It has become fashionable to give a psychiatric diagnosis to those Republicans teeing up a government shutdown. 
 
 “They’re on a different planet,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of the Senate Democratic leadership, said last week. “Off the deep end.” 
 
 Dana Milbank writes about political theater in the nation’s capital. He joined the Post as a political reporter in 2000. View Archive 
 
 Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Republicans “define insanity” with their behavior. 
 
 I’ve lapsed into the off-the-rocker shorthand, too, but this misstates — and understates — the problem. The trouble isn’t that Republicans on the defund-Obamacare mission are insane. It’s that they are being entirely rational. 
 
 Certainly, what they are doing is dangerous to the country and to the GOP brand: A minority are saying that if their demands are not met, they will throw the nation into default and shock the economy by closing down the government. 
 
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 But this doesn’t mean that the 228 House Republicans (joined by two Democrats) were acting irrationally when they voted Friday to keep the government operating only if Obamacare is jettisoned. Most of them were acting in their own rational self-interest, doing what’s necessary to survive in a political system gone mad. 
 
 The tally by political handicapper Stuart Rothenberg says that 211 of the 234 Republican seats in the House are “safe,” leaving only 23 even marginally competitive. Some of those seats are made safe by the incumbents’ skills or bank accounts. But many of them are safe because district lines have been drawn to make them uncompetitive. 
 
 The only way these Republican lawmakers would lose their seats is if they were ousted by a challenger in a low-turnout primary dominated by conservative activists and distorted by an explosion of independent expenditures by ideological groups. The surest way to keep their spots, therefore, is to vote against anything and everything President Obama supports — Obamacare above all. 
 
 The situation is similar for Republicans in the Senate, where 14 of the 15 GOP seats up in the next election cycle are either safely Republican or favoring the Republicans. To them, as well, the threat comes primarily if not entirely from the right. 
 
 Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), the man leading the shutdown campaign, knows this better than anybody. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called him a “wacko bird,” but Cruz is, in fact, coldly calculating. 
 
 A new article about Cruz by Jason Zengerle in GQ confirms my impression of him as an opportunist driven more by ambition than ideology. 
 
 A Harvard Law School roommate of Cruz’s told Zengerle that Cruz refused to study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergraduate at Harvard, Princeton or Yale. But when the tea party became a political force and Cruz saw a route to power, he shed his elitism and posed as a rebellious outsider. His rise, and his ability to make even the grizzled Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell cower, is the result of a cunning — and thoroughly rational — exploitation of the system. The only wacko bird in Cruz’s office is on the Daffy Duck baseball cap that he keeps as an answer to McCain. 
 
 Ann Telnaes animation: Ted Cruz shows what he's really after. (Ann Telnaes/The Washington Post) 
 
 And McConnell, who is facing a conservative primary challenge in Kentucky, is also acting rationally in trying to keep up with the Cruzes. McConnell has been a proud internationalist and hawk throughout his career, but after Cruz and fellow wacko-bird Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) opposed military action in Syria and McConnell’s primary opponent took the same position, poor McConnell broke with other Republican leaders and declared that he, too, opposed military action. 
 
 If McConnell and the other frightened Republicans are to be faulted, it’s for putting their own political survival above all else and doing things they know are dumb. For example, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), one of the last moderates, told Wolf Blitzer that the defund Obamacare effort “makes no sense at all” and that Cruz is “carrying out a fraud.” He then voted for the very effort he had called a kamikaze mission and likened to Gallipoli. 
 
 One of the most honest assessments of the Republican position came from Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.), who explained last week why he favored the shutdown showdown: “All that really matters is what my district wants. And my district is overwhelmingly in favor of my position.” 
 
 An enlightened officeholder might decide that other things matter, too: his oath to the Constitution, the national interest and his obligation to lead people and not just reflexively to follow public opinion. His constituents may not be aware of the hit the economy takes from a government shutdown and a default — but Massie should. 
 
 Massie’s position is shortsighted — but it is rational. Until Republicans can fix their truly insane primary system, it may be the only logical response. 
 
 Twitter: @Milbank 
 
 Read more from Dana Milbank’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. ||||| The fall television season kicks into gear this week, with tons of new stuff, but before you check out any of it, you owe yourself a bigger treat. Go back and watch Chris Wallace’s interview with Ted Cruz on “Fox News Sunday.” 
 
 That’s entertainment. For starters there’s Wallace’s demeanor: I would almost swear I caught him holding his nose. There’s his bafflement, the bafflement of an entire nation, about what Cruz hopes to accomplish with his doomed campaign to defund Obamacare. (Hint: he keeps himself in the spotlight. Could a cause be worthier?) 
 
 There’s Cruz’s sickly look after Wallace recites derisive statements about him from fellow Republicans and he’s reminded that even in his party and even on Fox, the distaste for him is robust. 
 
 But the best part, the belly laugh, is when Cruz is asked to respond to those digs. 
 
 “There are lots of folks in Washington that can choose to throw rocks,” he says, “and I’m not going to reciprocate.” Because he’s nobler than that. Because he takes the high, unrocky road. 
 
 Photo 
 
 Please. Cruz has been casting stones since he first moved into his Senate offices nine months ago. His quarry is bottomless. Let us not soon forget the hearings into Chuck Hagel’s confirmation as secretary of defense, when Cruz wondered aloud whether Hagel had taken honorariums from countries hostile to the United States. This insinuation was groundless and shameless, but it paid off, in a fashion. A newcomer to the Senate, Cruz was the dark star of the proceedings. 
 
 A brute was born. He went on to pelt Dianne Feinstein, a Senate elder whom he condescendingly lectured about the Constitution. And there were yet more stones for his Republican colleagues, whom he dismissed as “squishes.” It matters not if you are foe or friend: if Cruz can besmirch you in a manner that bolsters his purer-than-thou, blunter-than-thou, braver-than-thou pose, brace yourself. 
 
 This week he is blithely putting the lawmakers in his party between a rock and a hard place. If they fail to match the anti-Obamacare passion that he flexed anew in a Senate speech Monday, they’ll land on the far right’s watch list. But if they match it and the government shuts down, there’s a good chance that the Republican Party takes the blame and a hit it can ill afford. 
 
 It’s all the same to Cruz. His own notoriety is cemented. He won’t be a hero to many, but to the few who see him that way, he’ll be a veritable monument. 
 
 Which seems to match how he regards himself. 
 
 “He has come to the reluctant but unavoidable conclusion that he is simply more intelligent, more principled, more right — in both senses of the word — than pretty much everyone else in our nation’s capital,” writes Jason Zengerle in a profile of Cruz in the new issue of GQ. That’s not just a skeptical journalist’s take. That’s many exasperated Republicans’ assessment of Cruz, too. 
 
 He has eschewed the slow route to Senate prominence, which would have involved building alliances, for the fast track, which means playing the firebrand, playing to the cheap seats and playing to a news cycle that thrills to conflict. 
 
 And he’s lusting to do the same in the 2016 presidential race, especially if Rand Paul’s isolationism means that he can’t seize the role effectively. Cruz has bought into the notion that as a true conservative, he’d mimic Ronald Reagan’s success and avoid Bob Dole’s and Mitt Romney’s failures. This rewrites history, ignoring that the Republican nomination doesn’t go to the firebrand and that two Bushes won three presidencies by lofting words like “kinder,” “gentler” and “compassionate,” adjectives no one would ever affix to Cruz. 
 
 But then he’s selective with facts, a trait on jaw-dropping display during the Senate speech. He bemoaned the brinkmanship that other lawmakers engage in, spoke as if there’d never been adequate debate over Obamacare and pretended that the law had been implemented fully enough to be definitively appraised. 
 
 He also said, “This country will be better off if we work together.” Because he’s all about harmony. 
 
 Here’s more history he forgets: most of the politicians who’ve gone all the way had not just his ambition but also a geniality that’s alien to him and a degree of affection from peers that, by week’s end, he can say a permanent goodbye to. He’s grandstanding and bloviating his way to obsolescence. 
 
 To wit: on Monday evening, the Senate’s two highest-ranking Republicans, Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn, rejected Cruz’s particular strategy to defund Obamacare. And Cruz doesn’t come across so winningly in a recent profile in The Weekly Standard, which, like Fox, is supposed to be friendly turf. 
 
 Its author, Andrew Ferguson, describes a car ride in which he mulls hurling himself out the door, no matter how rocky his landing, rather than listen to Cruz for another second. The Senate can relate. ||||| Please. Cruz has been casting stones since he first moved into his Senate offices nine months ago. His quarry is bottomless. Let us not soon forget the hearings into Chuck Hagel’s confirmation as secretary of defense, when Cruz wondered aloud whether Hagel had taken honorariums from countries hostile to the United States. This insinuation was groundless and shameless, but it paid off, in a fashion. A newcomer to the Senate, Cruz was the dark star of the proceedings. 
 
 A brute was born. He went on to pelt Dianne Feinstein, a Senate elder whom he condescendingly lectured about the Constitution. And there were yet more stones for his Republican colleagues, whom he dismissed as “squishes.” It matters not if you are foe or friend: if Cruz can besmirch you in a manner that bolsters his purer-than-thou, blunter-than-thou, braver-than-thou pose, brace yourself. 
 
 This week he is blithely putting the lawmakers in his party between a rock and a hard place. If they fail to match the anti-Obamacare passion that he flexed anew in a Senate speech Monday, they’ll land on the far right’s watch list. But if they match it and the government shuts down, there’s a good chance that the Republican Party takes the blame and a hit it can ill afford. 
 
 Image Frank Bruni Credit Earl Wilson/The New York Times 
 
 It’s all the same to Cruz. His own notoriety is cemented. He won’t be a hero to many, but to the few who see him that way, he’ll be a veritable monument. 
 
 Which seems to match how he regards himself. 
 
 “He has come to the reluctant but unavoidable conclusion that he is simply more intelligent, more principled, more right — in both senses of the word — than pretty much everyone else in our nation’s capital,” writes Jason Zengerle in a profile of Cruz in the new issue of GQ. That’s not just a skeptical journalist’s take. That’s many exasperated Republicans’ assessment of Cruz, too.
– Ted Cruz is taking the "fast track" to Senate stardom, and that means capitalizing on conflict, writes Frank Bruni in the New York Times. He hasn't been around long, but he's already made "groundless and shameless" accusations against Chuck Hagel, offered Dianne Feinstein some constitutional pedantry, and even slapped fellow Republicans as "squishes." His stand against ObamaCare is forcing GOPers either to call for a government shutdown—likely hurting the party—or risk getting a place "on the far right’s watch list." What's more, his strategy won't get him far (even if it makes headlines) because successful politicians have to be likeable, whereas Cruz is "grandstanding and bloviating his way to obsolescence," Bruni writes. In the Washington Post, Dana Milbank agrees that Cruz is all about ambition—but he says Republicans like Cruz aren't risking their necks in the shutdown debate. In fact, they're "doing what’s necessary to survive in a political system gone mad." Thanks in large part to district mapping, few GOP House seats are "even marginally competitive," and conservative-dominated primaries are the only threat. So to keep their jobs, lawmakers have no choice but to take a Cruz-like path. Click for Milbank's full piece or for Bruni's.