A Pyrrhic Victory In New York -- UPDATED

Frank Rich's opinion on the Hoffman Effect is definitely worth reading today as he takes the limiters off and tears into the Teabaggers.

The right’s embrace of Hoffman is a double-barreled suicide for the G.O.P. On Saturday, the battered Scozzafava suspended her campaign, further scrambling the race. It’s still conceivable that the Democratic candidate could capture a seat the Republicans should own. But it’s even better for Democrats if Hoffman wins. Punch-drunk with this triumph, the right will redouble its support of primary challengers to 2010 G.O.P. candidates they regard as impure. That’s bad news for even a Republican as conservative as Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose primary opponent in the Texas governor’s race, the incumbent Rick Perry, floated the possibility of secession at a teabagger rally in April and hastily endorsed Hoffman on Thursday.

The more rightists who win G.O.P. primaries, the greater the Democrats’ prospects next year. But the electoral math is less interesting than the pathology of this movement. Its antecedent can be found in the early 1960s, when radical-right hysteria carried some of the same traits we’re seeing now: seething rage, fear of minorities, maniacal contempt for government, and a Freudian tendency to mimic the excesses of political foes. Writing in 1964 of that era’s equivalent to today’s tea party cells, the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that the John Birch Society’s “ruthless prosecution” of its own ideological war often mimicked the tactics of its Communist enemies.

The same could be said of Beck, Palin and their acolytes. Though they constantly liken the president to various totalitarian dictators, it is they who are re-enacting Stalinism in full purge mode. They drove out Arlen Specter, and now want to “melt Snowe” (as the blog Red State put it). The same Republicans who once deplored Democrats for refusing to let an anti-abortion dissident, Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, speak at the 1992 Clinton convention now routinely banish any dissenters in their own camp.

Kudos to Rich for this one...and better still, he digs into the whole picture of Obama Derangement Syndrome and the Teabagger victim card, and why it will continue to be a loser.

These conservatives’ whiny cries of victimization also parrot a tic they once condemned in liberals. After Rush Limbaugh was booted from an ownership group bidding on the St. Louis Rams, he moaned about being done in by the “race card.” What actually did him in, of course, was the free-market American capitalism he claims to champion. Limbaugh didn’t understand that in an increasingly diverse nation, profit-seeking N.F.L. franchises actually want to court black ticket buyers, not drive them away.

This same note of self-martyrdom was sounded in a much-noticed recent column by the former Nixon hand Pat Buchanan. Ol’ Pat sounded like the dispossessed antebellum grandees in “Gone With the Wind” when lamenting the plight of white working-class voters. “America was once their country,” he wrote. “They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”

They are right. That America was lost years ago, and no national political party can thrive if it lives in denial of that truth. The right still may want to believe, as Palin said during the campaign, that Alaska, with its small black and Hispanic populations, is a “microcosm of America.” (New York’s 23rd also has few blacks or Hispanics.) But most Americans like their country’s 21st-century profile.

That changing complexion is part of why the McCain-Palin ticket lost every demographic group by large margins in 2008 except white senior citizens and the dwindling fifth of America that’s still rural. It’s also why the G.O.P. has been in a nosedive since the inauguration, whatever Obama’s ups and downs. In the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, only 17 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans (as opposed to 30 percent for the Democrats, and 44 for independents).

Needless to say, Rich is already being attacked by the usual suspects this morning who are throwing hissy fits that anyone would dare say such a thing as the truth about these idiots.

It's the speed and the vehemence of the reaction to Rich's column that assures you that he has hit an artery on the Body Wingnut. The civil war in the GOP I've long been predicting is now in full swing, and the Teabaggers are winning. They will most likely win this battle.

And they will now lose the greater war.

[UPDATE 10:16 AM] Dan Riehl's reaction is All-Star Wingnut material.

As for moderates, too few to worry about are talking about a purge driven by the Right. Everyone with any sense knows there are districts where we must cooperate. Worse than that, it is precisely these moderates who have been so vocal in demonizing the Right as Far Right crazies, which we are not. They should learn their lesson and shut-up, as they have no clue what they are talking about.

"We're not crazies and we're not trying to purge you. NOW SHUT UP BEFORE WE PURGE YOU!"

[UPDATE 12:37 PM] The paper of record in NY-23, the Watertown Daily Times, is reporting that Dede Scozzafava is privately pushing her supporters to vote for the Democrat in the race, Bill Owens.

In her statement Saturday morning, the assemblywoman explained the reasons behind her decision: "It is increasingly clear that pressure is mounting on many of my supporters to shift their support. Consequently, I hereby release those individuals who have endorsed and supported my campaign to transfer their support as they see fit to do so."

During the day Saturday, she began to quietly and thoughtfully encourage her supporters to vote for Democrat William L. Owens.

...as is the Watertown Daily Times, now openly endorsing Owens.

The Watertown Daily Times initially endorsed Ms. Scozzafava as the best-qualified candidate in the race. We still think she is. However, in suspending her campaign she released her supporters' commitment to her. That left voters to choose between Mr. Owens and Mr. Hoffman.

Of the two, Bill Owens is by far the superior and only choice.

The Wingers are now apoplectic, but at least one seems to think that driving moderates out of the GOP and into the Democrats' tent just might be a bad idea in 2010. But make no mistake, the GOP has now all but fully thrown in their lot with the Teabaggers. The remaining moderates will be excised from the party.

And along with it, any chance they might of had in 2010 or 2012. I've said this before: the Democrats will need a corrective force to prevent them from making the mistakes of excess. As long as the Republicans are reduced to a fringe party of extremists, then that will never happen.