Republican Denial of Tactical Reality, An Example

I recently wrote a post arguing that the shutdown is simply the clearest yet manifestation of what we liberal types have known for a long time, namely that Republicans are unfit to govern, and that their unfitness is largely due to the takeover of their entire mentalities by the "reality-based community" thing, including the strategic parts of those mentalities. Well here's a nice Dave Weigel post about how Republicans simply do not believe that the shutdown is hurting them politically. Which it is. You cannot look at the bulk of the polling data and claim otherwise. Hell, there aren't very many individual polls you can look at and claim otherwise. And this is a big problem: if Republicans really believed that they're doing damage to their party, and maybe that it's long-term damage that won't be easily undone, they'd have an incentive to back the hell off before it gets any worse. But they don't believe that, so there's no incentive. A blind man driving toward a cliff doesn't know to stop, and if he won't even listen to his sighted passenger that there's a goddamn cliff half a mile in front of them, well... you're in trouble.