Fun fact: So unhinged has this guy been over the years in his criticism of political opponents that he was once accused of being “one fry short of a Happy Meal” by … Anthony Weiner. During his first stint in Congress, he called one of Ben Bernanke’s female advisors a “K Street whore,” sneered that Fox News was an enemy of America, said that letting Republicans control government is like letting Al Qaeda fly planes (he digs terrorism analogies), and most famously accused the GOP of wanting people to die quickly because they opposed the surefire, can’t-miss, liberal technocratic dreamscape of ObamaCare. In spite of it all — or rather, because of it all — he got reelected last year. And now, via David Freddoso, this:

From last night: Rep. @AlanGrayson and his $-raising email features burning cross that makes the "T" in "Tea Party." http://t.co/bBmmKEnsYc

— Dave Levinthal (@davelevinthal) October 22, 2013

The newsy part here isn’t that a sitting congressman would stoop to it. It’s par for the course for Grayson. The newsy part is that he chose to stick it in a fundraising e-mail to goose Democratic donors, which tells you where he thinks the party’s base is at. And he’s not the only sitting congressman to take a tack like this lately. Via Newsbusters, watch below as Steve Cohen casually reassures the MSNBC faithful that tea partiers are “domestic enemies” of the sort Cohen swore an oath to defend the Constitution against. Tom Friedman, while affirming that he doesn’t see the tea party as a terrorist group, nonetheless compared them to Hezbollah in his last column. Other lefties — all the way up to Rachel Maddow’s graphics department — have been having a renewed love affair with the concept of sedition over the past week in the wake of the government shutdown. It’s edifying to watch all of this play out side by side with concern-trolling about civility and bipartisanship as a solution to D.C.’s problems.

Update: Grayson’s not sorry, of course.

“Tea Party members have circulated countless altered pictures depicting President Obama and the First Lady as monkeys. Tea Party members also called my fellow Member of Congress, civil rights hero John Lewis, a ‘n***ger,’ and Rep. Barney Frank a ‘faggot,’” Grayson wrote verbatim in a written statement. “One could go on and on, because there is overwhelming evidence that the Tea Party is the home of bigotry and discrimination in America today, just as the KKK was for an earlier generation. If the shoe fits, wear it.”

The bit about racial epithets is, I believe, a reference to the incident outside the Capitol on the day ObamaCare was passed in 2010 in which some black Democrats claimed bystanders were shouting slurs at them. Andrew Breitbart offered $100,000 to anyone who could produce actual evidence that it happened. As of last December, the money was still unclaimed.