Distinguishing the extreme right wing from the Republican Party’s center can sometimes be difficult, but today the rejectionist front made the job a little easier by blasting Speaker John Boehner’s offer in the fiscal talks.

It’s an “$800 billion tax hike,” said Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina. It’s “categorical, pre-emptive capitulation,” said the Heritage Foundation. It “leaves conservatives wanting,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party spending group set up by the Koch brothers.

My immediate reaction was: wait, are they talking about the same offer Mr. Boehner and the House leadership made to President Obama on Monday afternoon? Because that letter, thin and bereft of details, was anything but a cave-in to the forces of socialism. It is based on the same fantasy that helped defeat Mitt Romney, claiming the country can afford to lower tax rates by getting rid of unspecified tax deductions. It cuts $1.2 trillion in spending over a decade, half of which would come from Medicare, Medicaid and other health programs, hurting low-income people just to preserve low tax rates for the rich. And it allows Mr. Boehner to reuse the blunt cudgel of the debt ceiling to force even more cuts on a regular basis.



Only if the offer is seen from the narrowest sectarian viewpoint — that it dares to raise revenue by ending those tax deductions — could it be seen as any kind of concession. Though Mr. Boehner adamantly states he opposes raising tax rates, which is the essential element for Mr. Obama, his willingness to bring in additional revenue violates the economic fundamentalism of the party’s far right.

It’s not clear whether Mr. Boehner is annoyed by this criticism, but in fact the conservatives are doing him a favor. For weeks, he has insisted that by succumbing to reality and allowing revenues to be part of a fiscal deal, he is taking a huge risk with his party and needs a great deal of budget-cutting in return. That position has seemed increasingly dubious as one Republican after another acknowledged that Mr. Obama won the election and thus taxes need to go up.

But now, right on cue, the extremists have weighed in to make Mr. Boehner’s fiscal stubbornness look downright courageous. The only problem for Mr. Boehner is that they aren’t really acting strategically; they actually believe this stuff.