Ok, so many this is a bit of inside baseball for most of you — but for me, the thrashing death spasms civil war over at the Republican National Committee is just too delicious to not point out:

A battle over control of the party’s purse strings has erupted at the troubled Republican National Committee, with defenders of Chairman Michael S. Steele accusing dissident RNC members of trying to “embarrass and neuter” the party’s new leader. Randy Pullen, the RNC’s elected treasurer, former RNC General Counsel David Norcross and three other former top RNC officers have presented Mr. Steele with a resolution, calling for a new set of checks and balances on the chairman’s power to dole out money… The resolution prompted a top Steele supporter to issue a scathing attack against Mr. Pullen and his allies after they had asked Mr. Steele to support the “good governance” resolution at a special meeting of the full national committee set for next month. The party spent about $300 million in last year’s elections. “I urge you to reject this hostile attempt to embarrass and neuter the chairman of the RNC,” Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus wrote in an e-mail to the 168-member national committee.

I know that dancing on the newly dug grave of your enemy can be seen as a bit unseemly but, well, all I can say is that they did it to themselves.

I wonder how Michael Steele is feeling about his ultra-hip, postmodern push to re-brand the GOP using urban-suburban hip-hop flava?

Update: Civil war breaks out in the Midwest too!

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.’s appearance at a Michigan county Republican Party event was scrapped this week after the county chairwoman said that hosting the moderate Utah governor would mean abandoning the party’s conservative principles. Kent County Republican Party Chairwoman Joanne Voorhees abruptly canceled the party fundraiser scheduled for Saturday. “The voters want and expect us to stand on principle and return to our roots. Unfortunately, by holding an event with Governor Huntsman, we would be doing the exact opposite,” Voorhees wrote in an e-mail quoted in The Grand Rapids Press. Voorhees did not specify which issues she felt were contrary to the party’s principles and did not return messages left at the party headquarters and on her cell phone. The group Campaign for Michigan Families praised the cancellation, attributing it to Huntsman’s support of civil unions, and urged the Oakland and Kalamazoo county parties, where Huntsman is also scheduled to speak this weekend, to do the same.

As John Cole opines:

Jon Huntsman, you all will recall, is the Governor of Utah, and who has an 82% approval rating as Governor and is a very viable way forward for the current GOP. But because he supports civil unions, he isn’t pure enough for the current GOP. This is the big problem for Republicans. The entire party apparatus at the state level has been taken over by a bunch of lunatics. The reason Specter switched yesterday was because the dwindling band of sociopaths who still call themselves Republican in Pennsylvania are so detached from reality, so far removed from the mainstream, and so convinced of the utter infallibility of their own bizarre brand of “conservatism,” that someone like Jon Huntsman or Arlen Specter, who deviated slightly on a few issues here and there, just isn’t pure enough for them.

Update 2: I can’t help quoting Dick Cheney on the GOP death spiral:

“I think the GOP may well have some kind of presence over a period of time,” Cheney said. “The level of activity that we see today from a political standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”

Oops, that was a shamefully misquoted clip from Cheney talking about the Iraq insurgency back in 2003, not the Republican insurgency Rep. Pete Sessions instigated.