I think you've bought us some breathing room with your choice of board and innocuous subject line, ER. Our Conservative colleagues have the fig leaf of assuming we're having a private conversation, with no obligation to defend their honor. Even if not a sparrow can fall on the Zone without The Scholar knowing about it.

The violent allergy to this topic is misplaced, I think. Hofstatder distinguished the subjects of his study as extremists, a new kind of conservative so paradoxically radical as to be not conservative at all. In the context of his time, John Birchers, not Republicans. He saw Barry Goldwater as a radical, and Eisenhower as the traditional conservative.

In modern times he'd see, as people like Messick and me and you see, our subject to be the Tea Party movement and its hangers-on and fellow-travelers and astroturf-waterers and -fertilizers. Some of our own Conservatives clearly distance themselves from the crazies, but The Scholar has this uncanny talent for seeming to defend the entire of rightwingerdom, while in fact only going on record as having masturbated too muchread Ayn Rand in adolescence, from which flows Libertarianism. A belief system that is at least debatable, unlike the inchoate rage of the Teahadis.

Based on a lifetime of observation, what we're talking about here forms a reasonably consistent view of what's going on in the extreme conservative's mind. But of what practical use is it?

What's brought us to this point has, I think, a lot to do with the fact that the Right has spent the last several decades building their bubble, and it now has the critical mass in rightwing news and talkers and thinktanks and entertainment and gated communities that their bubble has an event horizon. One with the unusual property that we can see in but they can't see out. Anybody out here can watch Fox News or read any of the rightwing newspapers or web sites, but because of the perfect inoculation by the "liberal mainstream media" meme, they can't see out.

The inside, in metaphorical appropriateness, is perfectly mirrored.

The bubble hasn't captured all conservatives, of course. But for the extremists like the Teapartiers, it's taken on the substance and tangibility of The Matrix. They live in a separate reality.

How do we even communicate any more?