Conservatives Blow Themselves Up Over Trump vs. Cruz? Huh?

Rubio, Bush, Christie, Kasich each can have their 6%, hehehehe...

Remember this Republican moderate candidate? Neither does anybody else...

Conservatives have been busy over the past who knows how many years creating the perfect conservative candidate, and all they get is Donald Trump or Ted Cruz? Seriously?

Yes, seriously. The Tea Party was already nearly completely in charge of the conservative base in 2012 but still couldn't stop the GOP establishment from nominating Mitt Romney. Seriously, Mitt Romney? You betcha.

Now, the challenge is -- if it comes down to Trump or Cruz -- to choose between the two. Unsurprisingly, it's led to war.

There are so many conservatives -- who, formerly, were very much in charge of the Republican Party -- ready to pile on to force Trump out of the race that the National Review and the Weekly Standard went all-in to lay it on the line against The Donald. It's backfired because the RNC had already decided that the real villain in the party was Ted Cruz!

French was responding to a report at CNN in which Senator Dan Coats of Indiana said that the wounds Cruz has created with the Republican caucus are so deep that they’d find it nearly impossible to work with him. And Coats was hardly alone in expressing that opinion. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina likened a choice between Trump and Cruz to a choice between being shot and poisoned to death. Most strikingly, Texas’s other senator, John Cornyn, refused to defend his partner after Bob Dole said that a Cruz candidacy would be “cataclysmic” for the party.

This 50-50 fight over the lunatic fringe -- let's face it, that's what the GOP core has become -- would be laughable if it didn't spell the end of something that's hard to calculate.

The RNC, which was finally warming to a Trump candidacy, wasn't very happy with the onslaught from the National Review and has responded by giving the magazine the boot as a featured partner at the upcoming GOP debate Feb. 25th. Bu-bye.

Any way you slice it, the Republican Party is the opposite of unified as it moves toward the primary season. I heard Chuck Todd on his MTP Daily show put it best: What was developing into a circular firing squad is now turning into a Quentin Tarantino movie. Super ouch!