THE GULLS CAN'T HELP IT.

It seems as if the Republican shitstorms have had an effect; their distorted portrayal of the IRS mess, and their pretense of civil libertarianism over the NSA revelations, have pulled down Obama's approval ratings. Good work! So, geniuses, what's the follow-up?

House passes late-term abortion ban
The House voted Tuesday to impose a nationwide ban on abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy over Democratic objections that the bill represents a dramatic attempt by Republicans to restrict abortion rights... 

With limited exceptions, the legislation would ban the abortion of a fetus younger than 20 weeks old, or at 22 weeks of pregnancy under a different measuring system. The ban would be backed by possible fines against doctors, as well as prison sentence of as many as five years.

What can you say about a movement that, having expertly wielded the dark chords of the Mighty Wurlitzer to get the audience to hiss Obama, suddenly segues into America's least favorite Gospel number accompanied by the Crazy Cletus Fetus Brigade? And sends its fine young men like Yuval Levin of National Review out on stage with a bucket on one foot to say stuff like this:

The front page of today’s New York Times carries a story about the late-term-abortion ban being considered in the House. The headline in the print edition is “Unfazed by 2012, G.O.P. Is Seeking Abortion Limits.” As if the people struggling to save the lives of innocent children whose only crime is that they are unwanted by their mothers or would disrupt somebody’s plans should be “fazed” into inaction by the 2012 election...

It's like they're trying to get people to imagine pregnant women chained to cots in a forced birthing center festooned with crosses and pictures of Todd Akin.

I think for some of them it's a perverse sort of strategy, based on a certainty that citizens will swoon for this sort of thing -- no pale pastels! But for most of them, I think it's just a tic. Or maybe that's too mild. Maybe it's a form of epilepsy.

However buttoned-down the operation can be, however smoothly things are running, every so often the brethren simply have to ululate and handle snakes in public. You may have forgotten that, because the Romney campaign was such a mess. After the tenth or twelfth time the Democrats dollied in on a Republican face that had been blackened by an exploding cigar, you came to assume that the Dems had gotten super-great at politics. They've certainly improved from when I was a young man, but they have mostly been fortunate that their opponents started having such frequent and spectacular seizures.

This is a natural consequence of the conservative anomie that has in recent months been frequently and hilariously discussed. Over the past five or six years, nearly all their crazy ideas have been discredited or at least called into question. People have tumbled to the fact that, unless carefully watched, the dynamo of capitalism will inevitably overheat and blow up your economy; that ginning up wars in the Middle East doesn't make the country safer; that you don't need fundamentalists to win elections if you have women and minorities; etc.

In fact, the recent conservative successes I mentioned are based on a total reversal of their position on surveillance from the last time they held power. Victory in any guise is gratifying, and so this must be to them -- but it comes with a price: it abstracts them still further from their true authoritarian and xenophobic nature. Why, the strain must be even greater than pretending to give a shit about Mexicans. And that's why they run amok.

What they need is someone forceful and charismatic to hold them in line and make them behave -- but it can't be one of the old-timers 'cause they're all RINO squares. So far I see Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz...

It'll be an interesting couple of years.