Some local bloggers at the Watertown Daily Times provide insight into the teabaggers’ loss in NY congressional district 23. Bob Gorman writes,

The delicate dance of dips and faints that Republicans perform to keep some semblance of a two-party system in New York was turned into a chicken-fried square dance in which everybody does whatever the caller says. And the caller was far, far away in a radio studio well to the west, but really the right, of New York state.

Gorman goes on to talk about the ham-handed way “national conservative talk show hosts” with no respect whatsoever for local sensibilities hijacked the local election. Another local blogger, Jeffrey Savitskie, refers to Hoffman as the “carpetbagger candidate.”

More evidence the teabaggers are channeling the spirit of Robespierre — RedState’s Erick Erickson says that Americans for Tax Reform is no longer an organization in good standing with the Jacobins tea party patriots. And why not? Because the Tax Policy Director of ATR supported Dede Scozzafava, who had signed a “no new taxes” pledge.

ATR is a group organized and run by Grover Norquist, dedicated to the deification of Ronald Reagan and the drowning of government in a bathtub. Yet ATR is apostate, to Erickson. No longer pure.

The Terror eventually turned on Robespierre himself, remember.

Election day is lively — in NY 23, there are reports police are being called to polling places to settle down overzealous Hoffman supporters, who seem mostly from out of town. They’re standing too close to the polling places and screaming anti-choice slogans at people going to vote.

Polls indicate that Hoffman should win fairly easily. It wouldn’t surprise me if this sort of behavior causes some people to switch their votes to someone else, however.

In New Jersey, in spite of some predictions of a Christie win, the GOP seems to be bracing for defeat. They’re already making up stories about voter fraud.

This should be kept under a bell jar at the Ripley’s museum. And right next to it, Andy McCarthy’s comparing Rush Limbaugh to Dr. Martin Luther King. John Cole has some other choice candidates for the Crazy Archives.

Lindsey Graham got into office by feeding wingnut paranoia, and now the paranoia has turned on him. Fascinating.

The wingnuts are in a froth that anyone objected to Rush Limbaugh becoming a St. Louis Rams owner. They are genuinely upset that anyone would accuse Rush of racism. Imagine.

And I missed Countdown last night, when Keith Olbermann made Michelle Malkin a runner-up in Worst Person in the World.

Runner up, Michelle Malkin. Maybe it‘s her. When this Obama song stupidity broke in New Jersey last month, with elementary school kids there singing about the president, author Sharice Carnie Nuenez (ph) says she got an e-mail from Malkin reading, “I understand that you uploaded the video of school children reciting a Barack Obama song/rap at Bernice Young Elementary School in June. I have a few quick questions. Did you help write the song and teach it to the children? Are you an educator or guest lecturer at the school? Did you teach about your book, “I Am Barack Obama” at the school. Your bio says you‘re a schoolmate of Obama. How well acquainted are you with the president?”

That was at 6:47 in the morning. By nighttime, Malkin and the lunatic fringe had decided Carnie Nuenez was responsible for the song and whichever plot their fevered little paranoid minds saw behind it. She received death threats and hate filled voicemails, all thanks to the total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee jerk fascistic hatred, without which Michelle Malkin would just be a big mashed up bag of meat with lipstick on it.

Ms. Carnie Nuenez had nothing to do with the song. By the way, the fringe is out protesting at the school again, scaring the kids. Exactly the way that psychotic pastor protests at military funerals.

The wingnuts are not dealing well with calling Their Michelle a “big mashed up bag of meat with lipstick on it.” That’s unfair. I’ve seen her in photos a lot, and I don’t think she’s always wearing lipstick.

But, y’know, it’s gotten really easy to yank their chains these days, hasn’t it?

E.J. Dionne is talking about the angry white men again. It seems every few years we find ourselves acknowledging the angry white men and analyzing what they’re angry about. He says,

No doubt some who despise Obama will see the judges in Norway as part of that latte-sipping crowd and will hold their esteem for the president against him. He can’t do much about this. What he can do — and perhaps then deserve the domestic equivalent of a peace prize — is reach out to the angry white men with policies that address their grievances, and do so with an understanding that what matters to them is not status but simply a chance to make a decent living again.

To which I say, nuts. I think if E.J. were paying closer attention, he’d notice the white people (of both genders) who are really, really angry and who are so vocally opposing everything Barack Obama is trying to do are not, for the most part, the same people who are out of work and facing foreclosures. They’re people who still have jobs and homes and health insurance (or Medicare), and who somehow have been persuaded that Somebody — minorities, liberal elites, the government, whatever — wants to take those things away from them.

And it’s about time we acnowledged that the angry white men have always been with us. The seething resentments, the well-nurtured victimhood, the paranoia, the absolute intolerance for any point of view but theirs were also the hallmark of the antebellum southerners who drove us into the Civil War.

I mean, who else but a proto-wingnut could talk about the “War of Northern Aggression” when it was the South’s aggression that started the war? As Digby pointed out about mid-way through the Bush Administration, the last half of Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech could almost have been addressed to Bush supporters, especially if you substitute “opposition to slavery” with “liberalism.” For example, “The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery liberalism, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.”

Dionne suggests that we must acknowledge the angry white men have real grievances. Oh, please. What grievances do they have that the rest of us don’t have also? And, more to the point, what problems beset them that they didn’t help bring upon themselves?

The fact is, there’s been a big, fat stain of irrational paranoia that runs through American history and which has tripped us up over and over. And there is no placating it. You can give the irrational paranoids everything they want, cater to their every whim, and they will still hate you and blame you for every cloud in the sky. Why? Because it’s part of our culture. And ignorance and stupidity are factors, also.

I’m not sure what’s to be done about it, but I do know that you don’t make crazy go away by catering to it.

Thanks to Uncledad for the video suggestion.

What can one say, but … omg.

Update: See “Ad Boycott Costs Glenn Beck Over 50% of Ad Dollars” and (spoof alert, I think) “Glenn Beck’s ‘9-12’ logo based on communist and socialist designs.”