South Africa and apartheid, Custer’s Last Stand — those are not exactly great moments in world history. But Chris Matthews says that today’s Tea Party-influenced Republican Party fits in the same category. On his Monday MSNBC program, Matthews asked the Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman why he thought the GOP was taking a tough stand on the debt ceiling negotiations. “What’s going on here as I see it is a kind of slow-motion secession,” Fineman said. “This is an ending of the social compact. This is two, three generations worth of agreement about Social Security, about Medicare, about the role of...