One day, historians will look back on these advertisements and conclude that conservatism had reached an intellectual and moral nadir, and had only two political cards left to play: fear and anger. Lacking a positive program of its own, it has opted to push paranoid delusions instead. That’s what these advertisements are really all about. What’s significant is the window they provide into the anxiety-plagued psyche of segments of the GOP base. They say far more about those that made them, and about their intended audience, than they do about Obama.

As David Frum observed shortly after President Obama’s election, “to listen to Fox News and other conservative media, you’d think we were living in Czechoslovakia in the final hours before the 1948 communist coup.” If anything, the feverish rhetoric has only grown worse since then. In this apocalyptic vision of the world, liberty hangs perilously by a thread. And President Obama, who is alternately conceived of as a Marxist, a Muslim, or a Mau Mau- and sometimes, as all three simultaneously- is out tear up the Constitution, destroy Christianity, impoverish us, and steal our unhealthy sugary desserts right out of our kitchen cupboards.