Conmen are protective of their marks, in the sense that they don’t want other grifters horning in on their con. Especially conmen who are so greedy that they risk blowing the deal for all conmen. That’s the gist of the fight now in progress between Ted Cruz representing the Teaparty vs the larger GOP:

Salon — The wheels are coming off the clown car that is the modern Republican Party. House and Senate GOP leaders are sniping at each other, on Twitter and, even more nastily, via their congressional aides. And no one’s been more vilified than the junior senator from Texas, Ted Cruz. Not even Barack Obama, for a change.Cruz has defiantly led his party down the dead-end path of demanding that Democrats agree to defund Obamacare in exchange for Republicans’ voting to keep funding the government. Polls find even Republicans don’t like that idea, and so a few GOP politicians are asking what Cruz’s endgame is. And when Cruz said he knew Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wouldn’t let such a bill pass the Senate, and suggested it was all up to House Republicans, the knives came out.

Crus is now being called out as a fraud and a kamikaze, and he is richly deserves it. But it’s also the only trick he has, his fund raising and some related Teaparty groups are raking it in over the we-can-defund Obamacare scam. They can’t, that’s the scam, they lack the votes to even bring it to a vote in the Senate and the President would never sign it anyway. So the House, tired of Cruz’s bullshit grandstanding, passed a version which will now get kicked to the Senate and now the nation can watch Cruz fail to get Obamacare defunded. He’ll rally the Teaparty which will bring more hare-brained pressure on the GOP to self destruct.

Cruz is now on a McCarthy-like roller coaster, and like McCarthy, there’s not any easy way out. It’s good for him politically, he doesn’t know anything else, and backing down could break him. But pushing forward will break the GOP on this issue and piss the entire nation off, rich and poor alike if they don’t get it together. If Crus has any sense of decency and self preservation, he’ll STFU and keep a low profile for a bit. Fortunately, every sign indicates he’s got a giant ego and not a lick of decency. His conservative buddies know that, maybe that’s why there’s a real smell of panic and vitriol in the air now, beyond the usual day-to-day sniping or ugly primary battle.