuffed.

An agent called his wife and she had to leave work to drive home and grab other documents like his birth certificate.

Jackie explains, “I have his social security card as well and mine. He’s legit. It’s the first time it’s ever happened.”

Both were born in the United States and say they are now both infuriated that keeping important documents safely at home is no longer an option.

Jackie says, “It doesn’t feel like it’s a good way of life, to live with fear, even though we are okay, we are legal…still have to carry documents around.”

Republicans know all this, but don’t care. The Grand Old Party simply cannot allow Democrats to be the ones who actually, y’know, do something about it. They had their chance to do something under Junior Bush, but chose inaction; if the immigration bill under discussion resembles the one Bush failed to get through a Republican Congress, they’ll denounce it as un-American anyway.

It’s just normal Republican reactionary behavior. The GOP also knew that health care spending was bankrupting families, business, and government; they just didn’t want the Democrats to succeed in doing something about it. But the uglier truth is that a right-wing teabagging base will crucify any Republican who votes for immigration reform, and that has the GOP terrified.

They know the demographics are changing and they could lose the southwest for a generation. But they also know the racist right-wing authoritarian warmongering teabagger fringe will crucify any Republican who votes for reform. Their solution for this dilemma is…nothing. Down the memory hole again! Graham wants to quash any discussion of the issue — and no doubt most Republicans in Congress would really, really like that to work.

They’d rather be free to demagogue in home districts without being on the record in Washington, which is a pretty good argument for Democrats bringing up immigration reform ASAP. It’s also an example of the GOP painting itself into rhetorical corners that guarantee minority status.

Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.

The FBI also raided a “Christian” militia group. From the Hutaree website:

We believe that one day, as prophecy says, there will be an Anti-Christ. All christians must know this and prepare, just as Christ commanded. Luke 22:35-37, And He said to them, “When I sent you without money bag, knapsack, and sandals, did you lack anything?” So they said, “Nothing.” 36, Then he said to them, “But now, he who has a money bag, let him take it, and likewise a knapsack; and he who has no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one. 37, “For I say to you that this which is written must be accomplished in me: ‘And He was numbered with transgressors,’ For the things concerning Me have an end.” This clearly states the reason for the training and preparation of the Hutaree.

Conveniently not included is Luke 22:38: “The disciples said, ‘See, Lord, here are two swords.’ ‘That is enough,’ he replied.”

Rich is essentially recognizing what I warned about one year ago. Now, I’ll make a second prediction: the mutterings among the tea party demographic will commence. My next gun show will feature at least one addled personality telling me the Hutaree, who were apparently planning to attack Muslims, were no danger to anyone. Right-wing radio will catch fire; denunciations of Teh Obamanon™ will use the same language aimed at Clinton from 1993-1995. We may even hear the term “jackbooted government thugs” used again.

And someone, somewhere will take it as a sign to begin the apocalypse.

Of course, inevitably there will be claims of an “inside job” and a “false flag” operation. There always are. The Samsara of Wacky does not permit any sort of introspection that might tear a hole in the paranoid universe.

Two swords are never enough. A dozen swords are not enough. There is no limit to the rationalizations of an apocalyptic mind.

At HuffPo, David Frum’s wife recognizes the end of conservative philosophy:

I can categorically state I’ve never seen such a hostile environment towards free thought and debate — once the hallmarks of Reaganism, the politics with which we grew up — prevail in our movement as it does today. The thuggish demagoguery of the Limbaughs and Becks is a trait we once derided in the old socialist Left. Well boys, take a look in the mirror. It is us now.

As I have been saying: the teabaggery is only hurting the party now. Friendly fire is the order of the day.

ThinkProgress has a list of her statements about a third party; up til now she has taken the more popular position among teabaggers that the movement shouldn’t form its own party. But Sarah was never good at that consistent-thought thing, and she’s always eager to grow her personality cult one way or another.

Yes, Republicans, your creation will now go to war with you. Bad enough it was shouting insults and spitting on Congress members over the weekend; now it’s going to take all those RNC-supplied signs and attack you with them. But keep it up! You’re doing great!

A website called “Save Our Movement” demands right-wing purity from Republicans:

We Declare ourselves INDEPENDENT of the Republican Party, which has in the past manipulated its Conservative Base to win election after election and which then betrays everything that Base fought for and believed.

We reject the idea that the electoral goals of the Republican Party are identical to the goals of the Tea Party Movement or that this Movement is an adjunct to the Republican Party.

We reject the Republican Party professionals who now seek to use the Tea Party Movement for their corrupt and narrow political purposes.

We acknowledge that standing on our principles does not mean throwing out our common sense; we will NOT abandon our principles in the name of a nonexistent bipartisanship or a misguided devotion to an illusion of “pragmatism”, which disguises a desire to betray us in its name.

We reject the scare tactics of the Republican Party, which seeks to herd us into voting for candidates who supposedly represent the “lesser of two evils” in the name of fealty to the principle of small government and then having to suffer such candidates as they betray that principle. We are not well served by parasites whose livelihoods depend on the very State whose power to reward or sanction we elected them to limit and proscribe.

We insist that the Tea Party Movement does NOT consider the election of Republicans in and of itself to be necessarily beneficial to our goals.

We demand the Republican Party understand that we reject its attempts to co-opt us.

WE WILL WORK AGAINST THEM when they oppose our views by trying to force Repub­licans In Name Only (RINO) on us. When Republicans are in accord with their Conservative Base as well as the Independent voters who align with it, IT WINS; when they are NOT in accord with the Conservative Base and the Independent voters who align with it, IT LOSES.

We reject RINO money; we reject RINO “advice”; we reject RINO “professional experi­ence”; we reject RINO “progressivism”; we reject RINO support of Big Government; we reject RINO back room deal making; we reject RINO pork spending; we reject false RINO profes­sions of Conservative views and we reject the RINO’s statist subversion of the principles of small government for which the Republican Party is supposed to stand.

Republican Party attempts to ignore the will of the Base, as it did in 1976, 1992, 1996, 2006 and 2008, resulted in disaster; when it embraces the will of the Base, as it did in 1980, 1984 and 1994, it wins historic victories.

We demand the Republican Party recognize that while the Tea Party Movement cannot guarantee their aid will help them win elections, it is very likely WE CAN MAKE THEM LOSE if they are disdainful of our goals.

Meanwhile, the party continues co-opting activists:

One of the Tea Party’s top leaders was recently paid $7,500 by a campaign run by a California Republican group to promote one of their ballot initiatives.

Mark Meckler is a spokesman for the Tea Party Patriots and had publicly distanced himself from the Republican Party. But state records show that he accepted the money for “petition circulation management” from the “Citizen Power Campaign Supported by the Lincoln Club of Orange County.”

The RNC’s leaked fundraising memo has garnered a backlash:

“They don’t get it,” Judson Phillips, a Nashville lawyer who organized the National Tea Party Convention earlier this year, told the Beast. “They freaking don’t get it.”  Phillips said he disagreed with the characterization of small donors as “reactionary” and motivated by “fear.”  “Our motives are patriotic,” he said. “Can they be any more insulting? I guess they could have called us teabaggers, but Holy Cow, I’m so blown away by the whole thing I’m just sitting here stunned.”

A spokesman for FreedomWorks, the activist group led by Dick Armey that helped organize the first Tea Party protests, called the presentation “inept and silly.”

“I’m just kind of shocked,” the group’s spokesman, Adam Brandon, said. “I dont get what they were trying to accomplish…if I were them I’d try to say we’re strong on policy and we’re going to get the energy of these Tea Party activists and earn their trust. That seems a much more compelling message than cartoons.”

He added that the “fear” descriptor, while technically accurate in the sense donors are concerned about government policy, sent the wrong message. “When people start using the term ‘fear’ you start getting the black helicopter mythology going,” he said.

Pass the popcorn.