Another one of those liberal rags, this one called "The American Conservative," has blamed Ted Cruz for damaging the Republican party. Wait....

Source

Courtesy of The American Conservative:  

Jonathan Bernstein considers what the pointless shutdown fight has done to Ted Cruz’s political prospects: 

"It’s one thing to have a reputation as a loudmouth; it’s quite another to have a reputation as a loser. That’s what the shutdown fight has done to Cruz. Among true believers he’ll be the one who was a leader in a fight that surely would have won if the squishes hadn’t sold them out. But for most party actors, including many sympathetic to Tea Partyism, he’s going to be the guy who ran up the wrong hill."

It would have been different if Cruz’s gamble had been over a minor issue that drew little attention, but the purpose of the gamble all along seems to have been to turn Cruz into a national figure and link his name to some of the most important issues available. It succeeded in making him better known, but in every other respect it has backfired badly. More important, Cruz didn’t just misread the political landscape and support a strategy that had zero chance of success, but he did so in a way that maximized intra-party divisions, burned bridges with most of his colleagues, and distinguished himself as a self-seeking bomb-thrower who ended up helping to blow up his party’s own standing. Granted, Cruz didn’t do this all by himself, and there are many others that contributed to the mess the GOP finds itself in today, but he very much wanted to be identified as the leader of the effort, and now he will pay for it. 

Cruz’s error was almost the exact reverse of the one that Rubio made on immigration. Rubio was paying too much attention to what people outside the GOP thought and wanted from an immigration bill, and for that reason he failed to see how much resistance there was in the House to any bill that Democrats would support. Cruz was so determined to ignore the views of anyone outside the party and even the views of many of those inside it that he led fellow Republicans into a disaster while remaining oblivious to the danger. Cruz’s debacle has been much more significant for the GOP because the party’s leaders ended up going along with his losing strategy.

Okay so with the American Conservative now piling on with the many others within the Republican party now speaking out, does that mean that the Republican party is now ready to clean house and rid itself of their teabagging insurgents?

(According to Rolling Stone that may be virtually impossible at this point.)

Or are the self inflicted wounds simply too deep, and rife with infection, for anything to save the patient? And do we now find ourselves at the pivotal moment when the country becomes a three party political system?

At least 60% of the country believes that introducing a third party is the only way to fix our broken political system. Though of course similar calls for a third party have cropped up numerous times in the country's past.

If that were to happen you KNOW that the energy for such a party would come solely from the rabid Right Wing which believes the Republicans are far too willing to compromise with the Democrats, in other words do their jobs, and would rather send representatives to Washington who were driven by stubborn ideology and complete distrust of government.

That does not exactly describe a viable framework for a third party, so perhaps despite rumblings for change and disgust with the status quo, things will continue in much the same fashion, until the Republicans finally get their unruly new members house broken, or the party devolves into a permanent minority party spending all of its time bitching about government but having little actual impact on governing.

Either one works for me.