THE GOP HAS AN INTELLECTUAL CENTER, AND THAT'S WHERE YOU'LL FIND SARAH PALIN

You probably already know that Breitbart has published Sarah Palin's call for the impeachment of President Obama. Let me just point out some of the wording of that impeachment call, right there in her second paragraph:

Without borders, there is no nation. Obama knows this. Opening our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants is deliberate. This is his fundamental transformation of America.

Does the wording sound familiar? It should if you've been reading my blog regularly, because Palin is saying exactly what Wesley Pruden said in a Washington Times op-ed that was the lead item at Fox Nation for a while yesterday. I quoted that op-ed, the headline of which was:

An immigrant surge en route to a Third World USA

This is the 'fundamental transformation' Obama promised

Pruden wrote:

Mr. Obama promised in 2008 that he intended to transform America, and he is well on his way....

Making the United States over into a Third World country is exactly what this president is about. He is of the Third World. He spent his formative years in the Third World, and when his mother, obsessed with the Third World, brought him back to America, he sought out the company of those who dreamed of making America over into the world's largest welfare state, a France writ large....

Today, Palin writes:

Discrediting the price paid for America's exceptionalism over our history, he's given false hope and taxpayer's change to millions of foreign nationals who want to sneak into our country illegally. Because of Obama's purposeful dereliction of duty an untold number of illegal immigrants will kick off their shoes and come on in, competing against Americans for our jobs and limited public services.

Yesterday, in a post about the radical and insane platform of the Texas Republican Party, Charlie Pierce wrote:

This is the Republican Party. Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru are not.

I'd say the same thing about Sarah Palin, Wesley Pruden, and the guy their both cribbing from, Dinesh D'Souza: their crackpottery about Obama being a revenge-minded anti-colonialist deliberately flooding the U.S. with immigrants is the Republican Party; the reform-minded Deep Thinking of Levin and Ponnuru is not.

The intellectual center of the GOP is a body of conspiratorial superstition; it's a rancid stew of email forwards, right-wing media talking points, and elected officials' demagogic pronouncements. Sarah Palin is reading from canonical texts when she writes that Obama is destroying the country deliberately:

The federal government is trillions of dollars in debt, many cities are on the verge of insolvency, our overrun healthcare system, police forces, social services, schools, and our unsustainably generous welfare-state programs are stretched to the max. We average Americans know that. So why has this issue been allowed to be turned upside down with our "leader" creating such unsafe conditions while at the same time obstructing any economic recovery by creating more dependents than he allows producers?

That's right -- according to Palin, we haven't had a full economic recovery because Obama is "obstructing" a recovery intentionally; we've had an increase in people on public assistance not because CEOs aren't hiring, or because baby boomers are (predictably and inevitably) retiring in large numbers, but because Obama has a conscious strategy of "creating more dependents than he allows producers."

The GOP is a party of ideas -- and these are the ideas.

To quote Charlie Pierce again: "We allow ourselves only two major political parties. One of them is completely out of its fcking mind. This is a national problem."