(Above: This clip of Paul Begala calling for bombing Moscow defines the word "unhinged.")

The word "unhinged," which means "mentally deranged" is a rather unusual one. People don't normally refer to sane people as "hinged." So why do they say the opposite?

Whatever the reason, the term is catching on among conservative Republicans to describe liberal Democrats who have become so obsessed with President Trump that they seem to lose all connection to reality.

North Carolina-based political consultant Rick Shaftan tells me that the term crops up frequently in open-ended polling he does for various conservative candidates in the South.

"The word 'unhinged' started showing up in the polls," said Shaftan, who is formerly of Sparta.

Shaftan said he was unaware of any professional campaign to link the word to the anti-Trumpers.

"This is organic," he said.

The adjective seems to fit the phenomenon. I saw that the other day when I was talking with several of my liberal-leaning friends about what you might call "the impeachment pitch of the week."

That's the revelation that Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting with a Russian lawyer during which he was hoping to hear some dirt on the Hillary Clinton campaign. In fact, lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya gave The Donald Jr. a pitch for her pet cause, which is restoring the system for letting Americans adopt Russian children.

But it's the thought that counts, at least to the left. A consortium of three liberal advocacy groups filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission charging the Trump campaign "violated the ban on knowingly soliciting a contribution from a foreign national by arranging and attending a meeting to request and accept what he understood to be a valuable in-kind contribution to his father's presidential campaign in the form of opposition research on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government."

This is the meme going around in liberal circles. But it is obvious nonsense.

The right to gather information is protected by the First Amendment, regardless of who provides that information. UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, who is a leading expert on the First Amendment, made that point in his Volokh Conspiracy blog on the Washington Post website:

"If the Hillary Clinton campaign had reason to think that, say, the British government had 'very high level and sensitive information' showing serious misbehavior by Trump, I think it would have had every right to get that information and see if it should be put before the American people as evidence that Trump shouldn't be elected," he wrote. "Limiting candidates' ability to expose their opponents' misbehavior would violate the First Amendment."

Volokh went on to note that the statute in question applies not to foreign governments but to all foreigners. Under the interpretation the anti-Trumpers seek, no member of a campaign could seek information from any foreign national, Russian, British, Canadian or Fijian.

Now, that's unhinged. Yet I have had conversations with several of my otherwise sane friends anti-Trumper friends in which they insist that criminal charges and possibly impeachment are just around the corner.

In reality, this is just the latest in a series of non-scandal scandals concerning the Trump administration. Remember how you felt when you heard reports that the President had disclosed classified information in that White House chat with the Russkies?

To hear the breathless accounts in the media, impeachment was just around the corner then as well. But that scoop fell apart little by little as it was revealed that the president has the power to declassify anything he wants.

We're seeing that again. Once again the anti-Trumpers are pinning their hopes on impeachment. And once again they're overlooking the rather obvious fact that Trump's fellow Republicans control Congress and are not going to remove him from office over a meeting with someone whose name no one can pronounce.

I would characterize this never-ending hope of impeachment as "unhinged" but I figured I'd run that by language expert Ben Zimmer.

Zimmer, who is the Wall Street Journal language columnist, also has a thorough grounding in politics thanks to following the career of his father Dick, a former Republican congressman from Hunterdon County. When I asked him about "unhinged," Zimmer said the term was used extensively against Trump during the campaign.

"If you look at who was getting called 'unhinged' during the campaign, he got called that a lot," said Zimmer.

Now his supporters seem to have turned the word back on his opponents, Zimmer said.

"They're sort of using the other side's words against them," he said.

"So there's a lot of unhingement going around," I said. "Is that a word?"

"It is now," he replied.

And a quite useful one, I'd say.

PLUS: As is always the case with these media-hyped attacks on Trump, the real story comes out eventually and is an embarrassment to the pack journalists who fall for these attacks.

In this case, the full story on the charges of "collusion" has to include the mysterious consulting firm Fusion GPS, which was reportedly behind that "golden showers" dossier that inaccurately accused Trump of all sorts of bad things he supposedly did with the Russians.

The website Heavy has a good summary of what that firm has been up to:

"Fusion GPS was behind the colorful and controversial Christopher Steele dossier that emerged as one of the most bizarre moments in an already bizarre presidential campaign. The dossier contained a listing of unverified, almost unspeakable allegations about President Donald Trump, and it emerged in news reports on January 10, 2017, just 10 days before Trump was inaugurated as president."

Also check the famed Publius Tacitus for a complete rundown of the players in this sorry saga. (Warning: This gets so complex that it takes a couple hours to get a good idea of the background.)

And then there's that fake-news story that's being peddled by the media stating that 17 intelligence agencies confirmed Russian meddling in the election.

Scott Ritter is the former weapons inspector best known for warning that the claims of "weapons of mass destruction" leading to the 2003 Iraq War were false.

Here's his piece in the American Conservative on what really happened. This report was rushed through a hand-picked panel from three agencies without the normal checks and balances.

And finally there is uber-conservative Pat Buchanan putting an end to the silly notion that Putin is somehow an enemy of the United States:

"His cooperation is crucial to the peace of the world, the freedom of the Baltic States, an end to the Syrian civil war, tranquility in the Persian Gulf, and solving the North Korean crisis.

"While our tectonic plates may rub against one another, we are natural allies. The Russia of Tolstoy, Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn and the Orthodox Church belongs with the West."

If Russia's not our enemy, then this whole "scandal" goes away.

Bring on the next "scandal" please.