Republicans like to tell themselves that politics is an extreme sport, and that they are the extreme sport guys. Republicans are the ones who paddled the white water to try to rescue Terri Schiavo, whose parents lost the legal battle to maintain her life-support system. They are the ones who go over the Niagara Falls in a barrel for the tax cause. They are the ones who dare to "use the nuclear option", in their own words, on the filibuster. Dude!

But the party's insistence on acting "extreme" does not always serve it well. After all, they are not dudes on a raft - they are middle-aged office people in red ties. Sometimes, the compulsion to seem extreme makes the Republicans do juvenile things, such as opine on the Schiavo case. Other times an "extreme" label merely serves to make a reasonable project look radical. That is the case with the current debate in the US Senate over the filibuster.