Sometimes I wander through the fever swamps of the magazine of "holistic" protesters and tottering old Stalinists, <i>The Nation</i>: a magazine that is to <i>The New Republic</i> as Pat Buchanan's <i>American Conservative</I> is to <i>National Review</I>.

In other words, it's filled with the left wing equivalent of John Birchers, paranoid true believers who see politics as war by other means and Jewish fascist Christian fundamentalist financier-megachurch-preachers as the true force behind every right wing proposal, "right wing" proposal (read: something an espousing Christian or a corporation came up with), and "right wing deviationist" proposal (read: something from a liberal who doesn't read <i>The Nation</I>).

So you can see how surprised I was when I read such an illustrious magazine accusing Hillary Clinton - motto: "Three horsemen short of an apocalypse" - of <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/ehrenreich">being part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy</a>.

Now, first, shake off that weird feeling you just had, like that during the inevitable Family Get Together awkward silence after Crazy Uncle Joe talks about people watching him through the lightbulbs or Great Aunt Louise says the word "coloreds" to describe the majority of the world's population (and, specifically, "those uppity ones downtown"). Second, think about the fact that these people - devotees of The Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, Eschaton and the innumerable other sights of masturbatory BDS ventings - have a firm grasp upon the future of one of our two main political parties.

Jimmy Carter, perhaps the nation's worst President and acolyte of 1960's LBJ liberalism, infamously sat at Michael Moore's side during the 2004 DNC convention, and Markos Zunigas is a man to be mollified and kow-towed to by the Democrat candidates at The Yearly Kos.

We on the Right cast out our crazies. The Birchers were dismissed from conservative discourse in the fifties by the likes of WFB Jr. Those glossy eyed zealous reason-engineers fighting their continual last stand under the banner of Randianism were famously "read out." Our Michael Moore figure, Ann Coulter, is banished to the political equivalent of a corporation's Anchorage, Alaska office: fired from <i>National Review</I>, her increasingly outlandish books remaining unread Christmas presents from well meaning but politically apathetic or ignorant relatives. Talk of black helicopters, Blue Helmeted UN Stormtroopers, the NAFTA Superhighway, North American Union, or "the Amero" is a road straight to irrelevance on the right, one of the main reasons Ron Paul got so little of even the Republican vote.

It is high time for the Left to have the same cleansing. And they could, were it not for the conspirational style of their core beliefs, where disagreement for any reason is treated as sign of religious "psychosis" or being the stooge of the cabal <i>de jour</I> or Big Whatever.