I’m kind of liking this internecine warfare heating up among leading national Republicans.

Karl “Bush’s Brain” Rove and Sarah “Barracuda” Palin have gotten into a snit over their role in leading the party’s insurgent wing. Now we a former Republican National Committee chairman, Michael Steele, blasting the current RNC boss, Reince Priebus, for being a “loser.”

http://thehill.com/video/campaign/288785-steele-priebus-feud-heats-up

I won’t concern myself with the “Brain-Barracuda” dustup. Neither of them really is relevant at the moment.

Steele vs. Priebus is another matter. I kind of agree with Steele’s assessment of the GOP at this point. Priebus has just presided over a party that had a chance to win the presidency in 2012, only to nominate Mitt Romney, who emerged from one of the weirdest political primary fields in recent memory.

Steele did run the RNC when the GOP scored some stunning off-year election victories in 2010, taking control of the House of Reps and closing the gap with the Democrats in the Senate. He lost the chairmanship to Priebus in 2011 and then watched as his party lost ground in both houses of Congress and lost the presidency by 5 million votes and a near Electoral College landslide.

Perhaps it’s instructive that these two men would be sniping at each other, given that Priebus wrested the chairmanship away from Steele.

But it does go to show you that Republicans have fallen into the trap that ensnared Democrats in the 1970s. Democratic liberal insurgents fought with party establishment types over the Vietnam War and that internal squabbling tore the party apart for two decades before Bill Clinton arrived in 1992 and “triangulated” his way to the presidency. Clinton found a way to cut to the moderate center of his party while playing the two extremes against each other.

Republicans just might find themselves in a similarly long period in the wilderness.