The Republican Party and the political media world are already off to the 2016 horseraces. With endless fascination, the latest polling from Iowa and New Hampshire is examined under the microscopes of the pundits and sweeping pronouncements are made as to who the eventual frontrunners will be. Of course, it is way too early for any real analysis of the public's mood, but that doesn't stop the oddsmaking within the Beltway. After all, the Democratic nomination race is setting up to be a snoozer, so why not get started obsessing over the Republican race?

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I realize that to call this column "premature" would indeed even be an understatement. But you'll have to forgive me, since it's one of those lazy summer days where all of Washington is off on vacation (President Obama is taking two weeks at the beach, and Congress is taking the entire freakin' month off, as usual). So it seems like a good time for some unadulterated speculation of the sheerest sort. And I'm not even going to get drawn in to all the 2016 election speculation today. I'm going to skip over it all and just jump forward to January, 2017, as we all watch the first woman inaugurated to the presidency.

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American aircraft are once again waging war over the skies of Iraq. President Obama, as many have pointed out, is now the fourth United States president in a row to order some form of military offensive in Iraq. As always, plenty of critics immediately popped up to loudly explain what the president was doing wrong. The usual characters on the right demanded a much more intensive military action, the ones on the left warned darkly about slippery slopes and possible blowback, and the American people seemed to heave a sigh of resignation, in a "here we go again" moment.

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Today is primary election day in eight states across the land (including my own). The most media attention will be paid to the Mississippi Republican Senate primary, where the incumbent, Senator Thad Cochran, may be in trouble from a Tea Party challenger. So while the storyline a few weeks ago was "Establishment Republicans win big over Tea Party," the storyline tomorrow may be "Tea Party strikes back!"

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Today's article title is meant as commentary on the media's overreactions to the first big round of primary election results (announced last night), and not any sort of supportive call to arms. Just to be clear up front, in case anyone was expecting a very different sort of article. It really should read "The Tea Party Is Dead / Long Live The Tea Party," since it represents a clear dichotomy in how pundits reacted to the primary results. Since the Tea Party candidates didn't do very well (and even that's putting it charitably) in this first big round of primaries, many are now proclaiming total victory for the Establishment Republican faction of the Republican Party, and an absolute rout of the Tea Party faction. The second way of interpreting the results warns that rumors of the Tea Party's death are premature, and that what really happened was that the Tea Party's takeover bid for the entire Republican Party is now a complete success. The Tea Party won, this way of thinking goes, because they have now become the Republican Party.

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Over the course of the next two months, the Tea Party movement may become to be seen (to mix a few metaphors) as more of a paper tiger than the tail that wags the Republican dog. To put it a little more concretely, the Tea Party may be losing some of its outsized influence over the Republican Party. It is still too early to state with any degree of certainty (since the Tea Partiers have shown themselves to be impressively resilient on previous occasions), but if Tea Party power is indeed on the wane it could signal a turning point in modern American politics.

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Has it really been a whole year since the Republican Party put out their "post-mortem" document, which tried to identify why they got shellacked so badly in the 2012 election? Since it's not a big date on my political calendar, the one-year anniversary kind of snuck up on me, I'll admit. But since the Republican National Committee used the term "post-mortem" in the first place, I guess it's now time for a post-mortem on the post-mortem (insert your own zombie or "dead man walking" joke here, if you must).

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As we enter into what political wonks call "primary season," the next few months are going to prove instructive as to the relative strength in the Republican Party of both the Tea Party and the Establishment Republican factions. The Tea Party rode high in the 2010 election cycle, and was again influential during the whole 2012 race, but one has to wonder if the luster of the Tea Party's shine is beginning to wear off -- even among Republican primary voters. The next few months will tell, as sitting Republicans either win their primaries or are dethroned by their Tea Party challengers.

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Welcome everyone to our year-end awards columns! Every year, we pre-empt our normal "Friday Talking Points" columns for two weeks, in order to take a look back at the year that was.

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In one of their stunning (but regular) "up is down" leaps of illogic, the Republican Party is charging President Obama with "court-packing." In reality, they're just miffed that a Democrat is going to exercise his constitutional authority to appoint judges in the regular order of things. To call such actions "court-packing" is nothing short of laughable, to be blunt. In fact, the only hinkey business afoot is coming from Republicans themselves on the issue.

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