You have to enjoy this part, though:



“There are two main objectives heading into 2014 — we have to expand the freedom caucus in the House and Senate, but we also have to protect the champions that have been repopulating the GOP over the past few years,” wrote FreedomWorks spokeswoman Jackie Bodnar in an email.

The freedom caucus. Yep, that's what they call themselves. We were all wondering, post-Bush, what conservatism would be re-branding itself into in order to distance itself from the globe-spanning car wrecks that were the result of implementing actual conservative ideas (oh, for the days when a deregulated Enron was the biggest fiasco, instead of ... all the others). It turned out that what The Movement decided it needed was to become aggressively dumber—see Ted Cruz, Louie Gohmert, Steve Stockman, Michele B—oh, hell, see the whole damn party—coupled with branding efforts so intentionally vague and abstract (Freedom! We like it!) that they make everyone from ye olde fiasco days look like rocket scientists in comparison.

When this all finally goes belly-up—when America finally decides that no, electing hard-shouting nimrods was not, as it turned out, the best way to gubbern a nation—I wonder what will come next. Do you suppose the large conservative PACs will then start branding themselves as Smart Folks, again? Will they start promoting technocratic wags, a new generation of branded-as-clever conservatives that do not mention the current generation any more than the current generation mentions the last? It seems farfetched, but I don't think any of us expected the movement reaction to the Bush years to be "You know what we need more of, in this movement? Mean-spirited imbeciles." The scrubbing on that one will have to be a spectacular effort.

