The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Salon by James Wolcott <http://www.vanityfair.com/contributors/james-wolcott> - February 23, 2010 Vanity Fair colleague Michael Wolff, though not a licensed clinician or chiropodist, renders what seems to me an inarguable diagnosis of the current conservative condition, i.e., they've gone loco <http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/02/its-not-politics-its-bon\ kers.html> :
Republicans, once the party of boring sobriety and solidness, are now the party of the kooky, the cracked, the unhinged. Republicans are not conservative in the least. Rather, they act out in the most deranged and dramatic ways. Having whipped themselves into dishrag fatigue over the socialist-fascist-satanic-nanny statism-TelePrompter totalitarianism cheese doodlies of the Obama administration, they've now revived to turn on each other, writing and pasting nasty things all over freshman Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown's high-school yearbook <http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/02/slide-show-scott-brown-d\ ada-protest-art.html> for voting for cloture on the jobs bill <http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/82753-scott-brown-vote\ s-for-cloture-on-jobs-bill> , thus betraying everything conservatism has stood for since the late William F. Buckley first lifted a salad fork and speared asparagus. How dare he, or as Wonkette's Ken Layne put it <http://wonkette.com/413851/the-wonderful-world-of-scott-browns-facebook\ -friends> : Handsome nudist truck driver Scott Brown was the GOP's BFF until he started "going rogue" on Monday with that whole "I'll just give a helping hand to the Socialists, because we are the Communist Brotherhood" thing he pulled right there on C-SPAN, as if teabaggers didn't even matter. Why doesn't Scott Brown respect his Facebook friends and the, uh, Constitution? Scott Brown is but the latest of the beauty-salon graduates driving conservatives to spazzy distraction. As NYCweboy argues <http://nycweboy.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/02/republicans-hot-drinks-an\ d-their-attractive-dude-problem.html> , the Republican Party has become the fan club for attention-deficit teenage girls of all ages and sexes, unable to decide between Fabian and Frankie Avalon, infatuated with Zec Efron one month and all moony over Rob Pattison the next, smitten with Mitt Romney one campaign and pining over Marco Rubio the next. "[If] if Republicans have a crisis of leadership, it may be because conservatives have become some of the most fickle lovers of new faces: as fast as a new handsome dude (usually white, but occasionally tan) enters the room, their love of last year's model goes out the window." So many male starlets have strutted the gangplank, only to splash into the briny deep, given the nudge by political purists and the easily bored. Why, I can recall--it wasn't that long ago--when Norm Coleman was going to be the new savior, with National Review types suggesting that his inquiry into George Galloway might do for him what the Alger Hiss case did for Richard Nixon--launch him into national prominence on a wave of vindication--and then there was that other NRO man-throb crush, Rick Santorum, and the on-again off-again romance with Bobby Jindal. That anyone could ever get a tingling sensation from the beaky-geeky Tim Pawlenty is just so weird, a sign of desperation. Further proof that the Republican Party's "big tent" has become a bughouse. http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2010/02/vanity-fair-colleague-m\ ichael-wolff-1.html
