That's an understatement. Boehner showed his true colors with the recent omnibus spending bill. He included several earmarks. Effective leaders lead by example. Boehner's example, among others, speaks for itself. (loudly)
One thing that must be done, and Rush touched on it yesterday with his response to Micheal Steele, is putting an end to open primaries which allow Dims to cross the aisle and participate in large numbers in the nomination of our candidates. I'm convinced that is how we wound up with Mclaim and many other RINO's like him.....
I think a lot of the problem with people like Boehner, etc. is not that they themselves are hard-core RINOs, but that they are weak-willed. They get up there and they "go Washington", they "Drink the Potomac Tea", so to speak. They need to be reminded of where their breadis buttered, electorally.
Problem is, when conservatives whine and threaten a third party and whatnot, this doesn't send the message we think it's sending. Instead of "hey, maybe we'd better shape up", the message is "these kooks are going to split us, so we'd better shift left to grab votes to compensate."
We need ONE conservative party in this country, not two or three. If we operated under a parliamentary system, it'd be different, and I'd probably already have started my own Neo-Ciceronian Party. Nevertheless, we operate under a winner take all electoral system, and splitting the conservative vote does nothing but elect Democrats. Under our system, the obvious answer to any thinking person is not to split up into a host of personality-driven ego-trip third parties, but to forcefully take over the Republican Party from the grassroots level, one county at a time. It can be done in two years, if we'd actually get energetic and organised enough to do it.
But that's the problem - for all their tough talk about their principles and whatnot, I think a lot of conservatives out there - including a lot of FReepers - are simply too lazy and self-interested to do what it takes to retake the GOP for conservatism (which, then, brings up the interesting question of why we'd trust them to put together a credible, viable third party). Conservatives like to gripe about the RINOs, but they don't like to actually do anything about them. They want to threaten to split off and create a third party, but they can't pull themselves away from the TV long enough to even get involved in their local GOP apparatus to start making a difference for conservatism. And have you tried organising conservatives? It's like trying to herd cats - except the cats are more cooperative. Until conservatives get off their individual ego trips and start working together, they'd be ineffective regardless of which route they take.
Oh, and by the way, all the talk about 1856 is nonsense, since there is no issue today like slavery to create the stark divisions such as were seen then. Also, people seem to forget that the Whig Party had already collapsed as a force in American politics by 1852 - the Republicans didn't so much arise as a split off of the Whigs as they arose as a re-animation of its corpse, infused with a better moral compass on the slavery issue. No such comparable situation exists today.