“I’ve been called a RINO… I don’t think I’ve changed at all. I think the party has moved.”

— Former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, quoted on CNN.

“I think a lot of Republicans in Congress want to cooperate and know better, but they’re in the thralls of this reign of terror from the Far Right that has dragged the party to the Right.”

— David Axelrod, in an interview on CNN.

NPR reports on research by political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal who find that the Republican Party is the most conservative it has been a century.

Said Poole: “The short version would be since the late 1970s starting with the 1976 election in the House the Republican caucus has steadily moved to the right ever since. It’s been a little more uneven in the Senate. The Senate caucuses have also moved to the right. Republicans are now furtherest to the right that they’ve been in 100 years.”

Rick Pearlstein argues that Republicans “plant their flag in an uncompromising position, and wait for the world to come around – which, quite often, it eventually does. This is because in a media environment based on the ideology of ‘balance,’ in which anything one of the parties insists upon must be given equal weight to whatever the other party says back, the party that plants its ideological flag further from the center makes the center move. And that is how America changes. You set the stage for future changes by shifting the rhetoric of the present.”

“Republicans being against sex is not good. Sex is popular.”

— GOP strategist Alex Castellanos, quoted by Maureen Dowd.

“I don’t know what the Republican establishment is. I haven’t learned the secret handshake, and I don’t know where to go for a membership card.”

— Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), quoted by Time.

Coming next week: Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party by Geoffrey Kabaservice.

The latest Pew Research poll shows a growing divide between the Republican Party and the Tea Party, as the GOP’s favorable numbers have declined in congressional districts represented by members of the House Tea Party Caucus to nearly those of the Democratic Party.

Key numbers: “Currently, 41% say they have a favorable opinion of the GOP, while 48% say they have an unfavorable view… currently about four-in-ten (39%) say they have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, while 50% offer an unfavorable view.”

Chris Cillizza: “What happened? To put it bluntly: governing. Establishment Republicans smartly wrapped their arms around the tea party during the 2010 election… But once the tea party helped elect a Republican majority, the expectations of what that majority would do were unrealistic… The establishment wing of the GOP is, ultimately, playing within the pre-written rules of the current political system… What Republican strategists have to bank on is that the distaste for President Obama among tea partiers is great enough to overcome any qualms they might have about voting for Republican candidates who they don’t believe entirely represent their interests.”

David Frum: “When I entered Republican politics during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions — crime, inflation, the Cold War — right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.”

“In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.”

“The Republican Party has totally abdicated its job in our democracy, which is to act as the guardian of fiscal discipline and responsibility. They’re on an anti-tax jihad — one that benefits the prosperous classes.”

— Former Reagan budget director David Stockman, in an interview with Rolling Stone.