Grand old stances on social issues destroy GOP unity

 NICK O'MALLEY

ANY hopes Republicans might have had that the gnashing of teeth that came with their November election loss might be over were dashed this week, when tensions between the right and far right threatened to explode into civil war.

After the President, Barack Obama, delivered a State of the Union address that was the logical extension of his trenchantly liberal inauguration address, Republicans delivered not one but two rebuttals.
There have been signs of a realignment in the conservative firmament ever since the election. Blame has been laid and fingers pointed. The former Bush speechwriter David Frum told Fairfax Media earlier this year that the Republican Party was being done a disservice by an ''information entertainment complex'' that was fanning radicalism and ridiculing sensible debate, dragging the party further away from mainstream political views and cashing in on the process.
He chose not to name names, but since then Fox News has ended its contracts with the former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin and Dick Morris, the paid party consultant who was predicting a sweeping Mitt Romney victory up until the election.
Weirdly enough, Karl Rove, the even more prominent paid GOP agent who had an on-air meltdown on Fox on election night, declaring that key states still hung in the balance when they clearly had been lost, has managed to reinvent himself on the moderate side of this divide.
The official Republican State of the Union rebuttal was made by Marco Rubio, the young Cuban American senator and former Tea Party champion from Florida who is being cast by many as the hopeful modern face of the part - one more welcoming to the growing Hispanic population that helped defeat Romney.