Can the GOP Pick Up Their Pieces?

They are looking like the last scene in “Bridge on the River Kwai:” devastation everywhere, dazed survivors mumbling “Madness, madness.”

With only a week to go before another disastrous government shutdown, the Disloyal Opposition is splintering into fragments, turning on one another in hitherto unforeseen ways.

Fox’s Chris Wallace is amazed to get “unsolicited research and questions, not from Democrats but from top Republicans, to hammer [Ted] Cruz” while Karl Rove pontificates:

“You cannot build a Congressional majority in either party...unless you are treating your colleagues with some certain amount of respect, and saying, ‘Hey, what do you think of my idea?’ Instead they have dictated to their colleagues through the media, and through public statements, and not consulted them about this strategy at all.”

Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill opines: “I don’t think in America we should throw tantrums when we lose elections and threaten to shut down the government and refuse to pay the bills. The American people had a choice last November.”

What we may see in coming weeks is the Tea Party’s big blowout, the final test of whether a movement that at heart hates all government can exist within a traditional political party dedicated to controlling, not destroying it.

When it’s all over, Republicans will be unable to abolish Obamacare or defund it. The law they helped pass in 2010, with all its imperfections, will stand. Neither will they be able to use the debt ceiling debate to lower the nation’s credit rating again.

What they may accomplish is fragmenting themselves so badly that a majority of voters next year and in 2016 will no longer be able to see the GOP as a coherent whole.

That would be the saddest outcome of all. America needs two rational parties.