The Republican establishment is still ducking teabags. They're genuinely freaked out.

Ducking Tea Bags

by digby

Via Weigel, if you want to know how frightened the GOP establishment is of the Tea Party, this should give you a clue:

The National Republican Senatorial Committee sent out an e-mail Friday morning urging donors to help U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller... Sen. John Cornyn, the NRSC chairman, asked supporters to donate to help Miller with expenses during an anticipated "lengthy recount."
"We need to get Joe the resources he needs to win the vote count. Because we need Joe to join our fight against Barack Obama," Cornyn said in the e-mail.

"Write In" is leading the race at the moment, although nobody knows if all of them will qualify for Murkowski. But let's just say it looks as though she's going to pull it out. And yet the Republicans still feel they need to kow tow to the teabaggers, despite the fact that everyone knows they would have probably won a majority in the Senate if it weren't for their lunacy.

In a rational world, one might think they'd be afraid to anger Murkowski, since a lot of Democrats voted for her and she could make an argument for going independent (and caucusing with the Dems) if they give her too much grief. But this isn't a rational world, and what this signals is that the GOP leadership may do all kinds of anonymous sniping to Politico, but they aren't going to publicly challenge DeMint. And they're going to bring the hammer down on what's left of their moderates whether they want to or not.

I wrote before that I thought there might be some party switchers, but I'm not so sure now. If Ben Nelson or Heath Shuler become Republicans it's almost assured that they'd get a tea bag primary from the right. They might as well take their chances with the progressives.

This is getting very interesting.

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