The same rule has been evoked by America’s festering right — (formerly known as the Republican Party.) 

 

The first rebuke for a Rule breaker — Rand Paul — came from Tea Party Pied Piper, Dick Armey:

Yep, the GOP had to cap the gusher of revelation spewing across the airwaves from the open mouth of Rep. Joe Barton, from Texas. Barton’s blowout preventer had clearly failed, and right in front of C-Span cameras no less. So Boehner and Cantor dragged Barton into a Congressional cloakroom and administered a junk-shot of their own. The next time we saw Barton he’d been duly plugged. (Though the slick lingers.)

 

Here in clear relief was the current schizophrenic state of the former Republican Party. Eisenhower noted that the GOP was really made up of two kinds of Republicans; “fur-coat Republicans and cloth-coat republicans.” Well, over the decades since fur-coat Republicans have flourished, but at the cost of those Archie Bunker cloth-coat Republicans. Yet the GOP remains, at its core, the party of and for oligarchic big business. (Exhibit One: Joe Burton) The trouble is that, as more and more wealth accumulated in fewer and fewer hands, that fur-coat demographic is not enough to get pro-big business Republican candidates elected. The party simply cannot survive without all those “small people” in cloth coats.

 

But a growing number of cloth-coat Republicans have noticed that their lot has suffered while Wall Streeters and Big Bankers and even bigger energy companies prospered. It was once enough to blame “tax and spend” Democrats when things went wrong. But, after eight years of Republican rule resulting in the worst crash since the Great Depression, Republicans could only warn that Democrats will make things worse. 

 

Which goes a long way in explaining the Tea Party movement. Former working class/middle class “cloth-coat” Republicans fled the party, many ended up in the arms of the nascent Tea Party populist movement.

 

With such a large block of voters fleeing the GOP on one side, and so few Fortune 500 executive voters on the other, the party did the only thing they could do — try to hijack the Tea Party. Instead the Tea Party hijacked the GOP. Now they’re stuck with them and every batshit crazy thing they say and believe. 

 

Which is why Dick Army is advising his wards to go all Manchurian candidate and to run silent, run deep — the deeper and the silenter the better.

 

But this is a short term solution to the GOPs growing problem. After all, if the run-silent tactic works, and a few of these  Mr. Smiths-on-lithium actually end up in  Washington, they’ll have to surface and show us their stuff. And if Cantor and Boehner think Joe Barton was an embarrassment, just wait.

 

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