The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Salon

by James Wolcott
VanityFair
February 23, 2010

Vanity Fair colleague Michael Wolff, though not a licensed clinician or chiropodist, renders what seems to me an inarguable diagnosis of the current conservative condition, i.e., they've gone loco:

Republicans, once the party of boring sobriety and solidness, are now the party of the kooky, the cracked, the unhinged. Republicans are not conservative in the least. Rather, they act out in the most deranged and dramatic ways.

Having whipped themselves into dishrag fatigue over the socialist-fascist-satanic-nanny statism-TelePrompter totalitarianism cheese doodlies of the Obama administration, they've now revived to turn on each other, writing and pasting nasty things all over freshman Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown's high-school yearbook for voting for cloture on the jobs bill, thus betraying everything conservatism has stood for since the late William F. Buckley first lifted a salad fork and speared asparagus. How dare he, or as Wonkette's Ken Layne put it:

Handsome nudist truck driver Scott Brown was the GOP’s BFF until he started “going rogue” on Monday with that whole “I’ll just give a helping hand to the Socialists, because we are the Communist Brotherhood” thing he pulled right there on C-SPAN, as if teabaggers didn’t even matter. Why doesn’t Scott Brown respect his Facebook friends and the, uh, Constitution?

(More here.)