It's the "until just about now" part of that sentence that puzzles. Suggests that someone or some entity or force now wants individuals of the world to notice just how and why the various factions of the GOP "function."

I'm gonna let that one go for now, as Dr. K. seems to have only recently come around to the necessity of using his bully pulpit for political discourse. Many people, especially veterans of the blogs, saw reason go out the window more than a decade ago. He's just now getting off the fence he has tried hard to straddle, in earnest.

If Paul said this to me in person, I'd be looking at him like this:

I also don't get his implicit assumption that there is only one unreasonable party. I think we have more than one; that's why most people in the US don't belong to either party.

The powers that be really want Romney in there. I think Santorum and Gingrich are in on it. Their role is to be so unbelievably awful that you will think Romney looks reasonable in comparison. To the rest of the country, it will be a relief if Santorum doesn't get the nomination. Same with Gingrich.

Didn't you wonder why it is that Gingrich is still in this race? He's had funding problems, staff resignations, he hasn't been able to get on the ballot in some states. He should have given up by now and yet, there he is at every debate. He's the evil villain and Santorum is the holy villain. But they're both villains and in comparison, a Mormon business guy doesn't look so bad. Seriously, Santorum makes Romney's Mormonism look like no big deal.

Courtesy of Ms. Avedon:

And I thought: wait a second...Krugman is openly declaring that Heritage Foundation health care policy, the policy that flowed from those same insane, pumpkin-shooting Republicans in the 1990s, is an "achievement."

The argument in elite, big-D Democratic circles seems to be that the scary Republicans are scarier than ever before, so scary, with their Tea Party and their conservative media, that they make the Republicans of the late 1990s look reasonable.

So reasonable, in fact, that conservative Republican policies from the late 1990s, policies that are completely at odds with the philosophy of the New Deal, a functioning government, a federal state that doesn't spy on anybody it feels like, and a free and fair market for everybody, policies that reject everything that movement liberals stand for are now considered to be "achievements" when enacted into law by today's centrist Democrats.

Now, if you think about it, that is, itself, quite detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality. And, it was not always thus.

But it does seem to be the argument that national Democrats are using to win over people like Dr. Krugman.

How could it be that the passage of policy identical in all important respects to conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation's, policy we movement liberals would have recognized in 1998 as an obviously, deeply unpopular non-solution, the product of bankrupt ideological premises regarding the superiority of "markets", certain to bring tragic consequences to the people of our country, and discredit to the party which promoted it, how could this be ever be rationally called an "achievement?"

It can't be. Not unless one jumps through extraordinary intellectual hoops to rationalize voting for a Democratic politician whose own "signature achievement" is Mitt Romney's health care policy.

And that's what this line is about, folks. We movement liberals are being told from on high that the reason why centrist Democrats' failures are actually achievements...is because the Republicans of today are super-scary.

And that's just not true. The movement conservatives are just as frighteningly wrong today as when Ann Coulter became a millionaire writing a book entitled "Godless" about liberals, and when Ramesh Ponnuru wrote "The Party of Death" about Democrats a few years ago. Quote-unquote "market-oriented" policies from the 1990s and 2000s are just as bad for America today as they were back when the majority of Democrats actually opposed them, instead of arm-twisting "progressive caucus" members into shilling for them.

So when you hear this line, that Republicans of today are like Congressional Ahmadinejads because they won't vote for Newt Gingrich's old agenda when it's proposed by Democrats, just remember: it's pretty likely that you're going to read Dem-leaning pundits in the Washington Post consider how reasonable Newt Gingrich's old agenda actually is, compared to the new Newt Gingrich's agenda.

And then ask yourself: is the political price that you're being asked to pay to protect yourself from these terrifying new Tea Party-style Republicans that you now have to vote for old, Dan Burton-style Republicans' agenda, and...

...what did FDR say about "fear itself"?

The only difference is that the Democrats want what the Republicans have -- blind obedience and massive cash cushions -- without being accountable to the electorate they mostly now see as a PR problem.