Jerky-flavored swizzle stick John Boehner, the face of the GOP House majority for the past four years, faces a stiff challenge to retain his speaker's post from a delicious cornucopia of conservatives who are fed up with the Ohio Republican's Obama-coddling multiculti socialist leadership.

Via Fox News:

The fledgling rebellion against electing John Boehner to a third term as House speaker gained momentum over the weekend, as nine conservative Republicans declared they intend to vote against the Ohio Republican when the House convenes on Tuesday.

Among them, Reps. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, and Ted Yoho, R-Fla., also have announced they will challenge Boehner for the position.

"We lack a leadership and we lack vision of where the country's going," Yoho told Fox News on Monday. "It's just not me feeling this."

Yoho, an "insurgent veterinarian" who represents the rural Tim Tebow-loving bubbas around Gainesville, has stood out as a firebrand ever since winning his seat in the tea party revolution on the strength of endorsements from such luminaries as the son of the guy who invented Gatorade and "Laura P.," a meatcutter at the local Publix, who was drawn to Yoho because "he wants to get back to the Constitution." The congressman again proved his mettle last year by fighting off an electoral challenge from a pale-faced cosplay vampire called Chazz Darling.

Louie Gohmert is Louie Gohmert. He's kind of a big deal in Nacogdoches.

Even after the Beltway had a day to digest this news, more Cocoa Puffs conservatives flipped on Boehner: Folksy xenophobe Steve King (R-Iowa) and free marketeer David Brat, the Virginia tea party upstart who unseated ex-majority leader Eric Cantor last year, are both opposing Boehner's speakership, Dave Weigel reported this morning.

The challenge is stiff, but it's brittle, as well: Boehner's golf-club wing of the party is likely to overcome this numerically insignificant challenge from the billy-club back-benchers, but is also content to let the far-right malcontents speak their piece before melting back into Washington swamps. Remember when everybody thought competing ideological forces would raze the Republican Party from within? Turns out the GOP has meditated on the problem and found a Buddhalike middle way: letting the rabblerousers rouse the rabble, while quietly keeping the old men at the helm.

In the meantime, as Weigel points out, none of Boehner's challengers are calling for their white supremacist-speechifying colleague to resign his post.

[Photo credit: AP Images]