RIP GOP?

Is the GOP dead? Did Obama kill it?

OK, so the GOP isn't technically dead, but they're as good as. They exist now only as some sort of squirming, feral blob, not unlike Lord Voldemort when his killing curse rebounded off Harry Potter's baby forehead. (If you're keeping score at home: Obama = Harry, GOP = He Who Must Not Be Named, and Avada Kedavra = Rovian identity politics.)

The best they have been able to do so far is to trot out Eric Cantor and Bobby Jindal (a combination Prof. Quirrell) while Rush Limbaugh (Bellatrix Lestrange) bellows and grunts ineffectually from his remote South Florida pigsty.

OK, Harry Potter allusions aside, the electoral reality is the GOP is in deep trouble. Unlike the Democratic Party's slump in 2000-2008, when Karl Rove triumphantly claimed a permanent Republican majority, the GOP's current status is far more dire, because its problems, while perhaps externally catalyzed by the seismic shifts that led to Obama's victory, are wholly internal in nature.

The GOP is a house divided, and as its most illustrious member once proclaimed, such a structure cannot stand. On one side, we have the true conservatives, the ones who have watched in horror the decidedly un-conservative presidency of George W. Bush, the champions of fiscal conservatism and limited government, the intellectual, slightly crazy types who would privatize libraries and the post office and impose a flat tax. You disagree with them, but you can at least understand where they are coming from.

On the other side, you have the neocons, the right wing Fox News fringe that worships Rush Limbaugh, listens to Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, and confuses yelling like idiots with moral superiority.

Somehow, inexplicably, the fringe has taken over the party. What's amazing and not a little amusing is how deeply the truecons loathe the neocon/theocon fringe, how totally pissed they are that the GOP has been hijacked by them.

Read, for example, David Frum's Newsweek cover story, titled "Why Rush is Wrong", in which Frum writes of Limbaugh: "With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence." (Zing!)

The clip below, forwarded by Mrs. Daily Chai, illustrates the deep anger at the heart of this schism in unequivocal terms. This comes from - of all things - CNN's flagship journalism show, D. L Hughley Breaks the News, since regretfully cancelled. D.L., we barely knew you.