Times change…

…but sometimes the players don't. Ed Kilgore notes the growing influence, via the promotional efforts of Glenn Beck, of the venerable crank W. Cleon Skousen, who provides...

...a sort of intellectual framework for the highly paranoid worldview of the Tea Party movement that Beck has done so much to promote. In his very colorful career, which earned him a big fat "dangerous extremist" file with his former employers at the FBI, Skousen gained most notice in the early 60s as a fellow traveler and stout defender of the John Birch Society (after Birch founder Robert Welch had been read out of the conservative movement for contending that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist).

Yep, they're the people our parents warned us about, people our parents thought they'd dealt with.

Another thing hasn't changed. Eternal vigilance is still the price of liberty.