Fallout from this Katherine Harris to-do: In a political "movement" populated by crooks and loons, how do we distinguish genuine certifiables?

The under-cover report from our intrepid South Florida operatives Sadie and Sophie on their journey down I-95 into the heart of metaphorical revival-tent darkness, where they got to hear Katherine Harris talking about hearing voices, is one of those things that's going to happen when you let a major political party be taken over entirely by people whose views are so extreme and irrational, you have to describe them as "nuts." How do you then distinguish those among them who are literally, clinically cuckoo?

Oh, sometimes it's easy. It has seemed pretty clear to me for a long time now, for example, that our one and only Veep has long since slipped from the darkness of evil into the deeper darkness of dementia (though if you play your cards right, you don't have to choose between darknesses)--and I mean eons before we had our new image of him stumbling drunk out of a car to shoot little birds planted on the ground for him, then managing to shoot up his "hunting" buddy, then stonewalling the authorities and finally making the victim apologize for getting shot.

No, our Dick's brain must surely have turned to porridge years before that, and I was pleased to hear Rachel Maddow voice the (surely inescapable) suspicion that it's the only explanation for his Face the Nation appearance Sunday, when Bob Schieffer confronted him with a series of his screamingly nutty observations about Iraq, and he slithered around the question by saying that they had all been basically correct.

So mark Dick the Veep down as an open-and-shut case (though where, you have to wonder, are the little men in the white coats with the butterfly nets?). As opposed to, say, "Dapper Don" Rumsfeld, who while surely "nuts" in the ordinary political sense, seems more of a garden-variety war criminal. Okay, maybe "garden-variety" is unfair. The problem is that there doesn't seem any prospect of war-crimes trials that would enable us to appreciate the true stature of his war crimes.

Now, in the matter of our Katherine, I have to say it does sound as if the dear girl has slipped her moorings.

Personally, I kind of stop sifting so carefully through the evidence as soon as I hear about the "hearing voices" thing, especially with the strong suggestion that one or more of those voices may belong to God. This for me is close to a near-clincher.

Nevertheless, there are circles today where being spoken to by God is taken as a sign of higher consciousness or spirituality. Plus I always expect to hear someone bark, "Well, what about Joan of Arc? Huh? Huh?"

True, I doubt that anyone in the American Christian Right has any idea who Joan of Arc was. I guess I would have to say, though, that while the difference isn't so easy to put into words, if you were to do a lineup of people who claim to have heard from God, you were to include George W. Bush and Katherine Harris and Joan of Arc, well, I don't think you'd have that tough a time telling the difference.

K