DES MOINES—On Friday night, seven of the Republican contenders for president gathered around a mock Thanksgiving table on a stage at the front of an enormous ballroom, which was filled to the gunwales even though the year's first winter storm had come rolling out of Nebraska that afternoon. "Satan," joked Bob Vander Plaats, "is trying to disrupt our plans tonight. But it was laid on my heart that the people who would show up tonight were the people who really love this country."

Vander Plaats is the head of the Family Leader Foundation. If you are a Republican candidate for president, and you run afoul of Vander Plaats and his legions, you are not going to get out of Iowa alive. They shake the hay with more enthusiasm, they bang their Bibles more vigorously than just about any group of people anywhere in the country, and they control the caucus process, if anyone does. Which is why the seven people who want to be president were sitting there at the table behind papier mache autumn leaves with Frank Luntz sitting in the Daddy chair at the end, and feeding them a series of questions that included the following:

"Where was god on 9/11?"

"When was the last time you cursed god?"

(I have to say that when Rick Santorum was asked this question, he gave a touching–and deeply honest–account of the death of his infant son, Gabriel, and how that had come to shake his faith. No joke. It was authentically moving.)

And…

"Is there anything you can tell me that would help me deal with this loss [of his father, in 1996]?"

And, at the beginning, when the gathering was disrupted several times by immigration rights protesters, Mike Huckabee took advantage of the situation to remind people that this never happens at liberal gatherings, as though the Republican party wasn't the breeding ground in which the very concept of ratfcking was born, and as though there weren't all those patriots showing up at events early in the president's term with questions about health care reform and automatic weapons. But the whole point, according to Luntz and the other folks at table, was to demonstrate Christian civility in the campaign, and to show those showboating Leninists at CNBC how to run a political discussion.

(And if you have any doubts that the CNBC crew has found a place of honor in the Great Hall of Conservative Paranoia, you would be disabused of them last night. Maria Bartiromo and John Harwood are hanging on the wall there now, right next to portraits of Saul Alinsky and Lois Lerner.)

There was unction in the extreme, and no little sanctimony, and the now very familiar recitation of the dystopian landscape created by eight years of the Obama Administration and of the nearly unstoppable acceleration of the handbasket taking the country to hell. The Savior was summoned on a number of occasions, not all of them relevant to his gospel mission on Earth. But the real meat on the Thanksgiving table got served up when Luntz wrenched the discussion away from sacred platitudes and into the realm of national security and foreign affairs. The clouds of incense were dispersed. The preacher masks all dropped. To a person, the seven Republican candidates came right up to the edge of accusing the president of the United States of treason and of being in sympathy with the murderers in France and in Mali. Right up to the edge, they all walked. Then they winked and took baby steps back, but everybody in the hall, all of the good Christians who'd come out in the snow, got the message.

They all signed onto the conservative talking point with the dumbest ass of all–that the president refuses to say the magic words, "radical Islamic extremism." (All of them were unanimous that "political correctness" was now not merely a nuisance, but a clear and present danger to national security.) Asked if Secretary of State John Kerry should resign over remarks he had made the other day comparing the attacks in Paris to the murders at Charlie Hebdo, Mike Huckabee replied, "I'd like Barack Obama to resign if he's not going to protect Americans, but rather respect Islam." Carson called the president an "armchair quarterback who is interfering tremendously" with the military in its efforts to roll back Daesh. After warning us of the rising Islamic caliphate, Santorum said, "We have a president who won't even call ISIS 'Islamic.' Nor will he even identify them as a state. This is delusional, and it's costing lives."

"The deeper problem," said Marco Rubio, "is that the president will not recognize this for what it is. This is a civilizational struggle between those of us who believe in freedom and liberty and radical jihadists."

(Why? Everybody in the hall knew why. Somewhere, the real birth certificate is still out there calling, calling.)

The worst of them, predictably, was Ted Cruz, whose code was easiest to break. "Barack Obama isn't an armchair quarterback," Cruz said. "It's worse than that. The policies he's advancing are helping the other team." Asked by Luntz what the president's motivation might be, Cruz replied, "Look, I am neither a psychologist nor a priest."

(He didn't have to say anything. Most of the crowd knew already.)

"What I will say is, look, this is a president who, on the national stage, said he doesn't have time for American leadership or America winning. I gotta say FDR, JFK and Ronald Reagan were rolling over in their graves at a president saying he doesn't have time for America winning."

(Like so much of what the Tailgunner says, this is a nearly obscene mischaracterization of what the president actually said. He was talking about not having time for phony slogans about "America winning" of the kind out of which the Tailgunner has made an entire political career.)

Cruz wasn't finished yet. "It's important to understand, number one, that President Obama today is serving as an apologist for radical Islamic terrorism. Now, what does an apologist mean, because you're right, that is a serious charge. An apologist is someone who gives a rationalization, a justification, tries to explain it. I remember last year I was at the National Prayer Breakfast, and it was the day after, you'll recall, the Jordanian pilot was lit on fire by ISIS. And President Obama stood in front of the National Prayer Breakfast and said, well, yes, ISIS has done some terrible things, but Christians and Jews have also done some bad things. And then he invokes the Crusades and the Inquisition. Now, last I checked, both of those ended hundreds and hundreds of years ago. I don't think it's asking too much to ask the president to stay in the current millennium. And that is exactly the argument the terrorists make."

This is gamey, awful stuff, reminiscent of the charges back in the 1950s that Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist dupe. But this kind of thing is thoroughly mainstreamed now, so much so that they don't even have to say it outright any more. It's been a long time since it was considered cricket to discuss a sitting president in terms like this in a political campaign but, as has been the case since 2009, the usual rules do not apply to this president, and this campaign is nowhere near as ugly as it's going to get. It changed over the last two weeks, and all of the well-dressed friends of Jesus at the Thanksgiving table there on stage have declared themselves along for the whole damn ride.

Correction: Maria Bartitomo now works at the Fox Business Channel, not at CNBC. I meant to say Rick Santelli. In the dim light of the Great Hall of Conservative Paranoia, their portraits looked alike.

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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