The prevailing political mood in America is peeved to an unprecedented degree and frightfully reckless.
Our nation faces two grave political dangers. One is the utter dysfunction of politics as usual. The other is the overcompensation many on the right embrace as a remedy.
Last week a poll from NBC and the Wall Street Journal showed a powerful lead for the rank-outsider contingent in the Republican presidential primary.
Dr. Ben Carson, a political novice and nutritional-supplement pitch man and brain surgeon who wants to do away with Medicare and was reported on Friday to have fabricated his acceptance to West Point, leads with 29 percent.
Donald Trump, a celebrity egomaniac who says he'll work well with Vladimir Putin because he and the Russian leader drove good ratings in separate segments for 60 Minutes in late September, is second at 23 percent.
U.S. Ted Cruz, who was so impractically extreme about shutting down the government that mild-mannered John Boozman got furious at him in a Republican conference, is at 10 percent.
Carly Fiorina, who ran a business into trouble, is at 3 percent. Rand Paul, who makes his libertarian dad seem jolly and moderate, is at 2 percent.
All of that adds to 67 percent. Two of three Republican poll respondents currently favor the odd, the zany, the mercurial, the extreme, the ominous and the disastrous.
Among mainstream establishment insiders, Marco Rubio got 11 percent, Jeb Bush 8, John Kasich 3 and Chris Christie 3. That's 25 percent for the sane, or the normal, to the extent Christie could be called that.
I assign 3 percent to "other." That's Mike Huckabee's showing. I do not know what he is anymore.
Some people tell me: Pay no attention to poll numbers at this point; they are abstract and vague, having nothing to do with the specific state contests for delegates that will matter next year.
Poll respondents are merely venting without consequence, they tell me. Normalcy will settle in by actual voting time, as it always does, they tell me.
Their key phrase: "As it always does."
I see a real prospect that the current mood is such on the impractical right that the way they've always done it is not the way they'll do it this time.
Voting takes place in Iowa inside 90 days and in New Hampshire inside a hundred. Carson leads Iowa. Trump leads New Hampshire.
The once-designated establishment fallback option--Bush--is inept, in a free fall, talking about giving warm kisses to Democrats and brandishing a desperate new slogan about how he'll "fix it."
The establishment option to Bush--Rubio--is described as being on fire in the polls. Actually, he's risen barely to double figures. Now people are looking at his ethically dubious mismanagement of personal finances.
Kasich is a social moderate, which means he is hopeless in a Republican primary dominated by fanatics.
And Christie is surely still troubled by that bridge debacle.
If it's actual voting evidence you want, consider: In a smattering of off-year elections last week, the angry outsiders of the right wing did more than vent. They voted.
They prevailed.
Kentucky elected a Tea Party Republican governor who embraced Kim Davis, the gay-discriminating and law-defying county clerk. The governor-elect wants to undo the state's successful Medicaid expansion.
In Houston, voters repealed by 62-38 an anti-gay-discrimination ordinance passed by the city council. They did so primarily because of fear that male weirdos would spend all their time gawking in girls' bathrooms. The transgender issue rises as the gay issue settles.
In Mississippi, voters overwhelmingly rejected an initiative to amend the state constitution to allow court review of whether the state legislature is funding public education adequately.
So I'm not sensing as yet the supposedly inevitable fade by angry outsiders who want to blow up the current state of affairs.
What I do see is similar outside disaffection among liberals and Democrats that provides fuel for the socialist, Bernie Sanders.
But now Hillary Clinton seems to have righted her ship and gained polling traction.
And do you know why? Here's what I theorize: The abusive nonsense that the House committee on Benghazi inflicted on her for 11 hours into the night made her seem the victim of a classically distressing episode of politics at its most usual and of Washington at its most ridiculous.
She became the outsider, thus golden.
That reminds me of what an incisive fellow said last week: If the Republican presidential candidates genuinely seek more substantive debate, as they say, then let them get grilled for 11 hours by Democrats looking at their emails.
Let's start with Carson, who only thought the CNBC debate moderators were tough.
------------v------------
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/08/2015