Really. I mean it. Former Reagan speechwriter, and erstwhile dolphin trainer^* Peggy Noonan, a right winger through and through, just called the religious right a bunch of idiots.

She was writing about Romney’s “Mormon” speech, and talks about “a particular fundamentalist strain within evangelical Protestantism”, and she finishes with this:

There was one significant mistake in the speech. I do not know why Romney did not include nonbelievers in his moving portrait of the great American family. We were founded by believing Christians^†, but soon enough Jeremiah Johnson, and the old proud agnostic mountain men, and the village atheist, and the Brahmin doubter, were there, and they too are part of us, part of this wonderful thing we have. Why did Mr. Romney not do the obvious thing and include them? My guess: It would have been reported, and some idiots would have seen it and been offended that this Romney character likes to laud atheists. And he would have lost the idiot vote.

My feeling is we’ve bowed too far to the idiots. This is true in politics, journalism, and just about everything else.

Emphasis mine.

This, I think is illustrative of the divide between the Wall Street Republicans and the Talibaptists.

They don’t like each other. They don’t support each other. They just find the other side useful, and Noonan illustrates, as does the Club for Growth going after Huckabee, that there are strains in this relationship.

^*She once wrote that Elian Gonzalez was saved from drowning by divinely inspired porpoises.
^†Actually, not true, and many of the founding fathers would have been offended by this. They considered themselves spiritual, not religious. Many were deists, and a number, John Adams comes to mind, found religion to be an affront to what they saw as the divine. They thought that it was a con game, used to enrich and empower the falsely pious.