By way of a follow-up to my Huffington Post column yesterday, you should definitely check out the articles posted today by EJ Dionne, Politico and Dave Weigel each covering the Republican-Wingnut-Complex.
Weigel definitely hit the mark with this:
The Democrats are in worse political shape than they were a year ago because unemployment is at 9.8 percent, the war in Afghanistan has grown less popular, and the bailouts of struggling banks are seen as wastes of money that haven’t worked. Republicans benefit when they talk about this stuff. But Beck and the others don’t let them talk about this stuff. For the past few months, they have moved the discussion onto fantasy terrain, accusing the president of reaching for dictatorial powers and surrounding himself with “radicals” who want to destroy capitalism.
Weigel goes on to correlate the current wingnut loud noises with the liberal reaction Bush's handling of Katrina. Imagine if we had mostly ignored the Katrina incompetence and instead focused on a conspiracy theory involving an old quote from a Bush administration official no one really cares about. We would have been idiots.