I don't care how burnt out you are on the primaries, you have to read this article on the Huffington Post: "Dunkin Donuts Pulls Ad Featuring Rachael Ray in a Scarf That Looks Too Arab." (It's also available on more "objective" news sites, but HuffPost has better quotes.)

What happened was this: in her latest commercial for Dunkin Donuts, Rachael Ray, the perky Food Network hostess, wore a black-and-white paisley scarf with a fringe. Which Michelle Malkin of the Fox Network, one of the leading right-wing pundits of the moment, denounced as looking like a Bedouin scarf, "a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos." Then, rather than ignoring this as an egregiously stupid remark, a small army of conservative bloggers actually picked it up and passed it around, seeing it as evidence of some sort of left-wing "hate couture" (Malkin's words, frequently repeated) in which Dunkin Donuts (whose customers, you'll recall, have been claimed by the Clinton campaign) was participating. The management of the donut company then pulled the ad from the air, which tells you everything you need to know about modern American corporate management.

Obviously Malkin's point can be torn apart at many levels. Sure, you can see Bedouin scarves on "beheading videos," but we're not fighting all Bedouins. You may as well declare corded wool sweaters a symbol of terrorism because so many IRA members wear them. And it wasn't even an Arab design, it was paisley. Paisley! But what's really worth pointing out here is that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of conservatives felt that this idiocy was worth getting upset about—or at least pretending to get upset about. Many of them even threatened a massive boycott of Dunkin Donuts. A boycott, a concerted public show of unity, because Rachael Ray wore a paisley scarf.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the failings of the first Bush administration, the American right wing has depended increasingly on its self-declared, phony "culture wars," stirring up resentment against Democrats, liberals, elitists, and a vaguely defined "media" to distract from its grotesque failings in domestic policy and foreign affairs. The killer catch with such strategies is that they dig deeper and deeper holes for themselves. As they fail to address Americans' real concerns and articulate any sort of vision for the future, "outrage conservatives" are forced to dig ever more desperately for the next cultural symbol to whip up anger over. And they ultimately, always hit the point at which they look petty, delusional, and just downright stupid. It happened to the pro-fascist right in the '30s and to the John Birchers in the '60s. It's happening, frequently and increasingly, to the terrorist-obsessed, pro-Bush neocons now.

Once they've reached this point, it's over. They lose the power to put their opponents on the defensive. They drive away more and more of the reasonable members of their own coalition. And they drag the more moderate elements of the Republican Party down with them. Eventually the GOP will refocus and regroup and wait for us to become disappointed with the Democrats. But it won't be this year.

If you need more evidence of the way the strategy leads the party mainstream to self-destruct, check out this article about the "Days Since Obama Has Visited Iraq" counter on the website of the Republican National Committee. Two-thirds of Americans want us to out of Iraq, and they're staking their effort to keep the White House on trying to generate smarmy indignation at the probable Democratic nominee for not going there to see why we should stay in.

What madness. What wonderful, encouraging madness.