Delusions moving to center

This recent column from Gene Lyons discusses how nutty some of the right-wingers have become. Definitely worth a read.

The worldwide financial crisis coinciding with the election of an African American president with an odd name appears to have driven a noisy minority clear around the bend. The kinds of delusional themes once featured in semi-underground videos like "The Clinton Chronicles" peddled by necromancers like the late Rev. Jerry Falwell have gone "mainstream."

President Bill Clinton was merely portrayed as a rapist, drug smuggler and murderer - comparatively private vices. Paranoid fears about U.N. "black helicopters" and the surrender of American sovereignty to "one-world" government of the kind that motivated Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh were limited to crackpot militias on the fringes of society.

Not anymore. No less an eminence than former Clinton political adviser Dick Morris made it official on FOX News recently. He opined: "Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the U.N.'s going to take over'? Well, they're beginning to have a case."