Heh™.

driftglass on the CPAC shindig...

Burning Man For Birchers Begins Today

Would it be funnier if it weren't literally true?

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.

He's talking about birthers…

…but James Vega explains a lot more than that when he notes that the problem is...

...that the creature the official conservative/Republican movement has nurtured all these years has broken out of the laboratory and is beginning to ravish the countryside.

Was a time, in my own personal memory, that a Republican wasn't required to swear fealty to a patently un-American ideology. Proud Democratic partisan that I am, I'm a bit nostalgic for those days, back when Dan Evans tossed the Birchers out of the WA GOP, and Rocky had a voice and a following in Republican ranks.

I'm not sure there's a viable return to legitimacy in the Republican future, but its existence in the past is evidence that it's possible, I suppose. Until then, like I always say sometimes...