The public is largely unaware of this because the conservative establishment in both Washington and the press has been relentless in its effort to separate the G.O.P. from the excesses of the Palin-Fox-Beck-Breitbart bomb throwers and from wacky Tea Party senatorial candidates like Sharron Angle of Nevada and Rand Paul of Kentucky. To hear most non-Fox conservative pundits tell it on Sunday talk shows or op-ed pages, these unruly radicals are just a passing craze. The new post-Bush G.O.P., we’re told, is exemplified by responsible, traditional small-government conservative governors like Mitch Daniels (of Indiana) or Chris Christie (of New Jersey).

But it’s Daniels and Christie who are the anomalies.

Whenever I start to hyperventilate about the state of the US if the Tea Party gets their way (think pre-Victorian England -- no education or voting rights for women or non-white people, a two class system where the rich aren't taxed to provide basic services for the desperately poor (or themselves, for that matter), and a judicial system based on the Old Testament), I think it must be because I haven't experienced politics for that long. Surely once you've seen 20 or 30 years of the back biting and a certain party trying to return us to the fabled "good ole days" with idiotic rhetoric, you get used to it.

It just doesn't feel that way, though. It feels like the pendulum is swinging backwards a lot more than it's swinging forwards. 41% of Republicans think Obama isn't a citizen, for Christ's sake! That's a seemingly insurmountable propaganda machine if we've ever witnessed one.

-janelane, the glass is half-full of Gulf coast oil-water