The craziest wingnut effusion ever of all time forever remains Kim Du Toit’s seminal 2003… essay? rant? dribbling? “The Pussification of the American Male.” (Yes, really.) But just a few days ago Dennis Prager, who is certainly no slouch in the seminal wingnut lunacy area, delivered himself of something special.  It is perhaps not so colorfully bizarre as his ideas about why God wants his wife to touch his pale, wormy penis even though he likes to act like an asshole, but it is nevertheless marvelously exemplary of the malignant constellation of resentments, bigotries, and willful inanities that comprises the gestural grunting currently passing for Conservative Thought.

I mean, honestly:

Here’s a challenge: Can you name one difference between what the media refer to as “world opinion” and Left-wing opinion?….

Here are examples of major world issues and what is deemed “world opinion.” They happen to all be Leftist views as well.

– hatred of President George W. Bush and admiration of President Barack Obama

– Manmade carbon emissions lead to global warming and devastation of the environment. Therefore, the world’s nations must tax carbon-based energy.

– The American invasion of Iraq was morally wrong, motivated by desire for oil.

– Israel is bad, as exemplified most recently by the Turkish flotilla incident.

– The American free-enterprise system is inferior to Europe’s welfare-state systems.

– The American health care system is inferior to that of all other wealthy countries….

Prager believes he has Discovered a Conspiracy: “The world’s media and virtually all international organizations are Leftist in their politics, and they both define ‘world opinion’ and in turn shape it.” Gosh.

What he has actually cataloged, admirably, is a definitional set of wingnut doxa (scroll down for the Bourdieu part).  Prager’s list is amusingly wrong: the American left, nevermind the global left, or the globe, is not exactly unified in admiration for Obama, for openers. The idea that Israel should be esteemed for how she handled the flotilla incident is, ahem, not precisely indisputable, strictly speaking. You know.

And the climate change stuff, as usual, remains the place where wingnuttia steps off the canyon edge and walks on air, Wile E. Coyote-like.

The thing is, and what kills me, is how persistent this class of stuff is in our body politic. It’s a cancer, is what it is. The United States cannot face any of the challenges that actually confront it, from loony foreign policy to loony environmental policy, because this sort of madness is taken seriously by all sorts of people who should know better, but don’t seem to remotely care.