The headline alone shouts conservatism's organizational fragmentation and ideological dishevelment: "Michele Bachmann poses challenge for GOP."
When one stops to ponder their implications, those are six remarkably revealing words. Michele Bachmann, she of deep intellectual impairment and self-advertising ethical absence, actually poses a challenging threat to the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. With God knows plenty of assistance, she's cementing it as the party only of Joe McCarthy, Glenn Beck and Howdy Doody.
"For all of Speaker John Boehner’s efforts to stage-manage the opening days of the Republican House, handpick his inner circle and keep his party on message," writes Poltico, "Bachmann keeps jumping into the fray. The tea party loves her, the media promotes her, and she is a huge draw on the fundraising circuit ... and there’s nothing Republicans can do about it.
"But Bachmann is more than just a limelight-hungry tea partier — she represents an anti-establishment tension simmering just below the surface of a unified Republican front."
Such an overstatement of the GOP's unification renders it a fantasy. Virtually no party solidarity lingers these days; it's every amplifying crackpot for him- or herself, and Bachmann, now that Sarah Palin is self-immolating, is leading a Pyrrhic charge.
What's left of the old GOP Establishment tolerates Bachmann (and Bachmann's unschooled ilk) out of a desperate sense of the party's preservation. But someday they'll have to stop whining to the press that, as the press puts it, there's really "nothing [they] can do about it." For there's always a chance that she, someday, will leave too little of their party for them to re-launch.