From Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast:
Watching the GOP convulse these last few days, I sense that we just might finally be on the cusp of an important and long-awaited moment. Up until now during the Obama era, the Republicans’ scorched-earth politics have harmed their party, but they have always harmed the Democrats nearly as much—or, in the long term, even more. It’s a big reason why they do the things they do—they know cynically that if they bring the government to a standstill, most people will just blame both parties, and indeed might even cast more blame on the party of government, the Democrats.
The gig may be about up. The odds are good that by the morning of October 18, one of two (correct) perceptions will be broadly held by the American public: one, that the Republican Party has collapsed into all-out ideological civil war; two, that the Republicans are a party not merely of obstructionists but destructionists, in ways that will be so evident that even those independents devoted to the idea that both sides are to blame will run up the white flag. All the Republicans’ madness of the last five years is finally going to catch up with them.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/...
Tomasky ascribes the GOP's doomsday predicament to three events: Calgary Cruz's phony filibuster, this weekend's government funding vote in Congress, and the debt ceiling fight. The lattermost began yesterday, according to Tomasky, when the GOP's ludicrous list of terrorist demands was leaked. It has already been roundly ridiculed by most of the MSM, including a damning editorial in today's New York Times:
A Republican Ransom Note
...House leaders responded on Thursday with one of the least serious negotiating proposals in modern Congressional history: a jaw-dropping list of ransom demands containing more than a dozen discredited Republican policy fantasies.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
That's brutal, coming from the NYT Editorial Board, IMO. Tomasky's piece in The Daily Beast sums it up nicely:
You can only set so many houses on fire before people finally figure out that this isn’t happening by accident and you must be an arsonist. The GOP is now flirting with that moment. It can’t come soon enough.