Charles Pierce wonders why Democrats refuse to call batsh%$ insane Republicans batsh%$ insane:

Back in 2010, as part of a biannual act of madness by which the magazine endeavors to analyze every congressional race in the country, I had occasion to talk to Tarryl Clark, who was challenging Michele Bachmann on behalf of the splendidly name Democratic Farmer-Labor Party for Bachmann’s job in Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District. How, I asked Clark, does one make good use of the rich trove of lunacy that is Bachmann’s entire public career.

“Well,” Clark told me. “I’m not going to call her crazy, if that’s what you mean.”

In fact, that was exactly what I meant.

The great failing of the Democratic party over the past three-and-a-half decades has been the party’s failure to take political advantage of the obvious prion disease that has afflicted the Republican party since it first ate all the monkey-brains in the mid-1970’s. ………

Seriously.

Michelle Bachmann, for example, got started on politics by opposing the Disney feature Aladdin (the one with Robin Williams) because she felt that it promulgated witchcraft.

The so-called expert political operatives in the Democratic Party seem to think that it is either unseemly, or perhaps unnecessary, to point out the complete insanity of many Republican candidates.

I guess that they think it’s a loser, but if it is, why the f%$# did Bachmann get elected for anything?

Not only does it not serve the Democratic party to ignore this mishugas, it ends up defining deviancy down, because silence is most certainly perceived as assent.

People need to remember Hubert Humphrey’s stirring speech at the 1964 Democratic convention, and its refrain, “But not Barry Goldwater,” put the final nail in the coffin of Goldwater’s campaign.

Calling out the crazy is both the right thing and the smart thing to do.