At What Point Do You Get Off The Crazy Train?

To all my Republican brothers and sisters, is this REALLY the kind of party you are proud to be a part of?

Republican state party leaders are rebelling against new Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele for failing to dub President Obama and the Democrats as "socialists." And the rebels insist that the label matters.

Even though Mr. Steele has called his Democratic adversaries "collectivists," at least 16 state leaders say the term lacks the pejorative punch needed to sway public opinion and want all 168 members of the Republican National Committee to debate and vote on it.

It is the first time in memory that a sitting national leader of the Republican Party has faced a public challenge over his ideological leadership by conservative members of his own national committee.

snip

Mr. Bopp, a constitutional law lawyer and hero to conservatives for arguing a Supreme Court challenge to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, said he had presented Mr. Steele with a petition bearing the signatures of RNC members from 16 states - the number needed under RNC rules to convene an extraordinary meeting of the full committee next month.

Mr. Steele has twice rejected requests by Mr. Bopp, who leads two conservative caucuses within the RNC, to call the special meeting.

The petition calls for open debate at the extraordinary meeting on three conservative resolutions that for the first time directly involve the RNC in policy and ideology.

"In just a few months, the goal of the Obama administration has become clear and obvious - to restructure American society along socialist ideals," Mr. Bopp said in summarizing the first resolution. The resolution's chief sponsor is Washington state RNC member Jeff Kent, and it calls on the Democrats to be "truthful and honest with the American people by renaming themselves the Democrat Socialist Party."

snip

"Just as President Reagan's identification of the Soviet Union as the 'evil empire' galvanized opposition to communism, we hope that the accurate depiction of the Democrats as a Socialist Party will galvanize opposition to their march to socialism," Mr. Bopp wrote in his e-mail.

Mr. Steele previously offered to issue a joint statement with signers of the resolution, but they turned down his offer and insisted on a debate and vote by the full RNC membership - a state party chairman and a national committeeman and national committeewoman from all 50 states and five territories.

Oregon RNC member Solomon Yue, a founder of a conservative caucus among RNC members, said, "We must refocus the public's attention to the Democrat Party's stampede to socialism and we must make our socialist president's every legislative victory so costly that he will lose the war in 2010 and 2012."

Publicly, Mr. Steele has shied away from using the socialist line.

"We don't see this president so much as a socialist as we see him as a collectivist," he told Fox News. "When you strip away this idea that the individual matters, for this concept of the collective - all of us pulling together and working towards some governmental goal - that's what I'm more concerned about."

But in an April 6 memo to RNC members, Mr. Steele said that "Democrats are indeed marching America toward European-style socialism, and I will continue to criticize their dangerous policies in that regard - but I believe these proposed resolutions will accomplish little than to give the media and our opponents the opportunities to mischaracterize Republicans."

I have no words.