After two decades of the GOP trying to destroy a couple of moderate Presidents whose main fault is that they belong to another party, we should drop the pretense that a Republican Party still exists. It’s fully and finally the Tea Party now. It’s a political group based on scorched-earth policies, bad science, tax cuts for the wealthy and adherence to an irrational and injurious ideology at all costs. It’s politics as hostage negotiations and nothing more.

Bill Clinton may have had moral failings that made him an easy target (though he wasn’t nearly as morally bankrupt as those who pursued him), but he was going to be targeted regardless. Obama, who has made it easy for them to rally their base by virtue of being black and intelligent, is a clear centrist who has been branded an extremist and undermined at every turn at the expense of the American people. The Tea Party will now run its Presidential election saying that the economy is struggling because of too many government restrictions (too little oversight caused the economic collapse) and high taxes on so-called “job creators” (taxes have been low on the wealthy for almost a decade and no jobs have been created because of it).

Mike Lofgren, a Republican operative for 30 years, recently stepped away from what he now sees as a fringe party. He’s written about the experience on truthout. An excerpt:

“To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel – how prudent is that? – in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.”