The skeleton with the wig on, above left, and her husband, don’t want poor people to have health insurance

You might think from the way that it’s getting reported that the 13 members of the Maine Republican Party who are leaving the GOP decided to ditch the party because it had gotten too extreme, too stupid, too racist, too xenophobic, was in bed with the oligarchs, etc.

“As Maine goes, so goes the nation,” you maybe hoped?

Well, if you actually read the entire resignation letter (which frankly isn’t really all that interesting) that’s not what they’re saying at all. These folks are hardcore Tea party types who loathe John Boehner and who are supportive of Maine’s governor Paul LePage, surely one of the very dumbest people in America to currently hold an important political office. There’s fierce competition as to who is actually the dumbest, but LePage is every bit as egregiously inane as Michele Bachmann, Steve King or Louie Gohmert are. Just yesterday LePage was revealed to have said that Obama “hates white people” at a private GOP fundraiser last week. Truly, when you assert support for Paul LePage, you are endorsing stupidity itself, in its most offensive, know-nothing, force your ignorance on others form.

So yeah, it seems pretty clear to me that this renegade baker’s dozen aren’t leaving the Republican Party because it’s too extreme, they’re heading out the door en masse because it’s not nearly extreme enough! The way Huffington Post lazily half-reported on the matter, you might well think they were “moderates.” Most of the tweets I’ve seen about it were from folks who seemed to be under this impression, too. Or maybe they just read the headline and… assumed.

What I did find interesting about the letter, though, is how it smacks so strongly of the Ron Paul-style free market/no foreign intervention school. When you have office-holders and elected officials (including a 2006 candidate for Congress) of a political party willing to denounce it in public and renounce their memberships, this is an interesting development indeed and one that should have the GOP establishment quaking, on both a state and national level. Will other Libertarian/Tea party types, emboldened by the defection of the Maine Republicans, do the same in their states and form break-away parties and political action groups? I sure hope so!

This whole “GOP Civil War” thing we’ve been hearing about sounds like it’s about to get very interesting, very quickly. This is a loud shoe dropping. With the deep, deep unbridled fanaticism within the party’s ranks, any sort of perceived ideological “betrayals” by former allies in the conservative movement makes the likelihood of that once ironclad coalition splintering into warring former Republican factions seem likely indeed.

The demographic tide that turned, hard, against the GOP in recent years as their voters got older (and deader) while the country as a whole has become younger and browner, is merely one of their seemingly insurmountable problems. Should they split up into two or more rival factions, to my mind, that would be just great. United they stand, but divided, well… the entire conservative movement will be about as impotent as their stalwart old white male voters. The oligarchs, the stupid, the religious, the stingy, they need each other BADLY. If that coalition frays—and then they go to war against each other like feuding hillbilly relatives with rabies, which they will—the GOP is doomed. Put-a-stake though-its-heart and piss-on-its-grave doomed.

Can a Republican ever win the White House again? Consider this, on a national level, the 2016 Democratic Presidential nominee will basically start out with 246 electoral votes. Imagine the finger-pointing rancor between say, the “Chris Christie Republicans” vs the Rand Paul fans and then turn the volume knob up to ten on that noise. The names may change, but the negative, hateful energy is turning inwards now. Without a black guy for them to unite against, what hope does the GOP have in 2016?

Update: Then there was this.

Keep in mind as you watch the video below that it was paid for by a Republican-affiliated PAC!