Polly Toynbee at the Guardian is the latest victim of an appalling new medical condition, USTPDS (US Tea Party Derangement Syndrome).

I mean, listen to this:

Why bother with the great show of presidential elections when presidents are denied the power to match their pomp? The politics of miasma, where words matter more than facts and actions, lets the Tea Party demand the impossible – debt reduction with tax cuts, spending cuts without touching the gargantuan defence budget.

Huh? President Obama had plenty of options, including for a while Democratic control of both Houses of Congress. He also had options for dealing with the debt crisis.

Plus debt reduction without tax cuts and reducing defence is not ‘impossible. Just cut other things. Start with, for example, the annual $80 billion lost because of Medicare/Medicaid fraud and abuse.

The rise of the Tea Party owes a great deal to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox TV, the foghorn of extremism that changed the nature of political discourse

My goodness. Fox News! That same channel which attracts a stunning 400,000 25-54 viewers in US TV prime time. Yet we still should be alarmed:

American intellectual fashions waft our way: a taste of the Tea Party arrives on these shores in the peculiar paranoia of the climate-change deniers. You may dismiss some as fruitcakes or oil company lobbyists, but when Andrew Turnbull, former head of the civil service, reveals that he is of their number, it should alarm us. 

Andrew of course had a glittering civil service career – under Polly’s Labour!

Reason should rule, but none of us is as rational as we pretend, each inhabiting our imaginations more than we do the real world, with opinions driven by beliefs, passions, convictions, hopes, fears and a hundred contradictory thoughts and impulses. But to make sense of the world, there is an obligation to seek out evidence and trust to expertise.

Fair enough. So, Polly, why do you write idiotic articles like this one, almost 100% fact-free? Why rave against Lord Turnbull who has given more heavyweight senior measured professional thought to Climate policy issues than almost anyone else in the country, if not the world? He’s about as good as it gets and as good as it can get, in any democracy or indeed any government ever.

What have we done to get such drivel served up to us in a supposedly serious paper?

Wait … those like the Tea Party who campaign against unsustainable spending are the crazy ones – those who drive reputable institutions into the ground and profit amidst the wreckage are the sane ones. Of course!