Through the looking glass, darkly

This morning (for my sins, no doubt - it is, after all, Sunday) I followed a little link, which led me down a dark hole, at the bottom of which I discovered an online article, which included the following quote:

"I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places."

These apocalyptic words were written by Mark Levin, at the National Review Online. If you're feeling masochistic, you can read the whole piece here.

What struck me about these particular words was that they mirrored - almost perfectly - my own sentiments, and those of many people I know, in the aftermath of George Bush's reelection in 2004.

Today, four years later, I have the sense that America has come to its senses, corrected its moral course, redeemed itself, vindicated the wisdom of its founders, and chastened me for having doubted its essential decency and common sense.

And all Mr. Levin can sense is doom.

To dip into the NRO these days is to sojourn in a bizarroland, where all normal values have been reversed - the perspective is so utterly weird it is disorienting.

Mr. Levin thinks that anyone who supports Obama - indeed, anyone who fails to despise and fear Obama - must be either a villain or a damned fool.

The fact that increasing numbers of reputable conservatives have endorsed Obama can only be explained by their own opportunism, or by Obama's capacity to deceive and bewitch.

Levin writes, "my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue."

This breathtaking bit of (unintended) irony comes to you straight from an enthusiastic supporter of Sarah Palin.

Mr. Levin is not alone - far from it. "The Corner" (as NRO's collective blog is called) is a veritable Mad Hatter's tea party of unhinged paranoid chatter that seems to make perfect sense to them and to them alone.

For a moment, I couldn't help but wonder whether I was being similarly paranoid four years ago when I worried that Dick Cheney was on the verge of turning the US into a crypto-fascist state. Perhaps we just have a bad habit in this country of getting hysterical whenever the opposition is in the ascendant.

But that was momentary. Then I remembered that the Bush administration actually did lie us into war. They did spy on their own citizens. They did question the patriotism of dissenters and try to silence them. They did seek - at every level of government, in every branch of government - to elevate and reward fealty to the administration over every other quality, including competence, experience and probity. They did try to make habeas corpus a matter of executive discretion. They did torture both the guilty and the innocent in our names.

It's no wonder that the apologists for this regime would see Obama, and all he represents, as a threat. To acknowledge his virtues would require them to reject what they have consented to and, indeed, gloried in for the last eight years.

And so, as many of their fellows come to their senses, and slip away one by one, the chatter gets louder and ever more inane, and the party dwindles to something very strange and very sad and very, very small.