Vice President Joe Biden occasionally gets mocked and ridiculed because he tends to say some off-the-wall things.

This link contains a curious truth about the state of a once-great Republican Party.

http://www.msnbc.com/hardball/biden-republican-party

It is that, as Biden noted, the Republican Party has morphed into perhaps three sub-parties.

If you watched President Obama’s State of the Union speech and then listened intently to the so-called “Republican response” to it, you heard three responses.

One came from a Washington state member of Congress, Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, speaking for the “mainstream” or “establishment” wing of the party; another came from a senator, Mike Lee of Utah, who spoke for the tea party wing of the GOP; then came the response from Rand Paul of Kentucky who spoke for, well, the Rand Paul wing of the Republican Party.

The budget deal that was worked out by the Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., divided the party along two fissures.

Then this week we saw Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, force fellow Republicans to cast a vote in favor of raising the debt ceiling without strings, which he did to embarrass members of his own party — and in the process he incurred the wrath of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who’s facing a tough primary challenge from the tea party wing at home.

The vice president said, “I wish there was a Republican Party. I wish there was one person who would sit across the table from us, make a deal, make a compromise, and know when you got up from that table, it was done.”

He added, “All you had to do is look at the response to the State of the Union. What were there, three or four?”

A Texas Panhandle Republican, the late state Sen. Teel Bivins, used to lament how Republicans occasionally would “eat their young.”

Bon appetit, GOP.