"Republicans have taken an extreme, hardline, no-new-taxes, never-compromise approach to governing.
Given that, a hardline no-tax position actually does help them politically.
Unless the new legislature and cabinet produce a radically different PA to the one that Mr Abbas has presided over until now, public support in Israel will grow for a hardline, no-peace-talks approach.
The sentence against them is hanging," declared Ahmad Khatami, a hardline ayatollah (no relation of the president's).
This includes the vast array of rebel forces, the most powerful and organised of which are hardline Islamists no different to Isis.
But it cannot do this without collapsing, since the North is in ideological competition with South Korea, whose economic model, the regime knows, wins hands down.The hardline version is no better.
Hardline Cuban exiles no longer hold the key to those votes: the old guard who once financed paramilitary raids on Havana harbour is dying out, younger Cuban-Americans with no direct relationship to the island cast their votes based on other issues and the Hispanics who've moved to Florida from Puerto Rico, Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin America now outnumber the Cubans in the state.
There's no hardline stance against infidelity that justifies public humiliation as a deterrent, no way that public humiliation doesn't harm the cheater's spouse and family as much as the cheater themselves.
With no hardline dissent in the room, the treaty has come to fruition rather quickly.
In contrast, no hardline presidential candidate has ever exceeded Ahmadinejad's 17.2 million votes in 2005 – and his numbers were boosted by the lowest voter turnout percentage since 1993, and droves of disenchanted reform-minded voters staying home on Election Day.
No wonder hardline Tory Eurosceptics are reacting with glee at the prospect of a Juncker presidency.
