It's one long and factually-exclusive complaint about conservative "crazies." The man actually dredges up stuff from a generation ago that nobody nowadays remembers, while somehow managing to overlook several Republican administrations, including Nixon, Reagan and the last eight years of George W. Bush, where the American Left was stark raving insane almost the whole time.

Either Perlstein is capable of eliminating all that from his mind, reinventing his history and reality from one day to the next (in which case the term "idiot" is clinical), or he honestly thinks his reading audience is that stupid. Which is it?

Like a lot of other leftists, Perlstein is furious that Obama's election and the Democratic congressional lock hasn't produced the instant and glorious "progressive" paradise that was promised. That his own side is irrational isn't on his broken radar screen, so he has to blame someone else. Why not those damn noisy proles?