As a moderate, your Uncle Dave and others like me may not like (to be kind) some of the things Obama and the left are doing, but with idiotic things like the birther movement, town hall screamers, death panels, religious wackos, Sarah and all the rest, the right is doing everything it can to ensure we want nothing to do with them or their policies. If they really have any anymore.

Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: “The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital.”

The election of Obama – a black man with an anti-conservative message – as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right’s view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.

When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn’t compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of “Drill, baby, drill” have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right’s world-view – to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation – has swollen. Now it is all they can see.

Since Obama’s rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. […] This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn’t new; it’s only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. […] But the ordinary Republican base believe this stuff. They are being tricked into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons.

Read the rest of the article for a lot more of a pretty clear description of how crazy all this looks to the rest of the world.