The Crazy Caucus: Michele Bachmann, Steve King, and Louie Gohmert

At this point, one can come to no other conclusion than that there are parts of this great nation in which a politician can adopt a position that takes us all hurtling over the Cliffs of Sanity without disqualifying said politician for fame, fortune, and relatively high national office. It's hard to know when we as a nation abandoned the goal of having as few crackpots as possible in positions of power, but the exotic fauna of the conservative movement has abandoned the underbrush for good and is now stalking the landscape unafraid.

"She's not going to call her crazy," said the spokesman for Tarryl Clark, a Democratic state senator in Minnesota who is trying to rid the Congress of the comic stylings of Michele Bachmann (above, left), the Republican who first got famous by gobsmacking Chris Matthews shortly before the 2008 elections by asserting that she wanted an investigation into which of her colleagues were anti-American. Subsequently, she was one of the first onto the Tea Party crazywagon, telling audiences of the agitated elderly about death panels and about how the Obama administration was going to make "slaves" of us all, and even leading a rally on the steps of the Capitol at which people protested the health-care-reform bill by waving pictures of Dachau. Not campaigning on the issue of Bachmann's transcendent nuttiness is tantamount to running against Rod Blagojevich and not pointing out that he's a crook.

A few degrees south of Minnesota, Iowan Matt Campbell is taking on Republican incumbent Steve King (above, right), the man who has never met an Obama conspiracy he didn't love. It was King who brought birtherism to the floor of the House. It was King who accused the White House of serving "ACORN cookies" at a social event. It was King who joined Bachmann in arguing that $10 billion intended to save the jobs of 160,000 teachers around the country was actually "money laundering" on behalf of the teachers' unions. And it was King who told the world that President Obama has a "mechanism that favors the black person."

"King insists on name-calling and divisive politics, and I don't think that plays well with western Iowa," Campbell says. Alas, we shall have to see about that. The odds are not good, however.

Moving even farther south and even deeper into the dementosphere, we find Louie Gohmert (above, center), the representative from the First District in Texas, and believe us when we tell you, Gohmert makes Steve King look like Cicero and Michele Bachmann like Margaret Thatcher. A characteristic Gohmert speech on the House floor during a debate on the military's Don't Ask — Don't Tell policy had Gohmert raving about bestiality, necrophilia, and voting for a black man. Most often, it seems as though he is unaware of his surroundings, as if maybe Louie doesn't realize that he is in the Congress. As yet, none of his fellow representatives have seen fit to throw a net over him, so Gohmert now has moved on famously to warn us about "terror babies" — infants born here to Al Qaeda operatives who will use their automatic citizenship to attack us down the line.

And the craziest thing of all? Louie Gohmert is running unopposed.