Tea Party Losing The Battle? Maybe Not ...

Click here for Digby's article at Salon entitled "Tea Party’s horrifying cousin: Here comes 'constitutional conservatism,'” subtitled "The sad club of dupes known as the Tea Party is not the real problem. This scary ideological undercurrent might be."

She quotes Ed Kilgore at Talking Points Memo:

Yesterday’s winner Pat Roberts, who already sported lifetime ratings of 86 percent from both the American Conservative Union and Americans for Prosperity, went far out of his way to propitiate the ideological gods of movement conservatism as he fought for reelection. He voted against an appropriations measure that included a project he had long sought for his alma mater, Kansas State University, and opposed a UN Treaty banning discrimination against people with disabilities over the objections of his revered Kansas Senate predecessors Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum.

Kilgore also pointed out in his blog at Washington Monthly on the eve of the Obama/Romney election:

Yes, years from now conservatives will sit around campfires and sing songs about the legendary internecine battles of late 2012, when father fought son and brother fought brother across a chasm of controversy as to whether 98% or 99% of abortions should be banned; whether undocumented workers should be branded and utilized as “guest workers,” loaded onto cattle cars and shipped home, or simply immiserated; whether the New Deal/Great Society programs should be abolished in order to cut upper-income taxes or abolished in order to boost Pentagon spending. There’s also a vicious, take-no-prisons fight over how quickly to return the role of the federal government in the economy to its pre-1930s role as handmaiden to industry. Blood will flow in the streets as Republicans battle over how to deal with health care after Obamacare is repealed and 50 million or people lose health insurance. Tax credits and risk pools or just “personal responsibility?”

In short, there's no cause for liberals to be jubilant at the apparent rout of the tea party crowd in the 2014 primaries; they've won by pushing Republican mainstream political thought so far to the right it cannot possibly be called moderate.