[The_Victor]

Bad advice. Purging the Tea Party from the GOP will even more certainly cause the GOP’s demise.

[skinkinthegrass]

Bad advice. Purging the Tea Party from the GOP
will even more certainly cause the GOP’s demise.hence, the "advice". (from the very Dark Side :)...

[Junk Silver]

What I get from this article is that the establishment GOP is colluding with the Mainstream media (i.e. the Obama Department of Propaganda) to provoke the Tea-Party elements of the Republican party to break off and form a third party.

I say to hell with that - it's our damn party and it is not in our best interests to let ourselves be thrown out of it. Let McCain and his “Surrender Caucus” form a third party, or better yet let them be honest for once and just declare themselves to be Democrats.

At the end of the day it's all a matter of votes. We'll see next year how badly defeated the Tea Party was this week.

[pieceofthepuzzle]

The bottom line is that if the Tea Party did not have the support of a large number of citizens, and didn’t represent a large number of citizens, we wouldn’t be having this debate. They have credibility because they represent a significant constituency.

What the GOP establishment is saying is that they don’t want to listen to a significant number of those who elected them to office. That’s clearly not representative government. The Democrats have done a good job at assembling coalitions of smaller factions of supporters. Republicans have adopted an all or none mentality that seeks to exclude the views of specific factions of their support. This is what keeps them from going over the top.