They're All Insane. Scary Insane.

The RWS™/teabagger/Fox "news" favorite description of President Obama is as a dictator, a Nazi, an aggregator of vast presidential power. (The last phrase, because it uses a big word, I haven't actually heard.) So it's particularly puzzling, to say the veriest leastest, to see the deluded and clueless audiences stand and cheer Newt Gingrich when he says he'd haul judges before Congress, ignore whatever part of judicial rulings he chooses; without even hiding it, he's claiming the power of an absolute monarch. Which, by the way, is exactly how he sees himself.

So it's even more amazing that when Rick "I'm Running Third In My Own State" Perry bowed out (gee, ya think?) and tossed his feather weight behind Gingrich, he said we need a "humbler" government. That's even more amazing than Sarah Palin's über-ironic claim that four years ago we had a candidate who wasn't properly vetted.

Newt says of our enemies, over the definition of which he'd claim sole authority, "Kill them," and the audience leaps to its Foxified feet. Get rid of judges, he shouts, and they rise like a river of ridiculousness. Funny, isn't it: if some black guy does stuff you don't like, even when it's what he was elected to do, he's a damn dictator. When it's your guy, though, and particularly if he salts it with your favorite racial and religious hatreds, he can literally announce his disdain for the most central check against dictatorial power, and you'll jump around like Oprah just gave you a car. Well, a white Oprah, anyway.

Let's not bring up the fact that the great defender of marriage against teh gay, the guy who reveres marriage so much he's tried it thrice, tried to talk his second wife into an open marriage, okay? Like that's gonna make a difference, right, to the Constitution-loving patriots who adore him because he wants to burn it like a witch in Salem.

How can anyone with half a brain (see, there it is!) not look at these people and weep for our country? Weep? Hell, stab his own ears with an icepick and pluck out his eyes!

RWS™ and every R candidate claim that Obama is seeking deliberately to destroy our country. How? The fact is, with their well-paid propagandists, their obstructionism, their deliberate dumbing down of education, laughing at science, playing the religion card at every opportunity, creating and funding teabaggers and calling them real, lying constantly, ignoring facts at every turn and convincing their fear-forged flock to do so as well, they, themselves, already have. You see it in every audience at every debate.

Arrest Them All

As if we need reminding of his instability, Newt Gingrich has once again untethered his massive ego from reality, taking flight ever further from grounding in our Constitution. The man is a megalomanical nutjob. To imagine Newt Gingrich as president is to be scared shitless, or depressed motionless. Were it to happen, he could well become the first ever to be impeached and removed from office. By his own party. (One can hope.) Unless, of course, he managed -- and I bet he'd try -- to declare martial law and somehow make it stick. Given the evermore evangelicalization of our military, it's not beyond possible.

There’s “no reason the American people need to tolerate a judge that out of touch with American culture,” Gingrich said on CBS’ Face the Nation, referring to a case where a judge ruled that explicit references to religion were barred from a high school graduation ceremony. And Gingrich recently has said judges should have to explain some of their decisions before Congress.

Host Bob Schieffer asked Gingrich how he planned to enforce that. Would you call in the Capitol Police to apprehend a federal judge, he asked.

“If you had to,” Gingrich said. “Or you’d instruct the Justice Department to send the U.S. Marshall in.”

Really? Does it need to be explained? You know: separation of powers; judicial review; rule of law, even when unpopular? Especially when unpopular, ferchrissakes! One might well ask of this man who claims our president is trying to destroy America: how does the idea of eliminating the judiciary at the metaphorical point of a bayonet square with your professed (!) desire to take America back to where it once was?

More than anyone who's ever sought or occupied the White House (Dick Cheney excepted), Gingrich's wet-dream is absolute and unfettered power, unrestrained by any piece of parchment, any branch of government. What, after all, goes better with omniscience than omnipotence?

But Newt's insane grandiosity -- or is grandiose insanity? -- isn't really the issue. It's that a man like him could, even for a second, become the darling of the Republican electorate: the latest in a steady stream of deliberate liars, intellectual lightweights, religious fanatics, or combinations of all three, to be the next not-Mitt. Or, for that matter, the Mitt. How riddled with Obama-hatred and paranoia, how brainwashed by the RWS™ and the propaganda mill known as Fox "news," how dumbed-down and polluted by magical thinking, how ill-informed about our democracy do you have to be even to consider such people, much less refrain from throwing them off the field like a streaker? Are there no thoughtful conservatives left? If so, for gods' sake come out of hiding and stand up for yourselves. Let it be known that knowledge and reason aren't automatic and universal disqualifiers on your side.

These people are an embarrassment, and Newt tops them all: his self-exceptionalism exceeds even the brain-stoppage of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, the craven malleability and corrupt prevarication of Mitt Romney. Except to those within it and too blind to see, their party has become a laughing stock. Which is not to say they'll lose. Because the whole damn country is on the verge as well. When fully half the population has happily and deliberately taken leave of reality, considers this crew credible contenders for the highest office in the land, unless more people start paying attention, what hope for the future can there possibly be?

As Disgusting As It Gets

Safely ensconced in Texas, where like-minded hate-minded are in abundance and will shelter him as if he's Osama in Abbotabad, loosed from the stultifying ethical constraints placed upon him by Rupert Murdoch, Glenn Beck, paragon of teabaggers, sinks further into the slime than even I, who thinks he'd have to bubble up from the bottom to be considered scum, would have thought possible. About the kids killed in Norway he smirks,

"As the thing started to unfold and there was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like the Hitler Youth," he said. "Who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing."

Being completely wrong is of course irrelevant to one whose raison d'etre is the peddling of fear and hate and falsehood.

Torbjørn Eriksen, a former press secretary to Jens Stoltenberg, Norway's prime minister, described the comment as "a new low" for the broadcaster, who has frequently been forced to apologise for offensive remarks.

"Young political activists have gathered at Utoya for over 60 years to learn about and be part of democracy, the very opposite of what the Hitler Youth was about," he told The Daily Telegraph. "Glenn Beck's comments are ignorant, incorrect and extremely hurtful."

Let's make a superhuman effort and ignore the heartless dismissal of sixty or so murdered kids, the barely-disguised implication that they deserved it. What might be even more disgusting than all of that is his (can it be anything but deliberate?) ignoring of the fact that the very teabaggers over whose open mouths he squats lord-like, run proudly political and deliberately brainwashing camps for kids as young as eight years old. That which he condemns, he facilitates.

Really, there's no denying that the right wing has simply gone nuts. How can you deal with people who deliberately lie, distort, ignore; who are uninformed about everything they claim to know about America -- its founding, its laws, its traditions? What do you do, as president, when the opposition is willing to destroy the country to get its way, cares more about quashing the opposition than negotiating a future? Does the term "negotiate" even apply? When one side gives fealty to radio hosts who fill the air with hatred and stupidity, who peddle unfocused rage for a living, where's the way in for common sense? When a movement is built on falsehood and when its leaders consider lying its central modus operandi, when its vision is based on greed, selfishness, and ignorance, by what means can they be reached? When a party has no feet on the ground, where is the common ground?

I can no longer fathom it, if I ever could. We have a formerly legitimate political party (and enough people to elect them) that is so far off the deep end that there's no longer any reason for hope. Deliberately and very successfully dumbed down and made to believe nonsense, supporters of Beck and Limbaugh and Fox "news" and Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin have turned democracy into this. From that unrelentingly and intentionally unenlightened place, where can we possibly go?