The GOP's Kool-Aid: It's what's for breakfast!

Many of us are beginning to wonder if there really is something in the GOP's Kool-Aid -- not just some metaphorical substance of like-minded policy daffiness, but possibly some actual, chemical pathogen of debilitating mental disease.

I mean, come on, it's getting otherwise inexplicably weird out there, leading the Politico this morning to ask, for instance, of the mysteriously peripatetic S.C. governor Mark Sanford, "Just how strange is too strange?" -- and "is the straight-laced Republican base ready for a candidate whose idea of relaxation is leaving his wife and kids on Father’s Day weekend to commune with [either] nature [or, as is being reported as of this writing, 'exotic' South Americans]?"

Yep, that's strange. Very strange.

But no stranger, perhaps, than almost anyone else on today's GOP side of political prominence.

Just yesterday, in this space, Dan Burton was being fitted for a well-earned straitjacket (if you missed it, he recently and publicly pined for some sort of "Get Smart," protective plexiglass dome in the House chamber to spare, for presumably good reasons left unexplained, 435 politicians from physical assault), and that was merely the latest act in a long, long series of manifest mental decline, virtually GOP-wide.

Or at least it seems that way. Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney and others of their neocon ilk are, of course, only as malevolently goofy as ever, but we must also note those more recent emanations of pure goofiness -- those utter, certifiable crackpots such as Michele Bachmann, Michael Steele and Sarah Palin -- all of whom get blended into an indistinguishable and accompanying mass of superlative hypocrisy and perversion -- Larry Craig, David Vitter, and Mark Foley, among others.

They've simply got to be ingesting the same stuff. Right? I mean, what are the coincidental odds that they would all simply find themselves in, and rise to the top of, the same political party?

It's the Kool-Aid I tell you. It's gotta be.