WASHINGTON, D.C.—It was a lively Thursday morning in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, a monument to one of the most monumentally shifty and polysyllabic power brokers in the history of the world's greatest deliberative body. (And also one of the most entertaining: Everett Dirksen, Republican of Illinois, moved heaven and earth throughout his career to try and get the marigold designated as the national flower.)

On the fifth floor, Dr. Ben Carson came before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs to discuss his nomination to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Meanwhile, four floors below, Rep. Mike Pompeo, Republican of Kansas, was chatting up the Senate Committee on Intelligence as regards his nomination to direct the CIA, an institution that has been somewhat in the news of late.

We'll get to what happened in the committees in a moment, but we should note that both Carson and Pompeo shared one attribute that was of great interest to the Democratic members of their respective committees, an attribute that keeps cropping up in the questioning of virtually all the members of the president-elect's proposed Cabinet, and one that is going to outlast this nomination process.

Both Carson and Pompeo are products of the Republican Party that is driven by the dark energy of movement conservatism. They are products of the post-Goldwater south-and-west power axis that has driven Republican politics ever since Harry Dent pointed out the glory road to Richard Nixon back in 1968. Even Carson, who is an elite neurosurgeon, and Pompeo, who graduated at the top of his class at West Point, have had to tailor their politics and their public personae to cater to the anti-rational, theocratic, anti-intellectual Id of modern conservatism—the creature that rose up from the swamp and elected itself a president this year. This means that both Carson and Pompeo have long histories of saying and writing things that sound like transmissions coming through their molars from Planet X.

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Which means that, now that they're being nominated for executive-branch positions that (theoretically) serve the entire nation, they essentially have to argue at their hearings that, yes, I said that nutty stuff then, but now that I'm working for All The American People, I will try to ignore the interplanetary signals as best I can.

For example, as Michelle Goldberg in Slate pointed out, and as we here at the shebeen have chronicled, Pompeo more than occasionally has fallen out of the crazy tree and hit every branch on his way to the ground. Goldberg pointed to a 2015 speech that Pompeo gave at a Bible-banging rally in Kansas. This is the guy who's going to be running one of what is allegedly one of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world.

To worship our lord and celebrate our nation at the same place is not only our right, it is our duty," he began. Pompeo's speech was a mishmash of domestic culture war callouts and dark warnings about the danger of radical Islam. He cited an inflammatory prayer that a pastor named the Rev. Joe Wright once delivered before the Kansas State Legislature: "America had worshipped other Gods and called it multiculturalism. We'd endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle." He lamented government efforts to "rip faith from our schools" and then segued immediately into a discussion of the jihadi threat: "This evil is all around us." Pompeo concluded by describing politics as "a never-ending struggle … until the rapture."

Well, I'm certainly comforted by the fact that our country's spooks are going to be supervised by a guy who believes that he's going to get wafted up to glory prior to the day that Jesus comes back and starts disemboweling people in the Middle East.

And the Collected Works of Ben Carson, who never has been elected to anything and is, therefore, a complete creature of the extremist right, are even fuller of chewy, wingnutty goodness, as Senator Sherrod Brown made clear in his opening statement.

BROWN: For those who cannot overcome the odds on their own, should we help them or not? Dr. Carson has repeatedly commented that government assistance programs are harmful. For example, he wrote that in the wake of the civil rights movement: "[R]acist people from both parties adopted a paternalistic attitude toward African-Americans and enacted federal and state programs designed to take care of people who couldn't take care of themselves – people who were ignorant, stupid, or just plain lazy." Why would they do this? To again quote Dr. Carson: "The only reason I can imagine that it would be a good idea for government to foster dependency in large groups of citizens is to cultivate a dependable voting bloc that will guarantee continued power as long as entitlements are provided." Dr. Carson has suggested that all assistance programs should be cut by 10 percent a year until the budget is balanced -- without exception and without regard to whether the population served is vulnerable. Even social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, which he believes are "socialist-leaning," should be subject to cuts… Since 1968, HUD has been charged with ensuring that all people – regardless of race, ethnicity, or whether they have a disability – have fair and equal access to housing and that its grantees "affirmatively further" this policy. Here too, Dr. Carson has been critical. In one of the few statements he has made on housing policy, he called into question more than four decades of civil rights law, and disparaged HUD's efforts to reduce segregation as "social-engineering schemes" designed to "legislate racial equality."

Ben Carson is a religious extremist. He has been one his entire career, and he has prospered outside of his area of expertise because the establishment institutions of modern conservatism have made being a religious extremist a profitable career choice. And now both of these men are being proposed as people who can lead their respective departments of government on behalf of all the people. This has required them to look either disingenuous or ridiculous in their performance before the Senate committees. There was no third choice for them.

To be fair, as far as I could tell, these issues came up only in passing when it came time for the committee members to question Carson and Pompeo, although Brown was fairly relentless about holding Carson to his previous statements about the evils of government paternalism, because, in his opening statement, Carson rather spectacularly asserted that he had been misinterpreted and misunderstood behind podiums all across America, both as a star on the conservative dinner circuit and as a presidential candidate.

CARSON: I do believe that government can play a very important role. I know that some have distorted what I have said about government but I believe government is important and it is there, I believe, to promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What has happened too often is that people who seemingly mean well have promoted things that do not encourage the development of innate talent.

These sentiments, to be completely charitable about it, are not intellectually consistent with what Ben Carson has told his admirers around the country during his time as a national figure. (Here is where we mention that Carson threw his prepared text to the four winds almost as soon as he sat down.) Then Senator Professor Warren's turn came, and she went all-in on the other Democratic strategy in these hearings.

First, make them own their own words, and then make them own El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago. She pressed Carson on what appeared to be the out-of-left-field question of whether or not he could guarantee that HUD money would not flow into the pockets of the president-elect or any of his avaricious spalpeens. Carson produced a cloud of banal squid ink.

CARSON: I can assure you that the things that I do are driven by a sense of morals and guides and, therefore, I will absolutely not play favorites for anyone.

It didn't work.

WARREN: Dr. Carson, let me stop you right there. I'm actually asking a more pointed question and it's not about your good faith. That's not my concern. My concern is for whether or not, among the billions of dollars that you will be responsible for handing out in grants and loans, can you just assure us that not one dollar will go to benefit either the president-elect or his family?

Carson got completely flummoxed, failed to give Warren a clear and unequivocal answer, and then produced this unexpected gem.

It will not be my intention to do anything that will benefit any American.

Oh, dear.

Where Carson had Warren, Pompeo had Ron Wyden of Oregon, who threw Pompeo's previous support for all of the extraconstitutional measures enacted under the Bush administration, with a special emphasis on unleashing the collection of metadata again, something that Pompeo pushed for when he was in Congress, back at him.

WYDEN: You would basically get the Congress and the country back in the business of collecting millions and millions of phone records…you also say in this op-ed that phone records ought to be combined with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive searchable database. So you would be in favor of a new law collecting all of this data of the personal lives of our people, and I think it would be helpful if you could start by saying are there any boundaries in your view to something this sweeping?

POMPEO: There would be boundaries. There are legal boundaries that exist today. I was talking about the U.S. government's ability to collect in a legal and lawful way foreign intelligence…Yes, I still stand behind commitment to keep America safe by conducting the lawful collection. The USA Freedom Act has changed it in fundamental ways. I understand the restrictions from the USA Freedom Act.

WYDEN: You wrote this op-ed after the passage of the law, so after the law passed, you said let's get back into the business of collecting all of this metadata, and I'm curious about what kind of information about finances and lifestyles would you not enter into your idea of this giant database.

POMPEO: As director of CIA, I can give you my assurance that we will not engage in unlawful activities, but I think this committee and the American people demand that if there's publicly available information that someone has out there on publicly available sites, I think we have the obligation to use that information to keep Americans safe, if someone has on their Facebook page information about an attack, I think people would find the director of the CIA and the intelligence community grossly negligent if they didn't collect that.

WYDEN: I take a back seat to nobody when it comes to keeping this country safe. You're talking about a whole new metadata system that is far more sweeping than anything that Congress indicated it would approve.

Of course, a lot of nominees have been passed after having said or written something that would make you wonder if they can do their jobs fairly. (This is not the same thing as having, say, Scott Pruitt at the EPA, or Andrew Puzder at Labor, whose entire public careers indicate they they don't believe in the fundamental missions of the institutions they're going to lead, nor is it the same thing as making Rick Perry Secretary of an Energy department that he wants to eliminate, even if he occasionally forgets what it's called.) When you have nominees with records of controversial pronouncements and writings, it's important that the country have faith that the president will be sufficiently informed and sufficiently in charge to rein in their wilder notions.

I think we need another plan this time, though.

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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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