The whole GOP field is insane in the membrane, at this point, really.

I find that the minute you argue your opponent is not rational is the minute you have given up understanding the problem. LOOK

The current it-girls of the Republican Party are Viktor Orban. Roderigo Duterte. Augusto Pinochet. "The base" wants strongmen, and it wants them old-school - none of your "spin dictators" here, they want dissidents dropped out of helicopters. Only... they live in a democratic republic with a long and healthy history of human rights and political protections for minority parties.

So they have to appear ruthless and strong - cracking down, talking tough - but they can't actually be ruthless and strong... except to the truly defenseless. Ron DeSantis is treating librarians the way Duterte treated drug dealers... within the confines of a modern civilized republic. All the flourish, all the bravado, all the ruthlessness, none of the stakes. And they do this because they have not yet reached the tipping point where rationality and reasonability out-poll red-blooded queer-bashing... not when you're talking to the true believers, anyway.

Get a time machine. Go talk to 2004 Mitt Romney. Tell him "so 20 years from now your party will choose to make the merits of slavery a wedge issue. Do you have any advice to your future self?" I imagine he'd take a few board seats and nope the fuck out 'cuz the middle of the country ain't comin' round on that, not never, not no how. But nobody took a time machine to Mitt, so he's gotta sit there going "so my team has painted themselves into the worst corner imaginable... but they're still my team."

(Hey has anybody seen Paul Ryan lately?)

I have no doubts that the fair weather Republicans will be back. They're gone now, though... so you're not going to get their money for your campaign and if you go for their vote, you're going to piss off the only people who are paying you. Remember: 2023 is the year that the governor. Of Florida. Picked a fight. With Disney. And he did that not because he's bugshit... but because it's what the mob wants.

If you're not in a mob? You stay away from the mob. And if you're in the mob? You either lead it by being the most bloodthirsty or you try to stay alive by hanging towards the back. One thing you don't do is go "look here old chaps are we sure these torches and pitchforks are really called for" because that ship has sailed.

I wouldn't say they're insane. I would say they're (A) desperate (B) out of options (C) convinced that they can ride this out in a direction that benefits them. But (C) is because they're inveterate gamblers. When even Jason Fucking Chaffetz nopes out of this shitshow you know the smart money has long since left town.