Here’s how the people disrupting town hall meetings look to “David T” at the center left British blog Harry’s Place: Nutterdom on the U.S. Right.

Believe me, we’ve been here in the U.K. This is pretty much the sort of lunacy that we saw in the Labour Party during 19 long years of opposition, the low point of which was the 1983 election: in which Labour sought to return to No. 10 on a platform of unilateral disarmament that was premised upon the mistaken notion that the U.S.S.R. was a benign entity with only pacific ambitions. I suspect we’re going to see a little bit of this again, after next year’s election. I’m braced for it.

The thing is: moderate Republicans should NEVER have allowed their party to get to the state it is in now. I don’t know how they did.

What does this make me think about the U.S. Right?

Well, if a moderate Republican like Mike Castle - a descendant of Benjamin Franklin - is treated like this, it makes me think that the party is in a shambles, has no ability to control its base, and is unelectable.

Alternatively - and this is worse - the Republican leadership actually believes that rattling on about birth certificates, combined with a platform of creationism and gay bashing is an electoral winner. What that means is that there is no home for moderates (i.e. non mad people) in the Republican Party.

Parties win elections when they define the mainstream, and then occupy it. If the Republican Party genuinely believes that a citizens’ army of wild eyed Pledge of Allegiance chanters will ever represent the centre ground, they’re lost.