I Remain Manfully Committed to Decreasing My Insufferability Quotient

by temporarily suspending the conceit that I am right about some things and other people are wrong or are so late to the party that they should at least wipe their feet before heading for the keg.

I therefore leave it to other, meaner people to calculated exactly what level of irony-density we must have reached now that we have a Republican Senator crying his anonymous eyes out to the author of "The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life" 

about how awful it is that his Party of Personal Responsibility has lost its fucking mind:

A Republican Senator Doubts His Party Can Govern
By Ramesh Ponnuru Oct 21, 2013 4:28 PM CT

It’s the day after Congress voted to fully reopen the federal government and raise the debt ceiling. The senator I’m meeting, who would fall roughly in the middle of the Senate’s Republicans if they were lined up by ideology, voted with the majority. “I’m being shredded by the Tea Party radio people today,” he says, although he doesn’t seem concerned about it. “That is what it is.”

His bigger concern: He doesn’t think that his party is ready to govern the country.

The Republicans who were in the public eye during the shutdown have generally been either the party’s top congressional leaders or its most vocal hard-liners. Most Republicans in Congress don’t fall into either category. This senator -- who requested anonymity so he could describe the party’s problems candidly -- is part of that less-high-profile contingent. My impression is that his views are widely shared within it.
...

The questions that his colleagues need to ask themselves, the senator says, are “What have we learned?” and “How do we not repeat this?” Most Republican senators, it seems to me, emerged from the shutdown fight with the same views they had going in. Those who thought it was a mistake found confirmation of their views in the party’s sagging poll numbers and lack of accomplishments; those who favored it thought it could have worked if the skeptics hadn’t sabotaged it.
...

It was very naughty for our political thought-leaders not to have warned untutored, dewy-eyed idealists like Senator Anonymous and Ramesh Ponnuru long ago that this sad pass was coming.