"It's true. The birthers are, apparently, a horde of fringe Republican funbots who are attempting to prove that the president was not actually born in Honolulu to mixed-race parentage back in August of '61, but instead was really spawned in some sort of bizarre test-tube experiment in a secret underground bunker in the '20s, somewhere in Islamabad and is really a handsome, radical Muslim fundamentalist robot who just so happens to enjoy mom jeans and has a wicked jump shot. Or something.

What delightful times we live in. Is it not the sweetest thing ever, the fact that this whack-job of a story is all over the news cycle and Fox News is stroking itself raw with the cheesy tabloid glory of it all, and even the most stoic, surly GOP congressman is now finding himself in the odd position of defending the president's very existence, as he fights off the rabid idiocy of his own party's nutball fringe?

Really, just when you thought it couldn't get any better than Sarah Palin exiting the political stage with an incoherent rant about who-knows-what so she can go "write" a book and have a reality show developed about her ("Todd and Sarah Plus Live Bait"?), along comes the Next Big Thing in political cotton candy noise pollution.

I find I am only able to ask one thing: Who knew? Who knew, in the wake of all those madcap Christian fundamentalists who ruled like drunken virgins over the Dark Days of Bush, the right still had such a cavalcade of intellectual toddlers waiting in the wings to come out and play in the fields of Infantile Fantasyland, and further guarantee the party's merciful irrelevance for years to come?

Make no mistake: we on the liberal side of the fence have no shortage of radical sects and ridiculous extremism, but you never really find those groups dominating the dialogue in quite the same way. It's a vital and telling difference: The Party of Bush is now paying a very dear price indeed for all those years of kowtowing to its basest, least educated, most radical voting blocks. Live by the nutball base, die by the nutball base, eh, Newt? ..."

(From the pinko tree huggers up by SF Bay...)

Read more: here