Is the Tea Party America's Khmer Rouge?

So Wrong, In So Many Ways

The struggles underway between Congressional GOP leaders and the White House over America's debt ceiling have an eerie, nihilistic air to them.

Some attribute it to the struggles Republican House leader John Boehner and Senate leader Mitch McConell are having with their caucuses divided between sane members and radical Tea Party legislators.  I've found these Tea Partiers fascinating, in an ominous way and I just realized why.  I figure they're America's equivalent of Cambodia's old Khmer Rouge regime.  From WiKi:

This organization is remembered primarily for its policy of social engineering, which resulted in genocide.^[1] Its attempts at agricultural reform led to widespread famine, while its insistence on absolute self-sufficiency, even in the supply of medicine, led to the deaths of thousands from treatable diseases (such as malaria). Brutal and arbitrary executions and torture carried out by its cadres against perceived subversive elements, or during purges of its own ranks between 1976 and 1978, are considered to have constituted a genocide.

Now, obviously, I don't think the Tea Partiers are going to trigger a genocide, they've seen to it their public is far too heavily armed for that, but they are into a twisted form of social engineering laced with essentially nihilistic ideological dogma.  Like the KR, the TP is basically irrational and immune to logic and reason.

My suspicions are only reinforced by this assessment of the Congressional GOP in today's New York Times:

...Not only is Michele Bachmann, a leading Republican presidential candidate, saying a government default is nothing to worry about, but a core group of 59 House Republicans have indicated they will not raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances, according to House Speaker John Boehner.

That’s right: no matter how much President Obama gives them — from curbing entitlements to cuts in excess of $3 trillion — this cadre of radical Republicans is taking the burn-it-all-down position. They don’t want to see the terms of a deal because there is no deal they will accept. That’s their stated position.

With this step, what the chaos caucus has proven is that they have no interest in governing. They didn’t go to Washington to find solutions; they went there to destroy the place.

Based on Boehner’s math, the anarchists make up perhaps 25 percent of the G.O.P. House. At the other end of party control are the moneyed interests who’ve long bankrolled Republicans. They’re happy, of course, that their favored politicians are willing to go to the brink of catastrophe to keep even the most egregious tax loopholes from being closed. But now they’re getting scared, as the anarchist wing indicates it is serious about bringing the whole government down — and with it a lot of private money.