Via Conor Friedersdorf, the latest field demonstration that fools and their money are soon parted a stirring call to arms from Michael Reagan that will no doubt rally the hosts of righteousness against the Marxist Mohammedan menace of Obamataucracy.

Okay, TAC readers, help me out if you would. Obviously the Fairness Doctrine is a horrible idea and we should be glad to be rid of it. It’s certainly possible that I missed something, but I did at least put in a fair number of hours trying to pay reasonably close attention to the 2008 election, and did so going all the way back to the last cycle. I don’t recall ever hearing a serious Democratic contender for president advocating the Fairness Doctrine. A quick look through the affairs of the President-elect and his transition team doesn’t turn up any trace of a hint of a soupcon of evidence that President Obama is going to burn through political capital that could be spent on (presumably) a guaranteed-to-fail-spectacularly bailout of whichever industry goes belly up next.

True, members of the Congressional party occasionally make noises about it, but the last time anybody tried to move legislation on the issue was Rep. Louise Slaughter’s 2005 bill that died quietly in committee. The Democrats have already controlled Congress for two years. If they were really the wild-eyed Bolshevik fanatics the Human Events crowd seems genuinely to believe they are, somebody in the Democratic caucus would have made some sort of move to bring back the Fairness Doctrine in the 110th Congress. It didn’t happen. And being a consumer of a fair amount of left-wing as well as right-wing media, I promise that the best thing to do in case you become convinced that there is a major grassroots push on the left to reimpose the Fairness Doctrine, is seek out a well-recommended therapist.

So as far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of suggestions that a restoration of the Fairness Doctrine is in the offing come from right wing bloggers and talkers and writers who write as poorly as radio talkers talk.

Which raises the question, just what the hell is going on?

Has some significant proportion of the conservative vanguard suffered a mass nervous breakdown? Is the whole hysterical farce a deliberate swindle aimed at redistributing the wealth of unfortunate gullible people? Some third option? Or some middle ground between the two? (And while we’re laying everything on the table, can we have a little heart-to-heart about the Fairness Doctrine? Unconstitutional, silly, and counterproductive for any worthwhile liberal or conservative goals as it obviously is, we’re not talking about some sort of Enabling Act. Rush Limbaugh would get hurt because Rush Limbaugh broadcasts on ABC. But — let’s be real — anybody who voluntarily spends a lot of his or her time watching network television and listening to network radio has much more significant problems than having to suffer through some liberal do-gooder delivering a primetime PSA. There are abundant and vastly better ways to waste one’s life watching TV, if one so chooses.)

Conor says that conservatives’ activist resources could be put to better uses than fighting against a bill that won’t be proposed and would be a guaranteed loser if it were proposed if for no other reason than the number of Democratic legislators in the pockets of media distributors. He’s right of course, and I assume the way forward is clear:

Conservatives, what you must now devote all your energy to — as if your life depended on it, because in a way, it really does — is mobilization on behalf of the greatest American in history — nay, the eternal Platonic form of the Great American — Senator Joe “Mumbly Scold” Lieberman, who currently faces perhaps the most devastating trauma ever endured by man, namely losing gavelling privileges in a Senate committee he cares about so much he used those privileges to hold fewer than one hearing into Bush administration corruption over a two year span that didn’t exactly want for evidence of executive branch malfeasance. If Lieberman suffers a minor demotion in a political party he feels is populated by Communists, defeatists, traitors, and assorted other internal enemies, it would be like 9/11 all over again; and if the Liebercaust is coupled with a re-imposition of the Fairness Doctrine — why then, my friends, it would be exactly like we were living in Stalinist Russia. That is, if Stalin had tried to install Sharia law.

These are of course not just idle or academic musings. Inauguration Day is still more than two months away and there are already clear signs that there will be plenty to dislike about the agenda of the incoming administration. Somebody is going to have to be the opposition. Meanwhile, the opposition has taken to occupying its time chasing down imaginary Kenyan birth certificates, riffling through the Faculty directories at Chicago, Columbia, Yale, and Harvard looking for menacingly middle-Eastern names to drag through the mud for no reason at all, and, as above, at least somewhat willfully hallucinating a Democratic policy agenda for fun, profit, and avoidance of the responsibility to dwell in reality and attend to boringly existent problems. And that’s just a survey of some of the more respectable quarters of the world of pro-GOP opinion.

Look, I live in England now; does everybody have a Plan B in case America just stays broken?

After all, there has got to be a backup plan, hasn’t there? That is, something besides hosting colloquia on cruise ships to discuss how unfairly Sarah Palin was treated. And pace everybody at National Review with no immediate plans to flee for higher ground, advocating the same terrible policies with the same voter-repellent rhetoric by means of the same self-degrading tactics as before, only doing so faster, more loudly, with less regard for facts, and in general doubling and then redoubling efforts to be as thoroughly off-putting and loathsome as humanly possible to anyone not already dwelling under the shrinking tent, is not an option — except in the sense that it is what the conservative movement will opt for.