Posted 8:26 AM by Scoobie Davis

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Harold Meyerson, "When Your Base is Nuts":

How did the Republican Party become at once so insular and unmoored that winning its presidential nod requires an extremism that would give Barry Goldwater the creeps? Many are responsible for the Republicans' descent into madness, but pride of place surely goes to Fox News chair Roger Ailes, the onetime Nixon aide who created a counterfactual network that in turn helped create a counterfactual Republican Party. Ailes, we now learn from a recent article in New York Magazine, despairs over the current crop of Republican candidates, but he has no one more to blame than himself for driving more electable Republicans from the race. The man who gave Palin (as well as Huckabee, Santorum, and Gingrich) a regular gig at Fox, according to one Republican close to Ailes who's quoted in the article, now thinks "Palin is an idiot. He thinks she's stupid."

But take a bow, Roger; that's the Republican field you've built.