This is absurd!

How can these nutjobs have muscled their way into our public discourse?!

I believe it was the Romans who said, there is no fortress which cannot be breeched with money.

Republicans have Wall Street types, Fundies, Anti-taxers, Neocons, racists and some other types with money and they spend it Liberally.

I missed the Book Salon today, but many of these issues were brought up then — one of them being how the press tends to adopt the Republican framing of an issue as the default stance, the “normal” stance, which makes any other viewpoint seem abnormal or un-American.

Seriously, though: A lot of this is simply because of the media’s long-standing deference to the GOP. The only reason Joe Lieberman gets as much face time as he does is because the GOP/Media Complex sees him as a club with which to beat Democrats.

That’s why the press played up the every last move of the Democrats’ primary season as Yet More Evidence Of Backbiting Democrats, whereas the major rivalries between Republicans were shoved aside in the rush to crown McCain, who was shown by all the major polls to be the only candidate capable of going toe-to-toe with all three Democratic candidates. (To see just why the Republican bigwigs wanted McCain even though the base didn’t: In Rasmussen polling done before the start of the primaries, Edwards consistently did the best nationally among general-election voters, beating every Republican handily except Rudy Giuliani, with whom he tied; Obama did nearly as well, beating most Republicans easily aside from McCain and Huckabee; and Hillary Clinton came in third, losing by double digits to McCain, losing by closer margins to most other Republicans, and only winning against Tancredo and Ron Paul. Bottom line: McCain was their only hope.)

Indeed.