From the Columns

J. Goldberg: Continues to be an idiot. E. Robinson: Belabors the obvious. Though how is it that the obvious is never apparent to the Republican base?

Now that it's election time, the party -- as usual -- is trying to convince Americans that it stands on the side of the little guy. Sarah Palin has been trotted out to convince everyone that the party cares deeply about the eternal roster of cultural issues -- God, guns, gays, abortion, etc. If McCain and Palin were elected, the party would doubtless return these issues to the storage locker until the next election, at which point they would be dusted off once more. [...] I defy anyone to give a coherent explanation of what today's Republican Party, under George Bush and now John McCain, wants to do except perpetuate itself in power. When a political party reaches the point of lurching incoherence, the most effective cure is a good, long spell in the wilderness. Americans should help Republicans out by sending them home to get their act together.

It is this reporter's opinion that a good long spell in the torments of eternal hellfire would be more appropriate. But what do we know? E. J. Dionne: Worried that those base (Aren't they, though?) Republicans are moving the proverbial Overton window, & relegitimizing the extra-drooly right.

Yet culture war politics is relatively mild compared with the far-right appeals that are emerging this year. It is as if McCain's loyalists overshot the '60s and went back to the '50s or even the '30s. What we are witnessing is the mainstreaming of the far right, a phenomenon that began to take shape with some of the earliest attacks on Bill Clinton in the 1990s. False claims that Obama is Muslim, that he trained to overthrow the government and that he was educated in Wahhabi schools are a standard part of the political discussion. These fake stories come from voices on the ultra right that have dabbled in other forms of conspiracy, including classic anti-Semitism. McCain and his campaign do not pick up the most extreme charges. They just fan the flames by suggesting that voters don't really know who Obama is, hinting at a sinister back story without filling in the details.

Not that endorsements or whatever mean a damn thing, but Mr. Dionne, no doubt in his capacity as a full-fledged member of the cocktail weenie circuit in the Washington "village," brings us this tidbit about another defection from the McCain camp.

When Christopher Buckley, a novelist and former speechwriter for George H.W. Bush, announced last week that he would vote for Obama (his first vote ever for a Democrat), he referred to words once spoken to him by his late father. "You know," the conservative hero William F. Buckley Jr. said, "I've spent my entire lifetime separating the right from the kooks."

Too bad Bill didn't really take his task completely to heart. Unless some of the zillion pro-segregation pieces National Review published weren't "kooky," just, well, right? And to keep it even, if not fair, last words from the Hammer of Kraut (which is usually striking the Anvil of Idiocy):

Until now. Today, on the threshold of the presidency, Obama concedes the odiousness of these associations, which is why he has severed them. But for the years in which he sat in Wright's pews and shared common purpose on boards with Ayers, Obama considered them a legitimate, indeed unremarkable, part of social discourse. Do you? Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect. There is a difference between temperament and character. Equanimity is a virtue. Tolerance of the obscene is not.

"Shared common purpose on boards w/ Ayers?" Was that the Weather Underground Board of Advisers? No? Then it doesn't count, Charles. We refuse to tolerate any further obscenity from you.