Here’s how this leads us to the Benghazi committee:

1. It took mainstream journalism a long time to feel comfortable stating an obvious fact: that the modern Republican party is going through a push to the extreme unlike anything that is happening to today’s Democrats, and unlike anything else that has happened in politics since at least the Goldwater era and probably since long before. (After all, the Goldwater-era GOP had a significant liberal/moderate wing: Rockefeller, Scranton, Javits, Ford, George Romney, even Nixon and the first George Bush.) It feels so much more responsible, and is certainly safer, to write about “extremists on both sides.”

Three years ago, the think-tank eminences Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann wrote a Washington Post essay called “Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans Are the Problem.” That was an inspired headline, because it captured the fact that even now it is harder than you would think for reporters just flat out to state that truth. This summer Christopher Ingraham of the Post’s WonkBlog provided a chart that should run alongside any “extremists of both sides” discussion. As the little thumbnail below shows, the Democrats are about as extremist-and-moderate as ever; the Republicans are not.

The point is: Only now, a year after Eric Cantor was driven out of his House seat by a challenger not closer to the middle but further to the right; a month after John Boehner decided to leave one of the theoretically most-powerful jobs in American governance; when possible savior-successor Paul Ryan is being attacked as too liberal; and during a GOP presidential primary campaign whose “center” is further to the right than any in memory—only in these circumstances have reporters begun to talk directly about the Republican party’s move toward the fringe. We’d all still really prefer to warn against “extremists on both sides.” If you listen you’ll still hear that on talk shows.

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2. It took mainstream journalism a long time to be comfortable saying flat-out that today’s congressional GOP is set up to obstruct rather than govern, and that the really bitter division is between those, including RINOs like Boehner, who think the Republican majority has any responsibility to pass budgets or to oversee normal government functions, and those who think it is there to take stands against Obamacare, Planned Parenthood, the ExIm Bank, etc.

An astonishing exchange on Meet the Press two days ago may have helped reporters comprehend this point, because it was amazingly bitter, and it was between two Republicans. One was Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, who argued that for the good of the nation and the good of the party, his fellow Republicans needed to show that they could get things done. As Dent put it:

We have to get back to functionality. We have to prove to the American people we can govern. And that means we have to make sure the government is funded. We must make sure that we're not going to default on our obligations. We have to take care of transportation issues, tactics, extenders, et cetera.

(You can see the full NBC transcript here, and commentary here and here.) On the other side was Representative David Brat of Virginia, the man who knocked off Eric Cantor in the primary, essentially saying: You weak RINOs are the real problem. You’d even compromise with Pelosi!