I just want to highlight one paragraph in Kevin Drum's piece on the Tea Parties, before encouraging you to read the whole thing:
Today's conspiracy theories are different in detail but no less wacky -- and no less widespread. Some 30 percent of self-identified tea partiers believe that Obama isn't a natural-born citizen, according to an April New York Times poll. Some tea partiers are worried about internment camps for conservatives, an echo of a theory peddled by the Birchers in the '60s. As Canadian conservative Jonathan Kay bemusedly wrote in Newsweek after attending a tea party convention last winter, Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers are also frequent obsessions, "the idea being that they were the real brains behind this presidency, and Obama himself was simply some sort of manchurian candidate." And of course there's ACORN, the centerpiece of a baroque theory in which the now-defunct organization ran the Democratic Party, forced banks to make loans to minorities and poor people via the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act, crashed the economy, and got Obama elected president. Robert Welch would be proud.
The irony here is that nothing reminds me more of the paranoia of Jeremiah Wright (AIDS is the white man's attempt to destroy the black community! The Jews are keeping me from Obama!) or the inexcusable political violence of Bill Ayers than some of the people the Republican Party has chosen to oppose Obama or the baroque conspiracy theories it has embraced to explain his presidency. Between things like Sharron Angle's talk of "Second Amendment remedies" and the apparently widespread Republican belief that the president is sympathetic to Taliban-style Islamic law, Republicans have managed to replicate elements of the radicalism they found so disconcerting in Obama's "associations" while managing to ignore the rather centrist path of his presidency.
