The Tea Party would like you to know that they are NOT the Republican Party. It’s easy to see how people could get them confused — both suckle at the teat of the same corporate schills like David Koch and Richard Mellon Scaife. Both are composed of a group that, demographically speaking, are less educated, less informed, and less tolerant than the rest of America. Both have the same obsessive fascination with conspiracy theories about Obama being a Kenyan-born Hamas sleeper cell who studies the Mau Mau Revolution for guidance on running death panels chaired by William Ayers. But tinfoil hats aside, there are differences between the two groups.

While Republicans understand that the Constitution, by design, forces debate, compromise and careful contemplation of the issues, the Tea Party has apparently missed the memo. With all the attention to detail of a cocaine-addled German Shepard, the Tea Party demands that America is run their way, no exceptions.

The Tea Party does not care that the cost of defaulting on our debt would be radically higher than any alleged savings. They do not care that economists believe that a US default could trigger a global financial panic. They do not care that default means soaring interest rates and crippled markets. And they do not care about the recent plight of a country facing a similar problem, Greece. With the Greek government in shambles, credit rating slashed and economy under water, the riots and protests that have become a daily occurrence there are now being supplanted by calls for open anarchy.

While the Tea Party may not call for anarchy, they come as close to it as any significant political constituency in the United States since the 1930s. They believe people can be governed by abiding faith, and businesses by the invisible hand of the market. Why shelter the homeless when churches can do it for us? Why subsidize student loans when there is Wikipedia? Why regulate oil companies when people can vote with their dollar?

In the mind of a Tea Partier, compassion is obsolete because the weak are undeserving of our sympathy. In their perverse worldview, every life saved by government healthcare is a new tax, every child’s education a handout. The Tea Party won’t be satisfied by small government. The Tea Party wants no government.

And so we come to John Boehner. This HuffPo article details the delicate dance Boehner has to do between taking a position he knows he must, and alienating the movement that delivered him the Speakership. If Boehner doesn’t play ball, the Tea Party will hit him, and any other Republican open to bipartisanship, with a kamikaze third party challenge. Just like Jack Davis is running a doomed campaign to purge NY-26 of center-right conservatism, so the Tea Party wants to do with the nation at large.

John Boehner is no hack. He may be staunchly conservative, but he’s persuadable by reason. His backing of TARP helped to save our economy in 2008, and if he does the conscionable thing now, he may save it again. Some Democrats are salivating at this Hobson’s choice — make Boehner take a vote that will make him toxic to the Tea Party or make him take a vote that will nosedive the global economy (and give Democrats an issue to beat him over the head with come election time).

I, however, being of non-Ayn-Randian stock, feel pangs of sympathy for our spiritless speaker. He is in the decidedly unenviable position of being the voice of reason amongst an unreasonable constituency, a Kyle in a party of Cartmans, a Cheryl David in a world of Larrys.

So I say, lets take a moment to reflect on the John Boehners of the world, the hapless public servants who got into government for the actual purpose of governing. In the spirit of bipartisanship, let’s wipe the metaphorical tears from his craggy, florescent countenance and remind him of why he got into politics — not to serve the special interests, or the anti-tax lobbyists dressed in Revolutionary garb, or the David Kochs and Richard Mellon Scaifes of the world, but to serve the people.

Besides, there’s always 2014.