Not that you asked

There was so much going on last week, I didn't get around to the really big story--House Speaker John Boehner virtually throwing his hands in the air and shouting, "I can't take it anymore; I'm outta here." That's not exactly what he did, but it was what he meant when he announced his retirement from Congress. The Tea Party nutcases in his own party chased him off.

We are literally living in the cliche: "The inmates are running the asylum." The Tea Party crazies are actually holding the Congress and the government hostage. They don't have enough members to pass anything, but they do have enough to block anything they don't like, and they don't like a lot of things. The president and anything he does, Hillary Clinton, Social Security, Medicare, Planned Parenthood, and sane people. They'd probably be against the Constitution if someone read it to them. I doubt that their reading skills would allow them to understand it.

The problem the Tea Partiers have is they absolutely refuse to compromise. They consider compromise the same as defeat. Every other thinking person knows that the key part of politics is the art of compromise. They are the adult equivalent of the spoiled brat who says, "If I don't get what I want, I'm going to take my toys and go home." I'm using the word "adult" guardedly.

Whoever replaces Boehner probably won't have any more success than he did running Congress. The Tea Party will continue to block any rational bill, while promoting crazy ones. These people are so right wing they make regular conservatives like Boehner and Ronald Reagan look like moderates in comparison. There's a war going on in the Republican Party between normal conservatives and the Tea Party. The problem is, even if the Tea Party loses, it will never admit defeat but keep on fighting.

Meanwhile the leading contender to replace Boehner, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy looked like a shoo-in until he committed a politician's ultimate sin--he told the truth. During an appearance on Fox News, where he was likely lulled into a false feeling of security, he admitted that the main reason the Republican Congress keeps investigating Benghazi is to drive down Hillary Clinton's poll numbers. His fellow Republicans are upset that he has revealed their true motives, making all of the high minded drivel they've been feeding us a pack of lies.

Maybe because of that, another candidate for speaker emerged over the weekend, Rep. Jason Chaffetz. As chairman of the House Oversight Committee he has led one good investigation into the security lapses of the Secret Service and two goofy ones into Benghazi and Planned Parenthood. The irony of the whole Planned Parenthood brouhaha is that it focuses on abortion when the organization's primary purpose is preventing unwanted pregnancies, which in turn lowers the number of abortions.

The Republicans got themselves into this mess by catering to the far out right wing in an attempt to become the majority party. Instead, what they did was the same thing Dr. Frankenstein did. They created a monster.

Remember, if you're not in the top one percent in income and you vote Republican, you're not just voting against a Democrat, you're voting against yourself.