Frank Rich has a spread in NY Mag with some Edward Gorey-esque illustrations. Rich is basically shocked that the right aren’t practitioners of the hive mind lifestyle, wherein everyone has to agree 100% on everything, all of the time. That’s the thing about big tents: we don’t sweat the smaller issues and we find unity on the bigger issues threatening America now.

A week steeped in right-wing media reveals a Republican Party far more despairing than the lamestream knows.

[…]

But in putting together a menu for my immersion in the right’s alternative media reality, I didn’t want to play the knee-jerk liberal game of shooting fish in a barrel. So while I surveyed all the usual fire-breathing suspects, including relative newcomers like Dana Loesch, the young Eve Harrington gaining on Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter, I added highbrow and ­garden-variety conservative voices.

Despairing? We engage in healthy ideological jousting before uniting behind candidates. We fight during the primary, where fights do and should happen. We also provide healthy criticism of the party for whom we vote; we don’t cover for them like the left does with Obama and his unmitigated disasters on everything from the failed stimulus to the cluster[redacted] currently erupting in the Middle East.

I also believe that we have to get our foot in the door and save the country before we can effectively save the party. They’re both important, but I value country over party. I’d rather control the calendar of the senate and have power of appointment, investigation, impeachment, etc., over all else.

The particular excerpt Rich transcribes from my show, aired later by Rachel Maddow, was my commentary from the RNC about the floor fight. It was a floor fight that certainly paled in comparison to the epic fight seen on the DNC floor a week later when delegates booed the inclusion of God and Jerusalem as Israel’s capital—and their voice votes against it were overruled by the Democrat establishment.

That is true “despair.” Rich needn’t worry, at least about the right. The left? That’s another matter entirely. What Rich calls “despair,” we call “diversity.”