— Which, I’m not sure if that’s a step up from suggesting Ted Cruz is a traitor or not.

How much do you wanna bet this is the kind of guy who, if he’s willing to say this kind of thing on Twitter — while working for an organization whose most important figure is an apologist for Muslim extremism, and whose most important achievement has been getting politicians to sign tax pledges that they don’t stick to anyway — what do you think he and his inside-the-Beltway fop friends are saying in private. Any doubt he thinks of Trig Palin as a “waterhead” too?

Newsflash: you can be a leftist and wear an R behind your name and a flag pin on your lapel. And it seems to me we have so many of this type, who confuse what they’ve learned to rationalize as “pragmatism” with a complete capitulation to the “realities of government” that they have no desire to change or see changed. They are parasites. And proud of their stature as such.

Well, here’s a message for Mr Ellis: you can’t shame us; you can’t cow us; and while you and Rove and the Chamber of Commerce try pouring money into primaries to defeat us — attacking classical liberals and the conservative base with far more vigor than you ever do Democrats or Obama, except for predictable and rote condemnations of liberal policy backed up with absolutely no strategy to defeat it (aside from fundraising on your heartfelt desire to defeat it, which is always just over the horizon, much like the promises of a Marxist Utopia) — we will hit back twice as hard.

So yeah, you and your boys had better figure out a way to turn those 25-30 or so million illegals into citizens, so that you can send your corporate cronies the cheap labor they demand, and keep big government churning, even if that means you’re always cast as the loyal opposition.

Nobody is buying your schtick anymore. The fact that the left, the media, the government (by way of the IRS, in ways a recent study showed likely affected the outcomes of several elections), and now the Party leadership and its consultants and insiders, so clearly detest us is, as others have noted, a badge of honor — so much so that I’m having the Gadsden flag tattooed on my neck where they can see it, and understand that I don’t fear them, but rather mirror their contempt.

I have two young children. And I won’t let them live under the boots of bureaucrats in a soul-crushing, politically correct European-style socialist welfare state. Or worse.

Not without a prolonged fight, anyway.

So bring it on. All the demonization you heap on us matters not. We are not a traditional party. We are an idea — the idea, the Founding idea as laid out in the Declaration and later codified in the Constitution’s ratification. And so we will always be around, in the air and on the ground, visible only when we decide to coalesce into the next movement.

To some very nuanced insiders, this kind of hokey patriotism seems so antiquated and gauche. Which is what happens when you live your life without principles: you wind up sneering at everyone else’s to prove to yourself that your shameless expedience and intellectual cowardice is really something more sophisticated than that, an illusion you maintain by finding a consensus among the like minded cowards and gleeful capitulators you rely on to save you from the self-loathing your really should, were you honest, be feeling every time you lace up one of your ridiculous overpriced wingtips.