REPUBLICAN CRACK-UP WATCH

The latest GOP phony scandal, as you probably know, is evil Obama singled out Republican Chrysler dealers for closure!!!!!!1!1!!!! It's absurd even by the usual GOP phony-scandal standards: as Nate Silver makes clear, the car dealers being put out of business are overwhelmingly Republican because car dealers as a whole are overwhlemingly Republican. Also see John Cole:

I'll just note that the same people now screaming about this were, just a few weeks ago, screaming about the sanctity of contracts trying to make sure that the bondholders would get their way and push Chrysler into bankruptcy and be liquidated and cause every single Chrysler dealership across the country to close. But it would hurt the UAW, so then it was ok.

But did you know that Sarah Palin is trying to make hay of this? She's issued a statement singling out a dealership that's being closed in Soldotna, Alaska; she writes, "Obama closes another dealership -- this time in Soldotna as more of Alaskans' hard-earned money and jobs are lost to big government." (And in the absence of government intervention, the Soldotna dealership would be thriving, right?)

This crossed her radar, I suspect, because one of the owners of the dealership, Shea Hutchings, is a Soldotna city councilman -- a Republican, needless to say.

What kind of Republican? Eric Dondero of the blog Texans for Sarah Palin interviewed Hutchings and got this answer:

I am a Karl Rove neoconservative Republican, not a Sarah Palin grass roots Republican. I'm more of a Christian Conservative Mike Huckabee sort, more so than a libertarian Republican.

To which I say: hunh?

I know about libertarian Republicans vs. values Republicans. I know about country-club Republicans vs. Walmart Republicans. I know there are still six or seven moderate Republicans left, and all the other Republicans hate them.

But since when is being a "Mike Huckabee sort" extremely different from being "a Sarah Palin grass roots Republican"? (Palin eats moose, but Huckabee used to eat squirrel, dammit!) Since when is being a "Christian Conservative" like being Karl Rove, who's apparently an atheist? And why is being a "Christian Conservative" not like being Sarah Palin?

And why, when the governor has your back, do you go out of your way to deny that you're the kind of Republican she is? Isn't that sort of rude?

I'm starting to think that the loss of political dominance is making the old GOP coalition split into a greater number of warring but (to an outsider) frequently indistinguishable subgenres than heavy metal:



Either that or it's a Judean People's Front/People's Front of Judea thing: