Moderate Republicans No Longer Welcome in GOP

Eating Their Own:  Dede Scozzafava pressured to drop out of race.

The Wingnuts and Bolts:  A contentious special election in upstate New York is drawing national attention because of the high-handed tactics employed by far-right extremists in the Republican Party.  President Barack Obama appointed Rep. John McHughm as his Army Secretary, leaving three candidates to contend for the District 23 congressional seat: moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava, Democrat Bill Owens, and the Conservative Party nominee, Doug Hoffman.  Scozzafava is on record as supporting LGBT rights and women's reproductive rights, so naturally the Bible thumpers controlling the GOP didn't want her centrist views to compromise the party's backward agenda.  A posse of high-profile wingnuts (led by Caribou Barbie) were dispatched to the Empire State to campaign for Hoffman and badmouth the Republican candidate.  And now, just days before the election, Dede Scozzafava has dropped out of that race.

Valerie Bauman writes on HuffPo:  Fighting plunging support, Republican Dierdre Scozzafava abruptly suspended her campaign Saturday in a special election for a U.S. House seat that has exposed a rift among national factions of the party...  The announcement comes after a Siena College poll found she was in third place with 20 percent of the vote in the heavily Republican upstate New York district that has been safe ground for the party for more than 100 years. Conservative Party nominee Doug Hoffman and Democratic nominee Bill Owens were too close to call with 35 percent and 36 percent, respectively.  The race has pitted conservative and moderate wings of the Republican Party in a battle of ideology both nationally and statewide. Hoffman and his backers say Scozzafava is too liberal to represent the GOP, specifically noting her support of abortion rights and same-sex marriage. 

Over at the New York Times, Frank Rich tells it like it is:  That this pastoral setting could become a GOP killing field, attracting an all-star cast of combatants led by Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, William Kristol and Newt Gingrich, is a premise out of a Depression-era screwball comedy.  But such farces have become the norm for the conservative movement — whether the participants are dressing up in full “tea party” drag or not.  The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama.  The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom has what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity.

Frank Rich's Christ/GOP analogy is apropos.  This Battle of the Fringe will involve suffering, bloodletting, and a lingering death.  But members of the base that expect a Republican resurrection to occur will be disappointed.  They'll learn not all prayers are answered, and that cutting off a nose to spite a face leads to political disfigurement.