The symptoms of the prion disease are beginning to become so obvious that even some of our more prominent pundits are beginning to notice them. For example, even former Karl Rove life-coach Ron Fournier has noticed the severe lack of Abraham Lincolns in the current GOP presidential candidates. And noted climate-denialist and baseball drone George Effing Will has staked out the bold position that many of these candidates have gone so far around the bend that they've crossed some kind of termination barrier.

It is, therefore, especially disheartening that Cruz, who clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and who is better equipped by education and experience to think clearly about courts, proposes curing what he considers this court's political behavior by turning the court into a third political branch.

The problem, of course, is that, for all his expensive education and lengthy experience, Ted Cruz is a nut. And the larger problem is that the institutions of the conservative movement that has cosseted George Effing Will for his entire adult life, and from which he derives his endlessly mysterious influence as a "thinker," were the places where Republicans first ate the monkeybrains containing the prion disease in the first place.

And nobody knows what in the fk to do about Donald Trump. In turn, this has confused Jonathan Chait,who by and large is a sensible fellow. (H/T to Driftglass, who caught this one first today.)

What is significant and genuinely disturbing, not to mention poisonous to the Republican Party's electoral interests, is the fact that conservative thought leaders feel compelled to defend Trump's nativist ramblings. And not just bottom-feeding outlets like the Daily Caller and Breitbart, either. National Review editor Rich Lowry writes in Politico that Trump "has a point."

Yes, ol' Sparkle Pants did write that today in Tiger Beat On The Potomac.

It's just that a lack of education is an anchor around even the hardest-working person in modern America. This is illustrated in an exhaustive report based on government data, by Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors a lower level of immigration. I rely on it for the figures that follow.

It's no surprise that the editor of a longtime white-supremacist journal would cite a report from the CIS, an aging storage unit of moldy quasi-intellectual nativism.

There's a reason for that. Although you'd never know it to read its materials, CIS was started in 1985 by a Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton — a man known for his racist statements about Latinos, his decades-long flirtation with white nationalists and Holocaust deniers, and his publication of ugly racist materials. CIS' creation was part of a carefully thought-out strategy aimed at creating a set of complementary institutions to cultivate the nativist cause — groups including the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and NumbersUSA. As is shown in Tanton's correspondence, lodged in the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Tanton came up with the idea in the early 1980s for "a small think tank" that would "wage the war of ideas."

So, no, I do not choose to engage this "exhaustive study," because, if its author had concluded anything else, he would have lost his gig entirely. The prion disease is established now. There's nobody who is immune.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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