Christine O'Donnell News

I have often wondered what it is about these Tea Party types who aspire to prominent national office, sometimes even attaining their goal, only to confound their political fortunes through a penchant for self-inflicted self-destruction.

When offered a copy of the pro Tea Party, pro Sarah Palin book at the NC GOP Convention, a visibly irritated Karl Rove refused - telling author C. Edmund Wright that his book, WTF? How Karl Rove and the Establishment Lost...Again, is "a poorly researched piece of trash."

It only seems like yesterday she was the Republicans' most talked-about candidate for president.

She was a bomb thrower, a master performer, a flashy politician with an appetite for combat and perhaps the strongest TV presence of any Republican in Washington.

One of the favorite narratives propagated by the Republican establishment is that our candidates are "unelectable" loose cannons who will throw the election to the Democrats.

In politics the perfect is often the enemy of the good. The quick, easy path of immediate gratification trumps the more arduous process of making compromises in order to achieve greater overall progress.

Via Joel Gehrke , a scene from the intramural debate over the debt ceiling between Maverick and the Paul/Lee/Cruz tea-party coalition.

If May has been a rough month for Barack Obama, you could say the same for those intrepid voices calling for a "rebranding" of the Republican Party to make the GOP kinder and gentler and more appealing to the significant majority of Americans who look dimly upon that organization .

You'd think the conservative base would have learned its lesson in 2010, when, in a fever pitch of epic magnitude, it nominated Christine O'Donnell, Ken Buck, Sharron Angle and Joe Miller to run for the U.S. Senate.