Friday Open Thread [5.23.14]

Brian Beutler gets to the truth of the whole Tea Party v. Republican Establishment debate. It pains me to say this, but Christine O’Donnell is right.

[T]he real issue isn’t whether the “Tea Party,” now vanquished, has been a liability for the Republican Party, but whether the Republican electorate is fractious and reactionary, and has thus kept the Senate out of reach for Republicans two cycles in a row.

The answer is yes. And Republicans have addressed that problem not by running shock and awe campaigns against individual “Tea Party” candidates, but by aligning behind candidates and incumbents conservative enough for the primary electorate yet polished enough (they hope) to avoid Akin-like admissions against interest. There are no Christine O’Donnells this year, but there are no Mike Castles either.

So the questions now are whether the current crop of GOP candidates can actually suppress the right wing Id, and, secondarily, whether the winning candidates of the American right can durably embed themselves into the political system. Just as we know that 2016 (a presidential year) will be a tough one for Senate Republicans, we can also project that conservatives who win swing states this year will face a much different electorate when they’re up again in six years. And come then, their conservatism will be a liability, not an asset.

Meanwhile, regarding this real scandal of the cover-up by local VA officials in Phoenix of wait times, to the larger and more general scandal of long wait times for our veterans who need medical care, Jon Stewart reminds us that yes, while President Obama deserves blame for not fixing this problem, we should not forget who 1) exacerbated this problem during the Obama presidency (answer: Republicans); and 2) who caused this problem during the previous presidency (Bush and his Bush Republicans).