GOP, Tea Party in "Fatal Attraction"

The image of a pet rabbit in a boiling pot arises after a night of passion in Nashville, with Sarah Palin auditioning for the Glenn Close role in a remake of "Fatal Attraction."

If the GOP establishment was hoping for a one-night stand with the Tea Party, Palin evoked some serious stalking ahead by promising to campaign for challengers to traditional Republicans: "Contested primaries aren't civil war. They're democracy at work, and that's beautiful."

The prospect of such future passionate encounters should evoke a double-take in a GOP Michael Douglas like John Boehner who smugly insisted last week, "There really is no difference between what Republicans believe in and what the Tea Party activists believe in," urging his party's office holders in the fall elections to "prove to the Tea Party activists that we really are who we say we are."

Boehner may have forgotten his existing vows of fidelity, but his Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell, is not so naïve. He already finds himself in a love triangle with Palin, who is backing Libertarian Ron Paul's son as a successor to Jim Bunning, his junior partner, over the Minority Leader's choice for the job.

As nettlesome as Tea Party stalkers may be for Democrats, their search for ideological purity promises to be a pox for Republicans as well, scrambling election contests as they did last November in upstate New York, electing a Democrat for the first time in history.

Palin will do her act next month at a kickoff rally for the Tea Party Express, a cross-country bus caravan, in the Nevada hometown of embattled Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who finds himself in a tough re-election battle this year as well as attend an April 14th Tea Party rally in Boston.

She called the movement a "ground-up call to action that is forcing both parties to change the way they're doing business," a siren song that may sound good at the moment to out-of-power GOP proprietors, but as primaries to start to heat up in Florida, Texas, California and elsewhere, they may find some of their newfound dalliance partners as hard to shake as the Glenn Close character in "Fatal Attraction."

Hide the rabbits.