Whooooooooops Your Scary Government Strategy

Conservatives have always (ostensibly) been in favor of smaller government (except for wars of choice and massive corporate hand-outs under the guise of healthcare reform AS EXAMPLES), and (ostensibly) in favor of decentralized government (except for federal interventions into blocking same-sex marriage or making uteri property of the state AS EXAMPLES), but the fearmongering about the inherent nefariousness of the Big Scary Federal Government has gotten even more intense and hyperbolic and paranoid and absurd in the Age of Obama, especially as Republicans have tried to activate and exploit racist fears by dogwhistling about "entitlement" and "handouts" and "takers" and "moochers" while (ostensibly) talking about the federal government's "wealth redistribution" plan.

But whoooooooooooooops the problem is that they still want to get elected to the government they constantly say is a garbage nightmare not to be trusted in the slightest: "Republicans scheming to take back control of the Senate next year are walking a delicate line between the politically pragmatic decisions they need to make to win and an activist base that sees a nefarious, hidden agenda in Washington's meddling."

The party's having an increasingly difficult time finding candidates who want to run in races where they're going to face a primary battle which amounts to "so many candidates trying to portray themselves as the most conservative possible option," convincing a suspicious base that they definitely hate the federal government more than everyone else so please send me there—and then having to stick to the most absurd, retrograde, harmful, indefensible positions, because if they betray their promises to be the seething id of their bigoted, anti-intellectual base, they'll only prove even more that government can't be trusted, even Republicans in government.

What a clusterfuck. Whoops.