Frank Rich seems to think Christine O’Donnell is an asset to the Right, and not the joke she seems to be.

O’Donnell is particularly needed now because most of the other Republican Tea Party standard-bearers lack genuine antigovernment or proletarian cred. Joe Miller and Ken Buck, the Senate candidates in Alaska and Colorado, actually are graduates of elite universities like those O’Donnell lied about attending. Rick Scott, the populist running for governor in Florida, was chief executive of a health care corporation that scooped up so many Medicare and Medicaid payments it had to settle charges for defrauding taxpayers. Rand Paul, the scion of a congressman, is an ophthalmologist whose calls for spending restraint don’t extend to his own Medicare income. Carl Paladino, the truculent man of the people in New York, grew his fortune as a developer with government handouts and favors. His California bookend, Carly Fiorina, received a golden parachute worth as much as $42 million from Hewlett-Packard, where she liquidated some 20,000 jobs….

… O’Donnell, like Palin, knows that attacks by those elites, including conservative grandees, only backfire and enhance her image as a feisty defender of the aggrieved and resentful Joe Plumbers in “real America.”

O’Donnell’s very ineptitude makes her more attractive to the Right, Frank Rich thinks, because it means she’s “one of them,” not an elitist snob. Although it seems to me that someone who lied about attending ivy league schools on her resume is in no position to play up her populist virtues. Not that inconsistencies have ever stopped a wingnut before.

In other news — The “One Nation” progressive rally in Washington today is claiming a bigger crowd than Beckapalooza. I can’t tell from the photographs if it really was bigger, but it does appear to be less monochromatic, if you catch my drift.

I would have expected the Time magazine feature, “The Secret World of Extreme Militias,” to be getting a lot more attention in the blogosphere than it has been getting. Earlier this week some elements of the Right had the vapors over an appearance by Kos on Countdown (which I missed), in which Kos discussed threats of right-wing violence. Anyway, Time‘s Barton Gellman writes,

As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side. Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs. A six-month TIME investigation reveals that recruiting, planning, training and explicit calls for a shooting war are on the rise, as are criminal investigations by the FBI and state authorities. Readier for bloodshed than at any time since at least the confrontations in the 1990s in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, the radical right has raised the threat level against the President and other government targets.

Maybe the righties are keeping quiet about the story because they don’t want to draw attention to it.

One story that I hadn’t heard before is of James Cummings, who had planned to bring a real dirty bomb to the Obama inauguration. And let me emphasize that, unlike the hapless Jose Padilla, Cummings had the goods. With the help of a large inheritance he had accumulated a remarkable amount of thorium, cesium and uranium, the means to disperse them, and enough smarts to pull it off. He intended to load his bomb into a motor home and drive it to Washington for the inauguration.

And he might have achieved his plan had his wife not shot and killed in December 2008. Cummings had a long history as a domestic abuser, and I don’t believe Mrs. Cummings is being charged with anything. Indeed, she should get a medal.

See also Joe Conason.