I drove Darin to work the other day and ended up listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross as a result. She was interviewing Tim LaHaye, one of the authors of the apparently unreadable Left Behind series, which has reportedly sold 58 million copies. (Slacktivist is a better person than I, subjecting himself to those books.)

You have got to listen to this interview; it is unreal.

If LaHaye and Co.—and their millions of readers—actually believe this stuff…I am aghast. I really didn’t know this kind of nonsense was out there. In the interview, LaHaye spouts what can only be generously termed “garbage” about Christianity and the Apocalypse and the End of Days. And this is, I am sure, the sanitized version, suitable to share with the “unbelievers” on NPR.

These guys want the world to end. They want us all to die. Of course, they’ll be fine, having been saved in the Rapture.

Other than the obvious warm fuzzies of superiority, what do these people get out of believing this shit? And that’s what it is: shit designed to turn off the critical thinking, to turn believers into bleating, fleeceable sheep who pray for death—not theirs, of course, but the evil ones, like Catholics and Jews.

Gross had on another author after LaHaye, Gershom Gorenberg, author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount. What Gorenberg had to say about the Left Behind series, along with Fundamentalism in general, made me immediately sign up to get his book at the library. I’ll report back after I’ve read it.

Tony Hendra writes A Craven Apology to the Republicans in The American Prospect.

I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or…well, you know the drill.

We confess. It’s all true. Everything you say. We trafficked in hate. We did it in anger. Just as you said, Mr. Kristol, Mr. Krauthammer, Mr. Brooks: We poisoned the airwaves and befouled the sheets of our nation’s most august publications. We attacked a sitting president, impugned his integrity, smeared his family, invaded his privacy, tried desperately to drag him down to our own filthy, rock-bottom, sewer-dwelling level.

There is no parallel between your measured criticism of Bill Clinton and our vile attacks on George W. Bush. Bill Clinton deserved everything thrown at him because a corrupt and evil man who gains the White House by underhanded means should be attacked with every weapon at the disposal of a free press. And yes, it’s true, just as your more sagacious radio hosts have maintained: Hillary Clinton does owe her success to the practice of witchcraft. And no, it’s not true that ridiculing Chelsea at the most vulnerable stage in her development was the media equivalent of child molestation. Chelsea Clinton was fair game because she is the spawn of Satan. Scurrilous of us to suggest that the tirelessly moderate and civil proponent of these and so many other truths, Robert Bartley, now resides in the circle of hell reserved for hate-mongers and bigots! Mr. Bartley dwells in the bosom of his Republican creator. We see that now.

Read the whole thing.

My friend Rob has told me that I should scale my paranoia way, WAY back; these folks aren’t the Mafia, he says, they’re the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. He proceeded to list off a number of the gaffes, errors, and blunders the Ministration has made and the American people are waking up to. You know: WMD (or WMDPRA, or whatever it is this week), Valerie Plame, Halliburton, Enron…

And I said, so why is the Resident still getting 50% in the polls?

His answer was basically that the polls are nonsense, taken by people who don’t have the sense to use Caller ID. He wants me to take off the tinfoil hat. Concentrate on the edublogs. That kind of thing.

Okay, okay. So, I’ll do it. They’re not out to get everyone, they’re not out to steal everything, they’re not out to use burn the Constitution and form a theocracy that applies to everyone except the top 1%, who will have all the money and will continue doing exactly what they like. I will not share with you my belief that the GTCSS has done such egregious things that they will do anything, anything, to stay in power come this November, because they have way, way too much lose. (Yes, the phrase Reichstag fire Gulf of Tonkin October Surprise could come to mind, but saying it out loud would be wrong and, you know, paranoid.)

I’m calm. I’m relaxed. The tinfoil hat is off and my hair looks great. I’m playing a few games with my kids on the weekend and all is right with the world.

You, on the other hand, are invited to peruse:

• David Neiwart’s seminal “Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism.” Give the man the $5, read it, then cry. Actually, while you’re at Orcinus, check out “The Personal and the Political” too. The man’s writing is fantastic and powerful.
• A timeline to the events before, during, and after September 11.
• Whatever happened to the 9/11 Commission, by the way?
• Since we’re talking about September 11, some unanswered questions.
• Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of crazed religious fanatics! Or, “More WMD found in Texas than in Iraq.”
• Shorter Paul Krugman: What American dream?
• So a plaintiff goes hunting with the judge hearing his case. What’s wrong with that?
• Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ken Lay, California’s fiscal crisis.
• Our national heritage, going cheap.

In the immortal words of Teresa Nielsen Hayden—only a year ago! imagine that—“I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.”

Did. Did make me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist. It’s all better now.