Poor old Rove

I despair at the future of the Republican party if it decides to turn on all of its star performers. There is something in this that reminds me of the whole "revolutions eat their children" phenomenon, where Rove's brilliance in organising grass-roots support for the Republicans leading up to the 2000 elections is ultimately what undoes him. It's a shame, because, for all his supposed Manichean traits, Rove does know what he's doing and he's very good at it. By becoming apostate, he could in turn become a much more powerful enemy of the Tea Partiers than the Dems ever will be. Ok, I'm overloading the analogies here. Still, this whole thing has a terrible quality of purges on a holier-than-thou basis going on in the GOP and te Tea Party believing its own hype. What is especially troubling is that this means that the moderate bastions of the Democrats will have to be counted as the the only right-wingers in the house, because the Tea Party GOP, for all its talk, seems skewed to the left. Or I don't know if it's left, but it's a strange hybrid of left-and-nutty-right, where the state is built up and maintained, but taxes are lowered. It's a paradox of such colossal proportions that I wonder how any serious person could in turn take it seriously. I realise that it's the prerogative of the party not in power to present contrary positions to the one governing rather than workable alternatives, but there is a limit.
The whole problem is of Rove's own making - he made the GOP run as a machine where everyone was always on-message, the Dems have had more heterogeny and therefore seem the healthier party, despite the outcome of the November elections. Once, you make a party truly cadre-fied you have to either lead the masses or you will be led by them because they will want loyalty above all.
The scary thing is that the phoenix that rises from this mess is Sarah Palin, the leader of a movement at the height of its anger. It's a scary world we live in.