P.M. Carpenter

That Washington is broken is clear enough. What frightens, however, is that increasingly it seems beyond repair.

Dysfunction has become institutionalized, a morbid polarization has replaced mere opposition, and pure self-interest has subordinated and smothered the nation's overarching interests.

We once comforted ourselves that, while frustrating, these are typical of a republic's traditional ways. But no longer. Day by day, issue by issue, we are coming to understand that these are symptomatic of a fatally diseased authority.

When, at the first and probably last National Tea Party Convention, the rather unstable Andrew Breitbart introduced the even more unstable and thus more prosperous Sarah Palin as "the first person to tell us about the death panel," you knew we were in for some first-rate analysis ... say, from the seventeenth century.

Politicians, she said, sounding very much like Increase Mather, should "start seeking some divine intervention again in this country, so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again."

Now that's one helluva platform: Sarah Palin as the Great Conjurer, seeking, principally through prayer, to spare us from financial meltdowns, unemployment, natural disasters and Indian attacks.

Yesterday, after wisely infusing his lede with the qualifier of “early evidence” only, the Politico’s Jonathan Martin made a compelling case for signs of a GOP truce – an internal one, that is; one that “suggests that party leaders and even most grass-roots activists are more interested in winning elections than in ideological bloodletting.”

Martin’s piece was, in effect, suggestive of an indirect warning shot across Democrats’ bow: Beware, for as you bicker and divide, a unified GOP can – and will, should you persist -- do wonders with even exceptionally trashy favorability ratings.

Seldom in politics do altogether splendid ideas come down the bipartisan pike, but we have one in the online crusade for “Demand Question Time.”

Inspired by President Obama’s spirited face-off with Republican leaders last week, a fairly impressive collection of journalists, columnists, educators, activists and bloggers is asking, in petition form, for more of “these sessions … to be broadcast and webcast live and without commercial interruption, sponsorship or intermediaries.”

Those behind the campaign “to make Question Time a regular feature of our democracy” include personalities as politically diverse as David Corn and Glenn Reynolds, Grover Norquist and Katrina vanden Heuvel, Todd Gitlin and Brent Bozell, as well as online entities ranging from MoveOn to HotAir.

According to virtually all the available polling, the American public does not (yet) blame President Obama for Republicans’ epic irresponsibility that led to our accelerating deficits and massive debt. The latter’s jackhammering surrealism is now humming along in hyperdrive, however, so expect a reversal of reproach and misfortune.

“More spending, more taxes and more debt,” snarled Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell about Obama’s 10-year budget proposal, which, because McConnell while in the majority never applied less of the first and more of the second has resulted inexorably in the third.

We should not, however, blame McConnell & Co. for lack of foresight. The GOP’s metronomic ratcheting up of spending and whacking away at revenue was a carefully orchestrated train wreck, leading just as inevitably to what the Times’ David Sanger noted yesterday:

Right now, no matter how dreadfully dismal are Democrats' Congressional prospects in 2010, two factors persist in their favor. The first is Republican overconfidence.

As the Times' Adam Nagourney reported from the Republican National Committee's winter gathering, in Hawaii, that state's GOP governor giddily announced to the faithful last week that, all things considered, "You can count on the Democratic majority in the House being toast this fall."

President Obama is a supremely rational leader in a supremely irrational age. That is, perhaps, an oversimplified construct, but to me it neatly explains the Greek tragedy -- or Shakespearean comi-tragedy -- of his reign, and at no time was this on more vivid display than in his appearance last week at the House Republicans' deeper retreat into madness.

There the emperor stood, staring into a sea of uncomprehending visages and taking all comers, much to the latter's chagrin. As the farce proceeded, the frauds believed they had him on the run, only to realize later that he had systematically disrobed them.

Yesterday morning, after writing a column about "driv[ing] one of those famous Rovian wedges straight into the heart of the latest manifestation of 'movement' conservatism" -- the Tea Party phenomenon, I clicked on Politico and was delighted to find the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee already planning a similar blitzkrieg.

Delighted, not only because the DSCC and its chairman, Sen. Robert Menendez, appear earnest and timely in their freshly designed offensive, but mostly because it is an offensive -- not some conventional defensive maneuver full of rational responses to irrational assaults, for which Democrats are so notorious.

They are, instead, aggressively taking the fight to the right-wing flanks.

Wrote Politico: "Showing that they’ve learned the lesson of Massachusetts" -- and Virginia, and New Jersey, and New York, and in fact every Independent-studded district or state recently captivated by the demagogic simplifications of ultraconservatism -- the DSCC is issuing a memo "advising Democratic campaign managers to frame their opponents early -- and to drive a wedge between moderate voters and tea-party-style conservatives."

There's an enchanting, internal contradiction developing on the right -- actually, an exacerbation of decades-long contradictions -- and the left is doing little to exploit it, even though it could drive one of those famous Rovian wedges straight into the heart of the latest manifestation of "movement" conservatism.

To wit ...

Item One: Tea Partyers and their leadership.

As the NY Times has reported, recent polling reveals that "a hypothetical Tea Party wins more support than Democrats or Republicans," even while the real fundamentalists in the Tea Partying ranks are arguing that their movement so properly disdains the Washington Establishment they should run as a third party.

Yesterday morning brought the millionth, nay the billionth example of how Democrats customarily lose the message war.

It came on NBC's "Meet the Press," where host David Gregory does his damnedest every Sunday to be aggressive in nakedly conspicuous gotcha moments -- those in which the utter conspicuousness renders his aggression entirely unnecessary; those anticipated moments for which he has already plucked some juicy, contradictory quote from the past to prove his guest an insufferable hypocrite.