News from Washington tonight: talks between the President and House Republicans over the shutdown went nowhere. More:

With concerns growing that global financial markets could be thrown into turmoil if Congress does not agree to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans said they did not know whether Mr. Boehner would have enough support from the most conservative members in his conference to put a Senate plan up for a vote — if the leaders reach a deal.

“The question is: What will Senate Republicans do, what will Senate Democrats do?” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois.

Many Republicans said that however frustrated they were that the White House would not negotiate with them, they were just as dismayed with House colleagues who would not back down from their demands that any deal include provisions to chip away at the health care law.

“The problem here is that we don’t have a functioning majority,” said Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California. “After three weeks of this, they’re still not figuring it out. I don’t know what it takes.”

Devin Nunes is a RINO! As if things weren’t bad enough:

If Republicans needed any reminder about how outraged their most conservative supporters would be if they committed to a compromise that did not include provisions to weaken the health care law, they needed look no further than out the window. Glenn Beck, the fiery radio personality, was leading a group of Tea Party activists on the National Mall.

All of which nicely sets up Ross Douthat’s column, in which he compares the House Republicans to Mr. Kurtz, the madman with “jungle fever” in Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, who inspired the Marlon Brando character in Apocalypse Now. Kurtz has lived isolated in the jungle for so long he’s lost touch with reality. Excerpts:

But there is still something well-nigh-unprecedented about how Republicans have conducted themselves of late. It’s not the scale of their mistake, or the kind of damage that it’s caused, but the fact that their strategy was such self-evident folly, so transparently devoid of any method whatsoever.

Every sensible person, most Republican politicians included, could recognize that the shutdown fever would blow up in the party’s face. Even the shutdown’s ardent champions never advanced a remotely compelling story for how it would deliver its objectives. And everything that’s transpired since, from the party’s polling nose dive to the frantic efforts to save face, was entirely predictable in advance.

I like this analogy to help explain how crackpot the GOP has become:

But then imagine an alternate reality in which figures like Joe Lieberman and John Kerry were stuck trying to lead a Democratic Party whose backbenchers were mostly net-roots-funded fans of Michael Moore, and you have a decent analog for where the post-Bush Republicans have ended up.

Daniel Larison bats clean-up with this ruthless analysis of a bizarre interview that Michael Needham, the head of Heritage Action, the group that helped the shutdown, gave to the Wall Street Journal. Excerpt:

The trouble with all of this is that Needham, like Cruz, is heedless of the consequences of the actions that he has been pushing Republicans to take, and he won’t acknowledge the failure of an effort when the evidence of failure is undeniable. It is reminiscent of oblivious Bush administration officials that kept insisting that there was no insurgency in Iraq when there clearly was. Rather than make an embarrassing admission that they had badly misjudged the situation and were unreasonably optimistic from the beginning, they kept stubbornly saying that they would “stay the course” even though that guaranteed that things would become much worse.

The arrogance. The arrogance.

UPDATE: The Republicans are losing so badly tonight that talk on the Hill is that the Democrats might even win a rollback on the sequester. National Review’s ace Robert Costa reports great disarray among the House Republicans, and a sense that House Repubs aren’t so shell-shocked that they’re not paying attention to outside conservative groups egging them on. One of Costa’s readers tweets in response:

@dangainor @robertcostaNRO Nothing you have written better illustrates the gulf between Vichy GOP and the base, which will punish them.

— Joe Childers (@Pryme52) October 13, 2013

Any Republican who concedes defeat is the equivalent of a Nazi collaborator. Got it. Extremism in the defense of idiocy is no vice, ah reckon. This other dude tweeted:

It's like some evil genius convinced the Congressional Republicans that they would get 72 virgins if they blew up their own party.

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) October 11, 2013