These are dangerous times for the conservative movement in America.\u00a0 After last November’s mid-term election, the far-right has shown that it has the power to shape key elections.<\/p>\n
The Tea Party erupted into prominence as a national force, thanks to a remarkably supple partnership between the conservative media (Fox News and AM talk radio), wealthy backers (the Koch brothers and others) and hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file grassroots activists.<\/p>\n
At the heart of this renaissance is what Indiana’s Republican Governor Mitch Daniels called the “red menace” — this time meaning, not communism, but red ink.<\/p>\n
The public is clearly concerned about the Federal debt, and wants to see real budget-cutting solutions that also maintain a high level of basic government services, along with a robust social safety net.<\/p>\n
The GOP owns this issue, and is leveraging the Democrats toward significant compromises.<\/p>\n
But also fueling the conservative movement is a risky cocktail of conspiracy theorists, full-throated whack-jobs, hucksters and patently unqualified populists who are sucking the oxygen out of the room.<\/p>\n
It’s hard to tell whether the GOP has a significant slate of presidential contenders, because so much of the attention is going to Fox News personalities, who keep winking and nudging about being possible candidates.<\/p>\n
And that’s hardly the worst of it.<\/p>\n
Watching a recent broadcast of Glenn Beck’s Fox program, I found myself a little breathless at the vitriol, the flights of fancy, and the jittery panic he displayed.\u00a0 This may be an act, but I’m not so sure.<\/p>\n
I think Fox may really be exploiting an unwell man who has gone seriously lost in the maze of his own elaborately goofy ideas.<\/p>\n
In an interview last week, a frankly skeptical Bill O’Reilly asked Beck to back up his fulminations that Islamic extremists are conspiring with “labor unions” and other leftist groups to create “chaos” in America’s streets.<\/p>\n
Beck had no facts to offer.\u00a0 (In what appears almost an act of self-parody, Beck has urged his viewers to trust his “gut” that all these bizarre and mutually contradictory conceits are true.<\/p>\n
But Beck is only one of the more prominent examples of this phenomenon.<\/p>\n
At last week’s CPAC conservative conference — attended by almost all of the serious Republican leadership — some activists accused the right-leaning organization of being infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood.<\/p>\n