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So Michele Bachmann, who has clearly never read the document, says President Obama “has rewritten the Constitution for himself.” And add to that birther pastor, Carl Gallups, who says it is irresponsible not to speculate about the possibility that Obama is the anti-Christ.

We have watched as the tea party starts to sound like escaped sanitarium inmates. There is no need here to get into the other countless insanities inflicted upon Americans since 2008 alone, but the GOP has been a mother to them all. It is enough to say that, believe it or not, it has been all down hill since the tea party-sponsored government shut down.

The point is, we’ve all seen this stuff, right? We all agree it happened.

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Yet Alan Keyes, who manages to say that tolerance of gays “rapes the parental authority of Christian parents,” without causing a batted eye among his Republican compatriots (or the mainstream media), somehow manages to claim that the current Republican Party is not extreme enough and that a new Religious Right Party is needed.

Think about that. Not just the Christian Coalition. Not just the Moral Majority. Not just the so-called Religious Right. Not even the evangelically infested tea party. But an actual by God religious party.

It is difficult to believe people who talk like this are living on the same planet as the rest of us. Thanks to its extremism, the GOP has been unable to sustain itself since 2008 other than a brief rally in 2010, and a problem remains: who is going to vote for a bunch of people who sound like they’ve smoked too much crack?

Alan Keyes sounds even more deranged. In a column published yesterday, he said:

The year 2013 has witnessed a virtual cascade of events that have confirmed the prognostications and predictions I have continually and repeated made about the destructive, anti-American nature and intent of Barack Obama and all those who collaborate with him. But those same events have clearly demonstrated that the Obama collaboration includes almost the whole of the GOP’s national leadership. From Obamacare to immigration, from enslaving Obamacare mandates to feckless foreign policy debacles, the GOP leaders have been either complicit, supine, or AWOL. They have also shamelessly declared political war on GOP U.S. senators and representatives who have honestly tried to represent the intense opposition to socialist tyranny simmering hot amongst the voters. Obama has usurped the executive power intended to preserve the nation, in order to destroy it. In like manner, the GOP leaders have usurped the political party that is supposed to represent Americans who are loyal to liberty and the Constitution. And they have used their leadership position to belittle, criticize, obstruct, and betray us.

Nonsensical as this is, Keyes insists the GOP has betrayed America, complaining,

[T]oo many people remain tragically blind to, or apathetic about, the truth that is the key to thwarting Obama’s anti-American putsch. Tyrannical socialism would have no chance of overthrowing the citadel of America’s liberty except for the consistent and increasingly bold cooperation of the forces that dominate what is supposed to be the Republican opposition.

Because “The GOP leadership has now firmly conveyed its surrender in principle on issues of fundamental right like abortion and the rights of the natural family,” Keyes finds “it especially hard to understand how people of faith can go on deluding themselves with false hopes. Such an unprincipled leadership will never allow the GOP to be the ark of America’s preservation against the current tidal wave of godless socialism and expedient Machiavellian politics.”

He went on to say,

It may at times be true: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But if it’s really broke, you don’t fix it either, you replace it with something that works. Have Americans forgotten how to replace hijacked political parties? If so, nothing will ever restore their self-government. For when elections offer decent folks no choice that actually represents them, the process of election amounts to nothing more than pitiful decoration for our chains.

This is rich coming from a bunch of religious fanatics who themselves hijacked the Republican Party in the years following Goldwater’s 1964 defeat.

To any disinterested observer (admittedly, I am not one) there would seem to be a surfeit of extremism accepted under the Republican umbrella; that indeed, nothing but extremism is accepted. Remember Mitt Romney, the choice of the Republican “establishment” in 2012 and all the crazy things he said. One shudders to think of ways in which the Republican Party might become more extreme unless all these fantasies were made law.

The good news for America (and the world, really) is that if such an event came to pass, a desertion of Evangelicals from tea party to religious party might finally break the tea party’s influence for good, and if it did not, a three-headed monster would further splinter an already splintered conservatism in time for 2014 and 2016. It might also bleed enough lunatics from the GOP for the Republican Party to return to respectability.

That, I think, would be a result all Americans could root for.