He can be both a partisan hack and very much believe that Tea Party candidates are going to cost them election votes.

They probably expected Tea Party members to be the same as "internet libertarians" - declare their independence from the big two, proclaim how the entire system is wrong and vote straight Republican establishment anyway. Instead, they looked at Obama's primary road and realized "hey, we can run them as Republicans and rely on Old Republican apathy to win primaries" instead. It succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and into their worst nightmares, and now they're trying to reel it back in before 2012 has Saint Palin as a Presidential candidate and nutjobs on the ballot in the swing states.

So yeah, he's shilling for the Republican party because said party is in danger of imploding if this keeps up.

Doubtful, although Michelle Bachmann got elected so its not completely impossible.

Would it be such a bad thing if the Tea Party became a significant political force in America? I mean, these people will absolutely try to legislate some incredibly fucked up stuff.

They would try to mandate Christian prayer in public schools, outlaw all abortion, slash taxes to the bone for the rich, destroy social programs and causing unemployment and crime to skyrocket, pass Jim Crow laws against Muslims...I could go on and on. Their rhetoric on these issues is so strong, they could not possibly get away with NOT introducing laws on this stuff like the Republicans have done for so long.

Maybe that would finally motivate the complacent and silent moderates to get off their asses.

You have a point. When the pendulum swings one way, it'll swing further in the opposite direction. A great example is Carter after Nixon, Kennedy after McCarthyism and Goldwater, Clinton after Bush, and Obama after Bush.

If the pendulum swings to the extreme right and these policies are brought to fruition, then the complacent moderates would really change things in a hurry and you'd probably see an even bigger majority of Dems in the house and senate then we had lately.

,000 says she isn't. It's still Delaware, and O'Donnell is not Senator Brown, who Republicans in the rest of the country are now calling a LIEbural turncoat because his politics have gone so centrist. They should have known that since he voted for the MA health care act that our national health care act was largely modeled after.

Bachmann was elected in a deeply Republican part of Minnesota where immigration of Not-Cenamark is a hot issue.

Harriet: ...except that it doesn't.

Every time they get a majority, they hand something absolutely vital to the electoral process away to corporatists, such as giving voting machine privileges to DeBolt, and passing increasingly difficult to repeal tax breaks to the rich, so that every time we DO get a moderate/Democrat majority, the entire damn time is spent playing clean-up, and then they just wait a turn and start the "BIG GOVERNMENT ACCOMPLISHES NOTHING" routine again once collective amnesia has made middle America forget how bad off it was two years previous.

Ironically, the worst thing that could ever happen to the Republicans is if they ever actually SUCCEED on doing ANYTHING their usual wedge-politics spiels make them shout about. I've talked to Catholics lately who are increasingly becoming self-aware of their "permanent bloc" status, and they might be the first defection in 2012, if the anti-Catholic rants on Beck keep up.

Right on, cognitivedissonance.