As should be apparent to anyone who paid attention to the November 2012 election cycle, the Republican party is in electoral disarray. To call their messaging strategy tone deaf is an insult to the musically-impaired, who typically find other ways to communicate successfully. In print, web and television outreach, the GOP managed to estrange women, the scientific community and minorities with all-out assaults on female reproductive rights and workplace equality, sneers at empirical evidence of climate change and of course, a view of our nation’s immigrants as persona non grata. The really neat trick about the last bungle is the speed with which the Republican party managed to destroy the 59 percent approval rating once enjoyed by former President George W. Bush amongst Latin Americans during the majority of his term.

After an embarrassing Election Day drubbing which featured President Obama trouncing Mitt Romney with regard to women voters, African-Americans and (this statistic still stuns me) enjoying a 44-point advantage amongst Hispanics, GOP loyalists (masochists?) hoped ballot box tallies would deliver the necessary wakeup call. Republican Governors and Senators, all coincidentally I’m sure, considering a 2016 run for the White House, fell all over themselves to get to the nearest microphone. The plea, in not so many words, was clear: please stop engendering long-term revulsion for our party with backward, racist rhetoric that ignores the country’s rapidly evolving demographics. In January, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal cautioned the Republican National Committee to “Stop being the stupid party,” while 2013 It Boy, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, begged his caucus to cease using “harsh, intolerable and inexcusable” rhetoric directed at illegal immigrants, or risk losing the Latino vote in perpetuity.

And for a moment, considering the speed with which the Senate managed to come together in consideration of long-overdue, comprehensive immigration reform, it appeared that GOP party members received the message. In short order, Republicans returned to their number one priority: stonewalling the President at every turn with regard to Cabinet and judicial appointments, squashing common-sense gun reforms and scandal baiting that led former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (Newt Gingrich, people!) to caution his party against “overreach.” These are, clearly, crazy times in which we live.

But while the Republican Party goes about its daily business of painting the President as the enemy of freedom, privacy and job creation, leaders in the Senate have tried to ignore the very real fact that, when it comes to creating resurgent conservative momentum, the enemy lies within. The threatening calls, quite literally, are coming from inside the House.

Consider this week’s headline courtesy of ABC News: House Committee Would Criminalize Being Undocumented. Writers Jim Avila and Serena Marshall open the piece with the rhetorical question, “One small step for immigration in the Senate, one giant leap backward in the House?” Describing the recent work of the House Judiciary Committee on immigration reform, the article notes a “First step, making it a federal crime (misdemeanor) to be in the United States with undocumented status and repealing DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), better known as the DREAM Act, that provides temporary status to people brought to the United States as children and were younger than 31 as of June 15, 2012.”

Though this proposed legislation has zero chance of passage in the Senate, or of being signed into law by President Obama, Republicans in the House have no qualms about continued waste of taxpayer time and money that results in legislation opposing the will of the American people. Depending on the poll, it is estimated that between 61 and 78 percent of voting citizens support immigration overhaul.

The response to the House’s latest shot at immigrants was immediate and profound. Avila and Marshall report that “Protestors chanting ‘shame, shame, shame, stop the pain’ and ‘Si, se puede’ (‘Yes, We Can’) caused a momentary pause in the committee at the beginning of the proceedings.” And, “The hashtag #HATEact was being used by opponents of the legislation on social media.”

Well done GOP. Nothing like welcoming Latino voters back into the fold.

However my question for today is directed at those would-be populist Republican Senators and Governors. When exactly will you stop directing your petulant, partisan griping at Obama and start taking on your real opponents, the members of your own party who will have you languishing as a fringe minority (pun most certainly intended) for all eternity?

Who can forget the great (descriptor used with healthy dose of irony) health care reform debate of summer 2009? In a historic low point for American discourse, crazed Tea Party crackpots and others situated on the extreme right side of the political spectrum attempted to derail the eventual passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) by any means they deemed necessary.  These efforts included the sensational and oft-repeated claim that group of government drones would render service decisions that could theoretically result in the arbitrary deaths of American citizens. It is still hard to recall the death panel “conversation” without overt queasiness.

Having failed to gain traction for the propaganda outside the usual circle of tinfoil hat wearing paranoids, the right then sought to take the wind out of the act’s sails by senselessly voting for its repeal in the House no less than 37 times. These “symbolic” gestures have been an epic waste of taxpayer resources even as issues related to consistently high unemployment, infrastructure dissolution and climate change languish.

Then the GOP apparatus tried a new tactic, espousing the dire warning that Obamacare would bring the country to financial ruin, ruin I say! The folks who spread this disingenuous swill would have loved us to forget that Wall Street already tied its hand at that last decade. But instead of Republican howls for accountability at the time, we received cynical claims that further deregulation was the solution. That’s just what an alcoholic needs: increased access to spirits.

And then, oops! As Obamacare began to become the law of the land, we experienced a marked slowdown in health care costs. In even worse news for right wing agenda, the reversal may be permanent if the economy continues to grow. Better get back to that middle class job killing stat! I am certain GOP opposition to raising the Federal minimum wage is just a coincidence.

Having dispatched the more obvious objections to Obamacare with amazing speed in this era of legislative inertia, the right is launching a new scare tactic. Designed to divert attention away from the fact that health care reform is already working to relieve budgetary strain while increasing access to health insurance for Americans previously locked out, the conservative media apparatus would now have us believe that a doctor shortage is the next danger.

The Wall St. Cheat Sheet ran an article this week with a rhetorical question for a headline: Does Obamacare Mean Fewer Doctors and Less Accessible Healthcare? Note to right wing pundits: the inclusion of a question mark at the end of a provocative headline is a dead giveaway that what we are about to read is not solid analysis, but rather a rudimentary attempt to plant an idea. This is NOT journalism.

But I digress. Among the more flimsy evidence writer Meghan Foley offers is data from a “Physicians Foundation survey of 13,000 doctors [which] discovered that 60 percent of respondents would retire today if they could, an increase from 45 percent who gave the same answer before the legislation was passed.”

Here’s an idea. Perhaps those doctors who wish they could retire are among the throngs of Baby Boomers who, having lost savings, pensions, jobs and homes in the housing bubble burst and financial crash of 2008, can no longer afford to do so. How in the world is this survey direct evidence of Obamacare creating a doctor shortage? To suggest that other factors may be at play could be the understatement of my professional writing career.

I give the right’s media arm credit for Playskool Weeble-like resiliency, but the arguments and objections against implementing reform are becoming more pathetically desperate. If the Republican party and its voices are the “true patriots” they often claim to be, how about getting behind a law that was passed democratically and which is already demonstrating significant benefits with regard to the finances and security of the nation and its denizens. Give it up already.