Sad!

 This country has a screaming need for a conservative party. There needs to be a viable foil to the machinations of the Democrats and the Left generally speaking. The $6 trillion total price tag for the American Rescue Plan, American Jobs Plan, and American Families Plan. Putting the kibosh on the Keystone XL pipeline. The proposed hike in the capital gains tax rate. Climate alarmism. Identity-politics militancy. Corporate employee training programs based on the work of Ibram X. Kendi. The disaster at the southern border.

The Republican Party has demonstrated, this past week more than ever, that it is utterly unsuited to the role. 

The House Republican Conference's ousting of Liz Cheney from her position as the third-ranking member was egregious enough. It's now been followed by a defeat of Texas Representative Chip Roy to replace Cheney in that position by Elise Stefanik. Roy has a 96 percent lifetime rating from Heritage Action and a 95 percent rating from the American Conservative Union. Stefanik's ratings are 48 and 44, respectively. It's rather obvious why the conference went with her: She saw going full Trumpist as the ticket to an assured political future. 

The latest bit of evidence of her opportunistic career strategizing comes in her remarks upon her 134-46 victory: 

“I support President Trump ... he is an important voice in our Republican party and we look forward to working with him,” Stefanik said. “Republican voters are unified in their support and their desire to work with President Trump, and we are unified as Republicans.”

It's going to be interesting to see the response from the two fellow House members she mentions by name in her lame attempt to extend an olive branch:

"Liz Cheney is part of this Republican conference. Adam Kinzinger is part of this Republican conference,” Stefanik said. But she added: “We're unified in working with President Trump."

 Also this week we've been treated to a recently-surfaced 2019 video of Marjorie Taylor Greene shouting manically into the mail slot in Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's office door, calling her "crazy eyes," telling her to "get rid of [her] diaper" and beckoning her to come out into the hallway. 

This plays right into progressive hands. Ocasio Cortez can, and already has, juxtaposed herself as the stable and reasonable one. The clearly-she-is-not-well rhetoric writes itself. The Overton Window shifts such that AOC's Green New Deal and track record of outlandish remarks on various subjects, to the extend that the public recalls them, look like a grounded adult came up with them. 

Then consider what Donald Trump's first national security advisor, a formerly respected general, is up to these days: hanging with Lin Wood and calling him "an extraordinary human being."

There are those who call talk of the GOP's death hyperbole, who say that there is enough of a healthy party structure at local and state levels and willingness on the federal level to take opportunities to get serious work done that the party's difficulties pale in comparison.

Really? A party that lets MTG run wild while sidelining Liz Cheney and Chip Roy? A party whose figures with star status - Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, Elise Stefanik - are so desperate and cowardly that they hitch their wagons to the train of the joke of a human being who lost himself the presidency and lost them the Senate as well?

No, this is a party that has lost all claim to be the political repository for the conservative movement. Anyone with the most minuscule modicum of self-respect can no longer identify himself or herself as a member. 

It's time to hand it over to the cowards, nuts and sycophants and let them kill it off.