On Sunday’s Meet the Press (NBC), New York Times columnist David Brooks, a supposed conservative, launched into the Tea Party over the government shutdown, saying that Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) was “dumb”:

For some of these people--Dwight Eisenhower had a phrase about what Senator. He proves there's no ultimate answer to how dumb a person can be. And when I look at the way that some of the Republicans have conducted themselves, including some of the people you just mentioned, incredibly self-destructive.

The question now is will the Republican Party have a civil war over the nature of the party? And I think we're beginning to see rumblings of that. The problem is, to have a civil war, you actually have to have two sides. The Tea Party has a side. They have a political movement. They have a think tank. They have a donor side.

The other side, the Republicans who want to be able to compete in California, in New York, along the east coast and in Illinois, they don't have a side. They have American Crossroads, a PAC. They have a cocktail party. And so what they need to do is actually build some institutions, some think tanks, some fundraising efforts, some grassroots organizations, to match Tea Party, or else the Tea Party will take over.

David Gregory, picking up on Brooks’ anti-Tea Party cue, then labeled Ted Cruz “obviously anti-business.”