Kind of a follow up to the last post — Actor 212 and David Frum both discuss the destruction of the Republican Party as we know it. By “as we know it,” I mean a political party in the tradition of American political parties.

This is not to say that the GOP is going to disappear; far from it. It’s saying that the thing we call the Republican Party is being replaced by an alien entity that is a political party only in the broadest and loosest sense of the word.

The last post was about how the direction of the party is being steered by a self-selected external committee and not the elected Republican National Committee. Today, Actor and Frum write about the destructive influence of the Tea Party. But the Tea Party is a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster fabricated directly or indirectly by some of the same outsiders on the self-select committee, such as the Koch brothers and Karl Rove.

(Karl may not like the baggers, but he made baggerism possible. They were spawned in the toxic swamp of Karl’s brand of politicking.)

The Republican Party is rapidly turning into the wholly owned instrument of the 1 percent of the 1 percent, with a base made up of zombie baggers trained to lurch in whatever direction the dog whistles tell them to lurch. The party is no longer responding to the opinions and needs of voters at all, and it represents no one but its owners.

Happy Halloween.