Beyond Wingnuttery 0

Most persons like trains.

Trains are fun. The railroad is a fun place to work. Sometimes I miss it, though I do not miss the company that I used to work for.

Then there are train nuts, who make watching, writing about, maybe building model trains a hobby. It’s sort of like industrial bird watching.

Then there are what, on the railroad, we used to refer to as “foamers” or “FRNs” (loosely translated: “freaking rail nuts”). They are the persons who dress up in bib overalls and canvas steam-era engineer caps, go down to the train station whenever it’s open, watch the trains go by, and write down the consist of every train, even though all the cars look alike and were made by the same manufacturer within a few years of each other.

Somewhere along the line, they have lost any grip on basic reality.

You can get the same psychological breakdown in just about any line of endeavor; certainly, you can get it in politics, when persons lose sight of the concept that the purpose of a government is to govern and, in the United States, “provide for the general welfare.”

You can get persons who become so steeped in delusion and unreality that, frankly, they should not be let out without what used to be so graciously called in Victorian England a “companion.”

These people here are bleeding foamers. They illustrate why progressives started referring to themselves as the “reality-based” community:

When the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court meet on Dec. 5th, in their regular private conference to decide which cases to hear, two lawsuits that have captivated a segment of the blogosphere will be up for discussion.

Both urge the court to consider claims that President-elect Obama is not qualified to be president, because he is not a natural-born American citizen.

And why the term “wingnut” is not a misnomer.