We’ve spent a lot of time debating the possible existence of peak wingnut here. If this isn’t it, then it’s, at the very least, the Sistine Chapel of early 21st century wingnuttia (via Wonkette).

Update. Via the comments note that the black man in the blue shirt on the left is holding the Glenn Beck bible.

Republicans don’t like their black committee chair.

“He’s on a short leash here,” said one top House GOP leadership aide.

The National Republican Congressional Committee has a problem Nancy Pelosi.

[T]axpayers can only hope McChrystal is able to put her in her place.

WorldNetDaily wants to torpedo Chai Feldblum, a Jewish nominee for the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.

I’m telling you, the entire federal government is going to have to be fumigated some day when these deviants and degenerates are finally sent packing.

Peak Wingnut should arrive any day now. Ayup.

Here is a roundup of the hijinks. Where can I find the funny pictures?

The protests, for some reason, were a little bit bigger than the massive wave of protests from these “fiscal conservatives” when the Republicans and George Bush passed on trillions of unfunded liabilities with the Prescription Drug Act. I just can’t figure out why. It is almost like this is just partisan nonsense whipped up by Koch foundation funded outlets.

I think the thing that pisses me off the most about this (apart from the obvious hypocrisy that none of these people would even flinch if any of this had been proposed by Bush and Tom DeLay) is that this is what happened in the real aftermath of 9/11:

And now, the memory of 9/11 is being latched onto by partisan hacks, astroturfing wingnut welfare foundations, right-wing radio hosts, wingnut bloggers, glibertarian shit-heels, and the usual hodge-podge of misanthropes, racists, and redneck socipaths to pursue a completely partisan agenda. These people really are shameless, especialy since the Republican party just spent the last eight years using 9/11 to do whatever they wanted. I guess now they have just moved on to 9/12. Assholes.

The sad part is that we do not even have to wait to see what happens next. Half a mile from my house a relatively ordinary freeper/stormfronter shot three policemen because he thought Obama would take his guns away.

All these guys need is one martyr to put on their t-shirts and name blogs after. Nobody needs to get shot, although they would love it if someone did. Their intense police state paranoia will be validated enough when a local cop confiscates some bubba’s precious AR-15. Rumors were enough to send several recent crazed shooters over the edge. How many more need just one aggrieved victim of guvmint overreach with a photo and a name?

The second funny thing is that I don’t think that any of these guys have any idea what to do when they have their little revolution. I suppose they hope to take power just by making America ungovernable by anyone else. That works of course, but you need a crippling depression (ergo, anti-stimulus frenzy). You need a credible enemy group to rally against, and demonizing ‘liberals’ (and attendant hate magnets such immigrants, minorities, poor people, rich people who don’t hate the first three groups enough, etc) is just stupid. The word means nothing any more. If a fire-breathing Republican crosses Glenn Beck, the base calls him an Obama-loving liberal. Pick any three guvmint-hating bubbas and one of them will inevitably be more ‘liberal’ than the other two.

Honestly, I would pay good money to watch people who associate book learnin’ with the enemy try and fail to produce a modern-day Federalist Papers. If they do manage something it will be the first book ever written in all caps.

I’m so glad we got that peak wingnut thing over with.

JMart, who is apparently serving as Ben Smith’s stunt double, runs down the list of other things chief birther Orly (Yarly!) Taitz believes in:

There’s a cemetery somewhere in Arizona where they just dug 30,000 fresh graves, which wait now for the revolution.

Baxter International — a major Obama contributor — developed a vaccine for bird flu that actually kills people.

Google Congressman Alcee Hastings and House Bill 684 and you’ll see that they’re planning at least six civilian labor camps.

Google an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about train cars with shackles.

The communist dictator Hugo Chavez way back in 2004 purchased the Sequoia software that runs our voting machines and the mainstream media won’t report any of it — not even Fox because Saudi Arabia bought a percentage of Fox in 2007.

Death panels, socialism, labor camps- we really have let an insane minority take the national dialogue hostage.

Andy McCarthy at the NRO has a 3,700 word piece on… Obama’s birth certificate.

In fairness, Michael Moore IS fat.

This is great. Mike Stark tracks down Republicans in DC and asks them about the birther issue:

The reason Republicans in DC are running from some guy on the street asking them whether or not Obama is an American citizen is because they have spent the last thirty years cultivating a base of insane crazy people, and while they may escape a reporter from FDL, they can’t escape the base.

Matthews has G. Gordon Liddy on, and they are going through the birther nonsense, and after stating all Obama needs to do is show a birth certificate, Matthews shows him one, and Liddy claims it isn’t good enough because it was redacted.

Liddy looks like he has had a stroke. He is mumbling and doddering, and is claiming that not only is Obama not an American, but he is an illegal alien.

Maybe I’m ungrateful, but this trial balloon spelling out Eric Holder’s maybe plans to prosecute torture strikes me as something close to the worst of both worlds. On the one hand Holder looks likely to appoint a federal prosecutor to find out why so many of our prisoners died of organ failure, blunt trauma or drowned in their own blood.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is leaning toward appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate whether CIA personnel tortured terrorism suspects after Sept. 11, 2001, setting the stage for a conflict with administration officials who would prefer the issues remain in the past, according to three sources familiar with his thinking.

We can probably agree that as far as Republicans are concerned it doesn’t matter how Holder finesses this. Any decision that brings accountability to the torture regime will explode the wingularity into a Congress-paralyzing Big Bang of hysteria, obstruction and exotic particles that the universe has not seen since Joe McCarthy held the floor. The decision is so nuclear that details will almost certainly get lost in the noise.

Given the inevitability of epic mayhem from the GOP, I fail to see what Holder gains by enacting his probe in the least useful manner imaginable.

[S]ources said an inquiry would apply only to activities by interrogators, working in bad faith, that fell outside the “four corners” of the legal memos.

Hard to believe as it may seem, Holder’s probe will take John Yoo’s work, the famous memos that would make your ass dumber if you wiped with them, and treat them as the settled law of the time. Already clear and public evidence that DOJ lawyers drafted those memos entirely in bad faith, on orders from Bush officials who literally dictated what they wanted the memos to say, will be similarly ignored.

The actions of higher-level Bush policymakers are not under consideration for possible investigation.

To put it bluntly, this strategy is a goddamn disgrace. We called it whitewashing when the Bush administration made a few grunts pay for the orders they followed at Abu Ghraib. We called it a disgrace because that’s what it was. What do you think we should call it now? I don’t feel much sympathy for the sadistic creeps who will pay for their superiors’ sins this time any more than than I feel for Chuck Graner and Lynndie Englund. Interrogators who took it on themselves to surpass even the sick boundaries of Yoo’s torture memos deserve to answer in court. Nonetheless, to stop there and call it justice makes me physically ill.

Holder’s likely decision makes no more sense from a purely utilitarian perspective. The kind of investigations that are worth a major prosecutor’s time start at the grunt level so they can build a case against bigger fish. Handling it like this looks almost exactly the same as asking a mafia prosecutor to focus exclusively on the goons who got a little too enthusiastic when they beat up card players behind on their debts. Ordinary citizens would have a hard time seeing that as a terribly serious effort to bring down organized crime.

I will close with props to the eerily psychic feature writers at The Onion. Read this from May 2009.

WASHINGTON—In its first major hearing on the use of abusive interrogation tactics at Guantánamo Bay, a blue-ribbon panel found detainee Omar Khadr mentally unfit to testify about his years of psychological torture. “Because of Mr. Khadr’s fragile state due to unknown hours spent under the most brutal, mentally straining conditions, he cannot be trusted to speak competently on his own behalf,” said Rep. Kit Bond (R-MO), the panel’s chairman. “It is unfortunate that someone with such intimate knowledge of the horrors of waterboarding, stress positions, and induced hypothermia is so emotionally unstable. He bursts into tears at even the mention of mock torture.” Bond added that Khadr’s confession of planning 9/11, the London train bombings, and the Iranian hostage crisis would be kept on the record.

Ha ha. The Washington Post, today.

Other challenges an inquiry into alleged torture might face could include the difficulty of gathering evidence of improper conduct in war zones and questions about the reliability of witnesses who may have been held by the U.S. government for years, legal analysts said yesterday.

It almost makes you want to step back and admire the Bush crowd. For a team who couldn’t policy their way out of a paper bag made of warm air, they had a remarkable knack for putting well-intentioned officials in an impossible bind.

I just got this email from PJ Media:

July 4th weekend is quickly approaching. What does that mean for you?

Citizen Reporters:
For April 15, over 700 reporters signed up and ultimately uploaded 7,000 photos and over 100 videos! We want your help for July 4th weekend Tea Party coverage. Currently our Citizen Reporter count is approaching 800 – but we need more.
Sign up here.

Tea Party Organizers:
We want to help you make a difference by covering your event. Register it here.

This initial list of Tea Party events will be rapidly expanding during this week!

You gotta love that thinking- the Tax Day tea parties were a huge flop even with weeks of promotion at Fox News, so schedule a new set of patriotic tea parties on… July 4th, when everyone is celebrating Independence Day, and just count all them as part of the tea party numbers. Why, I bet there will be a hundred thousand or more tea party attendants in DC alone at the Lincoln Memorial! I bet they even stay for the fireworks they are so committed to the tea party cause!

So here is my plan for a tea party of our own. This year, from after Thanksgiving until 2 January, I want everyone who wants to signify that they support any liberal or dirty hippy position to do the following things to show your support for the cause:

1.) Put up a large evergreen in your living room and dress it up with lots of ornaments.
2.) Drink egg nog.
3.) Place candles in your window.
4.) Take the day off on the 24th or 25th of December, and spend it with your family.
5.) Sing little ditties and songs (we can even call them “carols”).
6.) Buy gifts for your friends and loved ones.

I have a lot more ideas about how we can really show our solidarity. I’m tentatively thinking about adopting the reindeer as our mascot, and maybe making mistletoe our official plant life, but I’m open to ideas.

What do you think?

*** Update ***

It has been suggested that not only should we choose mistletoe, but we should make up some silly rule about hanging it and then kissing people underneath it. This sounds promising.

Michele Bachmann is as dumb as a sack of hammers:

Except, of course, she can’t possibly be this stupid, so what she is doing should be seen for what it is- trying to whip people into a froth and inciting trouble. She’s really not much different from Glenn Beck or Hal Turner, actually, and far more reprehensible because she is actually an elected official.

I’m now to the point that I fully expect some census workers to get shot this year.

At the Fire Letterman rally:

The last woman reminded me of the Grinch (“your heart is full of unwashed socks, your soul is full of gunk, Mr. Grinch”), and “He will rape you with his mouth” is tragicomic choice of words.

The most amazing thing about it is that this could just as easily have been a McCain/Palin rally, a tea party, or an anti-abortion protest. Same wingnuts, different signs.

Sometimes you read something at one of the wingnut websites that is so spectacularly stupid you think it has to be performance art:

I think it is time to call it “The Obama Recession.” Using Obama’s own numbers, we are now worse off than we would have been had Obama’s stimulus not gone into effect.

***

The figure should speak for itself. Not only are the actual unemployment numbers worse than predicted with the Recovery Plan, they are worse than predicted had there been no stimulus at all!

Does it get any clearer than this? The “stimulus” was a failure at best, and at worst, a hoax in the first place.

This caused me physical pain.