THE CRAZIFICATION OF AMERICA: MAYBE THERE'S A LIMIT

Mark Halperin this morning on Mitt Romney's response to embassy attacks in Egypt and Libya:

Unless the Romney campaign has gamed this crisis out in some manner completely invisible to the Gang of 500, his doubling down on criticism of the President for the statement coming out of Cairo is likely to be seen as one of the most craven and ill-advised tactical moves in this entire campaign.

"Gang of 500" is, of course, Halperin's term for the elite movers and shakers who are deemed to be in charge of our politics. Halperin began using this term when he was in charge of The Note at the ABC News Web site.

More from Ben Smith at BuzzFeed:

Mitt Romney's sharply-worded attack on President Obama over a pair of deadly riots in Muslim countries last night has backfired badly among foreign policy hands of both parties, who cast it as hasty and off-key, released before the facts were clear at what has become a moment of tragedy....

"They were just trying to score a cheap news cycle hit based on the embassy statement and now it's just completely blown up," said a very senior Republican foreign policy hand, who called the statement an "utter disaster" and a "Lehman moment" -- a parallel to the moment when John McCain, amid the 2008 financial crisis, failed to come across as a steady leader....

[One] Republican, a former Bush State Department official, told BuzzFeed, "It wasn't presidential of Romney to go political immediately -- a tragedy of this magnitude should be something the nation collectively grieves before politics enters the conversation." ...

I guess now we see what makes the Beltway establishment draw the line -- a fear that the whole world could blow up.

But the Republican Party has been crazy for a long time. This same gang of elitists could have chided the party for, say, shutting down the government in the 1990s, or impeaching the president a couple of years later, or, more recently, threatening to allow the United States to go into default and thus causing a reduction in our credit rating. The elitists could have made their feelings known when the party began filibustering everything in sight, or getting its talking points from the likes of Glenn Back and Orly Taitz and David Barton. The elites could now be criticizing GOP officeholders and media voices for inflexibility on a jobs bill, or on taxing the rich.

But the elites have long figured that none of that really threatens them. The collapse of the U.S. economy, the destruction of the middle class, the breakdown of American politics -- the elite figure their houses and portfolios will survive all that. They're all right, Jack.

But this seems dangerous to them. So they're saying, if only in anonymous whispers to journalists, that it's a bit much.

They should try bestirring themselves more often.