So yeah, the Tea Party hilariously screwed the GOP last night.

[Linus Van Pelt]

I'm no fan of the Tea Party (to put it mildly), but this idea that they're kind of means-end irrational just because they botched a couple of senate races strikes me as very misguided.

There's nothing internally incoherent about thinking that that the establishment of both parties is sufficiently broken and the political culture in need of change that it's worth losing a couple of seats in the short term to bring about more substantive change. The same applies to third parties in general.

Or, shorter: there's a lot more to politics than who wins the next election.

I mean, do you really think that the Tea Party's goals would be that much better served by having  Mike Castle and an unafraid-of-being-primaried Olympia Snowe going around negotiating "deals" that the Washington press would love but both bases would hate whenever Obama and Boehner were in a deadlock?