Erstwhile Buckley wannabes imagine that if only people didn’t ask embarrassing questions, we could have a conservative intellectual utopia. The reality is the intellectuals and the fringe exist on both sides of the political spectrum. Sometimes both are wrapped up in the same person. Dr. Thomas Sowell is undeniably an intellectual, with degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, as well as being a defender of free market economics. However, on Rush Limbaugh’s program, with guest host Walter Williams, regarding President Obama’s speech to schoolchildren, Sowell said: “All the dictators want to get their hands on the kids. They get them early on — Stalin, Hitler, Castro, you name them.”

Sowell’s an intellectual, but the purgers would place his statements on the radical extreme end that must be isolated along with WorldNetDaily. However, paranoid nuts aren’t the only ones worried about this administration. With President Obama’s radical past and involvement with Jeremiah Wright, ACORN, other far left outfits, and his various racial statements, there’s enough reason to be concerned that Obama holds the office of the presidency. Add to this his decision to appoint an unprecedented number of unaccountable czars, his enormous ego, and willingness to accept praise as a demigod, and we’ve got a combination that’s proven deadly the world over.

I’m less disturbed by Glenn Beck’s paranoia than I am by those who, like an eighteen-year-old who thinks he’ll live forever, view the republic as an unsinkable ship that faces no threat other than an al-Qaeda dirty bomb.