Mr. C. Pierce, on the triumph of Christine O'Donnell in the Delaware GOP Senate Primary:
She is what politics produces when we abandon self-government for self-gratification. And that's the real obvious irony in her victory on Tuesday night, and the only thing about it that truly matters.
Mr. Pierce is mistaken. What "truly matters" O'Donnell's triumph is that for the first time in history, we have a comical lunatic running for the US Senate as a Republican, something that has never happened before ever. Sens. Bunning, Coburn (oh, one more Coburn), and Inhofe are no doubt Very Concerned that if O'Donnell, with her feeble grasp of objective reality, somehow wins the general election, suddenly, they may start to look ridiculous by association.
Because, as the always very sensible David Brooks informs us,
The Tea Party style is beginning to replicate itself in parts of the conservative world. Dinesh D’Souza’s Forbes cover article, “How Obama Thinks,” contained the sort of untethered assertions that have become the lingua franca of this movement. Obama got his subversive radicalism from his father’s grave, D’Souza postulated: “He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and freedom are code words for economic plunder.” The fact that Newt Gingrich embraced this offensive theory is a sign of how severely the normal intellectual standards have been weakened.
Stop snickering, you -- a political movement that has actually had its "intellectual standards" weakened from its old-Newt-Gingrinchian levels is something genuinely rather frightening.
Or it would be, if it had ever had "intellectual standards" at all, which it didn't, because, after all, they let David Brooks in, didn't they?