The Times' Timothy Egan and Paul Krugman conspire this morning to give no mercy.
First Egan reminds us that "58 percent of Republicans believe God created humans in the present form just within the last 10,000 years," and then he proceeds to "a quick" and ghastly "tour of the crazies in the House" who legislate in line with this theological whackdom--limiting himself, because of space, to John Shimkus, Joe Barton, Jack Kingston, Michele Bachmann, Todd Akin and Paul Broun.
Paul Krugman settles for just one crazy in the House, whose superior craziness, however, has naturally raptured him to the GOP's presidential ticket. While the leaders of Paul Ryan's church have issued a verdict of reasonable doubt about his comprehension of the New Testament, Ryan's real religion, notes Krugman, springs from another fictional work that "is a perennial favorite among adolescent boys. Most boys eventually outgrow it."
But not our boy Paul: Imminent Nominee for the Vice-Presidency of the United States.
I find Egan's piece the more intriguingly despairing and philosophically challenging, in that it poses something of chickens and eggs. Do morons serve in the House because 58 percent of their base are self-admitted imbeciles? Or are 58 percent of their base imbeciles because morons serve in the House, and thus encourage, from their national platform, an American educational system modelled on the intellectual integrity of Elmer Gantry?
Well, whatever, we'll leave it to Republicans to sits and thinks about that. Meanwhile, the rest of us can work on finally finishing that "64-page speech by John Galt [which] even Friedrich Hayek admitted that he never made it through."