Surrounding Obama's 100th day, the bottom appeared to fall out of the Republican Party: they lost a special election -- and a senator -- and saw the RNC get into a civil war between its members and chairman while elected officials created their own "alternate" party structure. Paging Mark Burnett ("Survivor") and Simon Cowell ("American Idol")! We may have your new reality TV smash!
Forget Rod Blagojevich! -- he's basically a one-trick pony (based on the hair -- one of the Shetland variety at that). The real action is in the Republican side of the ledger.
This week, one liberal Republican senator jumped to the Democrats, starting an internecine party battle over whether moderates should be welcomed, tolerated or expunged; a liberal Republican Supreme Court Justice retired (at 69, relatively young for high court justices) allowing a Democratic president to replace him; Republican National Committee members launched a procedural move to restrain their own recently elected party chairman from making decisions on how to spend the party money; that chairman blamed any possible money problems at the committee on his predecessor; and a former GOP speaker of the House mocked those members as "precious" spoiled individuals.
And that doesn't even touch on the family part of it: While Meghan McCain got into a Twitter fight with Karl Rove (just writing that shows how insane this has gotten), daddy John McCain signed onto a new GOP group designed to "rebrand the party" (which will undoubtedly raise money that might otherwise go to the RNC -- wonderful)!
Turning this into a talking-head C-SPAN type-show would be awful. Instead, it should be a vote-off, like "Survivor" or "American Idol." Either have a Tribal Council (perhaps made up of folks like Grover Norquist or the Club For Growth -- who took credit for driving Specter out of the party) or a panel of judges (including Robert Bork, who Specter famously helped vote down two decades ago) who decide who stays, who goes, and who gets electoral "immunity."
It's got hit written all over it. Spike TV, perhaps? Or, appropriately enough -- the USA Network!
Robert A. George is a New York writer. He blogs at Ragged Thots.
