I've known some really good politicians in my time, people who really knew how to hammer out coalitions and get things done. It wasn't always pretty, of course, but they managed some semblance of actual governance and moved the ball down the field. The Tea Party gang has an entirely different problem: A base made up of voters who don't accept that compromise, by definition, is inherent in a political process.

That sort of binary thinking is killing this country.

Now, you have a group of freshman Congress members who won election by promising that things were black and white, and they're going to be punished for illustrating that, as extreme as they were, they have to compromise on at least some things. It would be funny if I wasn't dreading an even more extreme crop the next time: