The Republican Party. What's up with that?

I've ingested my venti latte and I'm about to intellectualize. So if you're a Glenn Beck viewer, you should probably skip this bit and get back to your 9-12 Rally Commemorative coloring book (no black or brown crayons necessary). Here goes...

Smarter folks than I have been pondering the Republican Party's decline and wondering what needs to be done to rehabilitate it. Just what went so horribly wrong with the party of Lincoln that it's ended up as the party of Rush Limbaugh?

My favorite theory is that the post-Nixon Republicans mistakenly adopted a flawed ideology that's really just a fusion of two mutually exclusive schools of thought. On one hand, the free market; on the other, fundamentalist Christianity. But trying to mix both of these into one efficient synthesis is like duct taping two rabbits together and expecting them to run in a straight line.

Ayn Rand, secular deity of freemarket capitalism, once said "Faith is the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought." So how are you supposed to stir that in with the Sermon on the Mount - the foundation of Christian principles - and create a potable mix?

Because its 'fusion philosophy' is unsustainable, the Republican party has ended up as a movement with a collapsed philosophical core. And as a movement without a philosophy, it has devolved into nothing but a blank canvas on which extremists and charlatans get to project their own. And who's left to argue with them? What could idea-free pols like Boehner or Steele ever be expected to do in the face of Limbaugh's unrelenting fascist circus other than cede authority, roll over and say 'Uncle'? (Which they do quite literally on occasion.)

Far be it from me to aid the Republican party (that's Obama's job), but it seems like the RNC needs to decide once and for all who their base is. Is it Wall Street or the megachurch? Check that task off the list, and they may have a chance. (Though, for obvious reasons, I'd prefer they didn't.)