How is it that these people didn’t bat an eyelash at eight years of the Daffy-Fudd Reichstag barbecue, but go batshit crazy in less than a year of Obama-Biden? I’ll bet the Secret Service has given up drinking coffee and is horning lines of Ethiopian hararrharrarhar right off the counter at Starbucks.

I lived in Arizona, briefly, back in 1980, and had the same handgun I do today — a Smith & Wesson Model 19 Combat Magnum — but my mild hippie-anarchist gun-nuttery didn’t prepare me for seeing a motorcycle gangster roaring down the road with an assault rifle slung over one shoulder. Or a line of greasy-spoon stools bearing rednecks wearing holstered pistols.

If I recall correctly, back then you could wear a sidearm or fetch a long gun pretty much anywhere in Arizona, barring banks, bars and liquor stores. But I don’t recall anyone fetching one to a Ronald Reagan rally. We had to wait until 1981 and the nation’s capital for that, when John Hinckley Jr. punched a few .22-caliber holes in the prez, press secretary James Brady, DC police officer Thomas Delahanty and SS agent Timothy McCarthy.

I remember folks being somewhat upset over the idea that a crazy fucker with a gun might have the audacity to shoot a president. I guess times have changed.

Adolf Saddam Hussein Obama has a 1,200-word op-ed in The New York Times, and Steve Benen at Political Animal found a keeper in there: “No one in America should go broke because they get sick.”

Truer words, etc. And who among us are the most vulnerable? Just look at the pix of these tinfoil-beanie tea-baggers and tell me they won’t lose their single-wides, their rusty F-150s and their beloved three-legged hounds to bankruptcy without affordable health care. Obesity, illiteracy, ignorance and insanity are all treatable ailments, if not rejected for coverage as pre-existing conditions.

Congenital idiocy, alas, we shall have with us always. Until Adolf gets his death panels, of course. Then we can set about vigorously chlorinating the gene pool.