Mind you, he said this in a swing state where the “Taliban candidate” is currently ahead by 18 points.

At a get-out-the-vote rally in Fairfax County, Moran said: “I mean, if the Republicans were running in Afghanistan, they’d be running on the Taliban ticket as far as I can see.”

Moran was talking about Republicans Robert F. McDonnell for governor, Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling and state Sen. Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, who is running for attorney general. By some accounts, the three represent the most conservative Republican ticket to run in Virginia in many years. Moran’s comments clearly were aimed to motivate Democratic voters to turn out on Tuesday and vote blue.

According to WAMU, McDonnell spokeswoman Crystal Cameron called Moran’s remarks “negative” and “vicious.”

Wikipedia has a nifty list of some of Moran’s greatest hits (literally!) in case you want to refresh your memory. This sort of demagogic vaudeville doesn’t bother me coming from Moran any more than it does coming from Teacups, so why bother linking it? For two reasons. One: GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx said something similarly stupid today about ObamaCare being a more dire threat to America than any terrorist, which should come as news to anyone who’s worried about, say, Iranian nukes. But count on the left to have a politically calculated panic attack over that, even while Moran’s casually dismissing Bob McDonnell as some sort of nascent Mullah Omar. And two: Matt Welch was totally right this morning when he called Jesse Walker’s piece about the paranoid style in center-left politics an essential read. I linked it a bunch of times when it first came out but Frank Rich’s self-parodic op-ed about GOP “Stalinists” yesterday and Moran’s babbling about the Taliban today gives me an excuse to link it again. The conservative revival that’s playing out right now in NY-23 isn’t just a story of grassroots activism, it’s a story of the almost literally unbelievable vilification of that activism that began with the DNC’s “angry mobs” ad, continued with Harry Reid’s coinage of “evilmongers” and lesser Democrats’ invocation of “political terrorists” to describe the townhall protesters, and lives on now with Frank Rich-type op-ed dreck. Prepare yourself for the predictable media reaction to a Hoffman win tomorrow by reading Walker’s piece. Like I say, it’s essential.