Dana Milbank misunderstands the negative Republican reaction to Cheney’s primary challenge:

The race won’t be about ideology (Enzi is as conservative as they come) but about temperament: Enzi is agreeable, and Cheney is, well, not. The opposition to her candidacy, particularly among Senate conservatives, is therefore an encouraging sign that the tea party fever may be breaking — and that the Senate may be recovering from its paralysis.

There are three kinds of Republican and conservative opposition to Cheney’s candidacy: Wyoming Republicans that don’t appreciate an unusual challenge from a transplant from back east, national Republicans and conservative activists bewildered by the decision to target a reliably conservative incumbent for no apparent reason, and Enzi’s Republican Senate colleagues that have come out in support for a fellow incumbent. This has nothing to do with “tea party fever,” and most of the conservative criticism of Cheney’s announcement has not included an attack on her combativeness or her ideas. It is a measure of how ill-conceived this primary challenge is that it has managed to annoy so many on the right that otherwise like and agree with the Cheneys. It’s easy to interpret Paul’s support for Enzi in terms of his significant policy disagreements with Cheney, but the reason for it is even more straightforward: he is taking sides in a primary against Liz Cheney because Dick Cheney sided against him in 2010. In other words, most Republican opposition to Cheney doesn’t seem to be a rejection of her “divisiveness” as such, but reflects disapproval of an internecine fight over nothing more than ambition for office.

To think of this challenge as a Tea Party-style insurgency is to get things backwards. That sort of insurgency requires someone to pose as an opponent of political insiders and a critic of the current party leadership in Washington, and Cheney is neither of these. She might try to use the rhetoric of an insurgent candidate, but it will be impossible to miss that Cheney’s run is backed by outside money and Washington connections. It will be an exceedingly cynical attempt to exploit anti-Washington sentiment in order to entrench a family dynasty in national politics.