Daniel Tilson: GOP’s bastard child needs a new party to crash

Given how the Tea Party’s long-planned sabotage of the U.S. government has gone here in 2013, the time is ripe for the remains of what was once a proud and patriotic Republican Party to disown its bastard child once and for all.

Doomed never to be fully grown or sentient, this has always been more the misshapen right wing of some wild bird yearning to fly high and free of the weight of the rest of its body; birthed in the white heat of fury that arose at even the prospect of Americans electing their first black president of the United States.

We’re talking classic runt of the litter here; overcompensating for its low birth weight and slow learning curve by being over-aggressively survivalist in nature, by arguably being more ornery and ambitious than any of its national political predecessors.

And so it grew, not so much in size and weight at first, but in its sense of entitlement, in its thirst for acknowledgement, respect, and power.

Unfortunately for the Republican Party (and the rest of us), what might have simply been a birth-defect aberration of our evolutionary American political process was instead adopted, swaddled and nourished into terrible toddlerhood by corporate corrupters like the infamously ultra-conservative Koch Brothers.

Along the way, “old school” conservative Republican presidential candidate John McCain was forced to take on Tea Party darling Sarah Palin as running mate in 2008. Ironically enough, that may have tipped the election to Barack Obama.

More than a couple of conspiracy theorists have speculated that the Kochs and other super-rich puppet-masters scripted out and engineered that scenario, in hopes an African-American commander-in-chief would give them the grassroots ground troops they sought, a fired-up army of angry Americans whose strings they could pull.

Who knows? What we do know is that in the past five years American politics has been dominated by a Republican Party controlled by zealots and robber barons, acting in collusion to obscure and obstruct almost every attempt to improve life for the vast majority of working poor and middle-class Americans.

Now popularly known and hated as the “The Party Of No,” the Republican Party let its over-indulged Tea Party bastard grow from terrible toddlerhood into awful pre-adolescence, acting out endlessly and intimidating its way into undeniable power and influence.

More mature “old school” Republicans in Congress and elsewhere refused to fight for control, so here we are in the autumn of 2013 with this angry bastard child of the party of Abraham Lincoln, for crying out loud, having succeeded in shutting down our American government.

It’s time for party elders to throw the bastard out of the house once and for all, to publicly shame and shun it, to make it build a new party of its own to trash, crash and burn.

I’m not the only Democrat longing for an opposition party I can respect again. But the Republican Party is going to have to reclaim and regain its own self-respect first.