Andrea, forgive me, but your post sounds as overwrought as the President’s hamhanded groin-stomping immigration bill marketing plan.  Have you thought through some of your rhetoric?

[W]e MUST clean house. We MUST win back our party. We MUST win back our country and our control of it from arrogant, insulated careerists who think it’s their due….

That can mean only one thing. Vote. them. out. Every last one of them. It will be painful, but we MUST break off from those who have already broken away from us.

How many do you imagine this number to be?  We already know who the RINOs are.  But while people like McCain and Lindsay Graham are national figures, they’re not nationally elected.  On the Senate side they’re not all up for re-election in the same cycle.  And while the Democrats may be able to keep communal rage at a high-rolling boil for years on end, I rather doubt that we can.  It just isn’t our nature.

What about the once-dependable Jon Kyl?  He was just re-elected last November, which I’ll betcha dollars to doughnuts is why he was designated to shephard this misbegotten legislation through its cabalistic backroom negotiations.

The most recent case-in-point is Linc Chafee.  Was he taken out last year?  No, he wasn’t, even though he had a strong primary challenger.  And what was the outcome?  A Democrat replaced him who is, at best, no improvement. 

One other thought: Remember the aforementioned Senator Graham?  He wasn’t a RINO when he stepped up to the Senate in 2002.  But he became one under Darth Queeg’s insidious tutelege.  As long as a handful of “mavericks” remain - and we’d NEVER get rid of ALL of them - and even if this party deconstruction was conducive to majority-building, the fresh-faced conservatives who went to Washington would simply be subjected to the same corrupting influences, and a new litter of RINOs would emerge.  Just like Lindsay Graham did two years ago during the “memo of understanding” debacle.

That’s not a defense any member of the “perfidious devilspawn” wing of the GOP (far from it!), but simply a dash of cold, dripping reality that “Vote.  Them.  Out.” is good catharsis but is much easier bellowed than accomplished.  And even then it wouldn’t be a permanent housecleaning.

It may take a purge that will last two or three election cycles — four, eight, twelve years. But in the grand scheme of things, over the course of the 231 years of this country’s history, it’s a brief moment in time. And as a friend put it, “Sometimes the cure comes close to killing the patient. But if you don’t apply the cure, the patient is sure to die anyway.”

Be careful what you wish for.  Would you want to live in the America that would exist after two terms of Hillary Clinton?  And another one or two of Barack Obama?  I’ll guarantee you that after a single Hillary! term we’d be slobbering for anybody who could unseat her, no matter what their immigration views.  How do I know that?  Because that’s what happened in 2000.

Besides, in the age of Islamist terror and WMD proliferation, the old Nixon adage that “Nobody can completely screw up the country in only four years” is functionally obsolete.  Or, in other words, the patient is less likely to die than is the country itself as we have known it if the former lets anger push him (or her) into foolish, ill-considered decisions.

Might history be repeating itself? Should it? Is there a party worth defecting to?

Ronald Reagan was confronted with that question in 1976 during another time of intra-party dissention.  I’d say his answer, and subsequent actions, are timeless.