Completely round the bend

Some people are religious crazies and some people are political crazies and some people are either or both in a very scary way.

Islamists, for one example.

And guys like this for another.

If They Come for Your Guns, Do You Have a Responsibility to Fight?

There is reason to think he is widely admired and his view is widely shared.

[Aside:

Recall people used to say communism was a substitute for religion.

Others - the usual high-publicity imbeciles - even insisted it was a religion, much as others nowadays say the same of atheism - including some atheists.

But there is a valid and important point here, right next to the nonsense.

Religion is in all cases a package of groundless but often psychologically very appealing beliefs with biographical, familial, social, organizational, and sometimes political ties making it a powerful factor in making up the believer's identity and worldview, sometimes providing the pervasive and even exclusive meaning for his life.

Exactly the same can be said for even purely secular political ideologies.

Communism, for example, was in its day easily able to marshal many heroes and martyrs - though perhaps not as many as Islam and Christianity have done over their entire histories.

And the same again can be said, though in lesser degree, for the packages of moral beliefs making up the human conscience, as we know it, whether or not associated with religious beliefs.

Only the most ignorant, unreflective, stupid, or desperate can really be said to believe these things are true.

In a very real sense it is probably in most cases just a matter of wanting them to be true.

All the same, in every case they ready their believers for programs of violence and coercion.

/Aside.]

The success of people like this in making the questions of gun rights and gun control so central to American politics and in making such fanatical devotion to guns so common among conservatives and so powerful an influence on Republican politicians is to me the most literally frightening aspect of the conservative takeover of that party.

How clear does it have to be?

There is barely the thickness of a sheet of paper between mainstream, movement conservatism and the most idiotic and dangerous neo-Bircherism.

Yes.

I am saying this is George Will's fault, the fault of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the entire right wing noise machine, the fault of the National Review, the Weekly Standard, and all the rest of those irresponsible jerks.

They have fed this beast for decades and dragged it into the center of our national life.

They are all political scum.

It's just more obvious in the case of Limbaugh and the slime at Fox.