Have conservatives gone mad?

I’m echoing a question posed by Marc Ambinder in an op-ed piece in The Atlantic. The past gatekeepers of party sanity such as William F. Buckley, George Will and the like are either dead, marginalized or forced to pander to the rabid right. The John Birch Society long shut out of GOP politics because of lunacy such as insisting that Eisenhower was a closet commie along with 90% of all government officers and congressmen and that fluoridation of the water was a communist plot to control American minds and take over the country, is now welcomed back—actually cosponsoring the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) Convention in Washington this year. McCarthyism has been pulled from the forgotten shadows and allowed to replace reasoned debate. Wildly theatric snake-oil salesmen like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh now guide Republican thought where brilliant intellectuals once ruled.

Read Ambinder’s piece if you care about this. Of course, if you love the rabid right’s resurgence, you can just dismiss the author and the magazine he writes for in a typical ad hominem attack. No need to give his ideas audience, since you will already “know” your ideology is supreme and therefore anyone who disagrees with you is obviously terminally stupid and closed minded to boot.