Remember two years ago, when my tighty-righty compatriots couldn’t abide the GOP affronts to their ideological purity any longer and loudly declared their intention to drag them to philosophical repentence by staying home on Election Day and letting the Democrats take Congress back?  Remember how I wrote then that all this would do is convince the Republican remnant that they couldn’t count on the party’s conservative base and that they would instead scatter to the four winds in an every-Pachyderm-for-himself panic?

So they asked for it, so it is coming to pass (via Newsmax Insider):

Republicans in the U.S. House have parted ways with GOP leadership and voted for a key Medicare bill — providing a possible sign of things to come before the November elections.

Despite Minority Leader John Boehner’s aggressive push to convince GOP members to oppose the bill, 129 Republicans joined with all 226 Democrats to pass the legislation, which would prevent cuts in physician’s fees under Medicare.

The Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call observed: “House Republican leaders’ embarrassing failure to hold the line against a Medicare-related bill raised new questions about whether the rank and file will adopt an every-man-for-himself strategy as the election draws near.”

Representative Wayne Gilchrest, a Maryland Republican who was defeated in a primary earlier this year, told Roll Call that he views the Medicare vote as evidence that House Republicans are realizing they have to put their own interests above toeing the party line.

The American Medical Association and the pharmaceutical industry supported the bill. The GOP leadership opposed it partly in the belief that more “palatable” legislation is being drawn up in the Senate, according to Roll Call, which added, “With more sensitive votes expected in July and September, Republican leaders’ ability to hold their rank and file in line will continue to be tested.” [emphasis added]

IOW, “their own interests” and those of conservatives have diverged.  Which will doubtless provoke the Quinn Hillyers of the cyberworld into “punishing” the GOP even more, which will further alienate whatever scattered Republican survivors even more and push them further to the Left, and so on.

‘Tis the bitterest of ironies that virtually all of the Left’s momentum in this cycle is being generated by the civil war raging on the Right.  It’s so bad it may take an Obama presidency to defibrilate my wayward brethren back to sanity.

Perhaps there is still some hope for counter-change.  But even then it probably won’t recur in my lifetime.

[cross-posted at ]