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I have preached long and often on these threads that the Republican Party must be reformed and that it cannot win if he does not accommodate The Tea Party Movement. Equally, The Tea Party Movement will succeed only in electing Democrats if it does not align itself with the Republican Party.

I disagree with the second sentence here. The only real value of the Tea Parties, if the Republican Party is assumed to be the only hope of conservatives, is that they send the message to the GOP that liberals will not be elected. That threat must be there, and it must be real. Otherwise, the republicans will continue to move left. In order to keep the threat there and make it real, Tea Partiers MUST refuse to vote for RINOs, DIABLOs, and liberals of all stripes, regardless of which party they're in. The Republican Party must come to US, not us to them.

I quite agree that the Republican Party must always be held to account or for various environmental reasons it will tend to drift to the left with the tide. My admonition to The Tea Party Movement was addressed to a different issue which is a tendency within that movement which is observable even within these threads to veer away from the Republican Party to form a third party movement. This is the gravest mistake conservatives and those who love freedom in the time of Obama could possibly make.

Without rehearsing again the history of the political party movement in America, it should suffice to say that splinter groups succeed only in electing the party not from which they splinter but rather the party to which they are most opposed. So it will be if The Tea Party Movement indulges a quite understandable emotional need to punish the Republican establishment.

There is another complication. The Tea Party Movement is comprised not only of conservatives but of independents of several flavors, many of whom are certainly not doctrinaire conservatives but who are fiscal conservatives and some are libertarians. These people have no objection to Rinos who will abandon conservative social issues providing they are fiscally conservative. I am of the opinion that the Reagan construct for the conservative movement in shaping the Republican Party with three legs is the only viable way for conservatism to prevail in America. That means that the party embraces social conservatives, national security conservatives, and fiscal conservatives. Not all tea party goers will be congruent with all three legs all the time.