One unfortunate factor that exacerbated the tendency to dismiss all critics of Barack Obama as kooks: the many right wing bloggers who did act like kooks, enthusiastically and relentlessly promoting stories like the birth certificate nonsense, the “Michelle Obama ‘whitey’ tape,” the “Obama is the love child of Malcolm X” rubbish, and countless other insane and/or stupid smears. The damage they did (and are still doing, in some cases) to the center-right blogosphere was enormous; when some of the loudest voices are screaming gibberish, they drown out everyone else and tar the whole group by association.

The bell curve meets Gresham’s Law: the people at the four to six sigma tail on either end of the political bell curve tend to make up for small numbers with loud voices, and their political views tend to drive sane discourse out of the public marketplace, just like bad money drives good out of circulation.