The session hasn’t even started and tensions that have been bubbling behind closed doors are flaring up publicly now between ultra-far-right wingers, on one side, and your run-of-the-mill conservative Republicans on the other.

In a press release entitled “Is the conservative mandate derailed before leaving the station?” former GOP legislator Roger Koopman, of Bozeman, fired the first public attack on the “Republican Establishment” over the lack of leadership bones thrown to the GOP’s hard-right ideologues given the fact that the TEA Party delivered the GOP a “a powerful conservative mandate” in the November elections.

Judging by who received plum leadership positions, Koopman is part right and part wrong.  Wing nut appointees include Krayton Kearns (House Ag), Ted Washburn (House FWP) and David Howard (House HHS).  Those guys are RWNJs all the way.  So the question is, is Koopman trying just to get attention for himself, or does he honestly believe that these yahoos are somehow not conservative enough?  Koopman ends the rant by calling for a separate TEA Party caucus of truly “principled” conservatives:

If there is any hope for conservative Montanans in the coming legislature, it will come from a highly organized, principled group of Republican legislators who will simply not allow the conservative mandate of November 2 to be stolen from them.

The best part, you might recall, is that Koopman was caught sucking off the government tit a while back, and basically got cited by the state for using public resources to line his own pockets.