TPM LiveWire highlights this puzzling tweet from Colorado State Senator David Schultheis:

Don’t for a second, think Obama wants what is best for U.S. He is flying the U.S. Plane right into the ground at full speed. Let’s Roll.

Now most left-wing commentary has devoted ample (and amply deserved) digital ink to how shocking, repugnant, etc. it is for anyone–let alone an elected official–to compare the President of the United States to the 9/11 hijackers. But hyperbolic statements like this are pretty much par for the course when it comes to the teabagging community: if anything, we should give Schultheis a little credit for not following that tweet with a twitpic of him waving photos of Auschwitz around at an anti-health care bill rally.

What makes this tweet so precious isn’t its outrageousness; it’s the terrible metaphor.

You may remember that what made the passengers of Flight 93 so heroic wasn’t that they wrested control of the plane and then proceeded to turn it in the opposite direction of Socialismtown; rather, they sacrificed their own lives and crashed the plane in the middle of a field. Maybe I’m just giving him the benefit of the doubt, but something tells me Schultheis didn’t intend to suggest that conservative activists should do everything they can to make sure that the United States crashes and burns as well.

I’m not singling this out just to be pedantic (although lord knows that a license to unchecked pedantry is one of the perks of blogging); there’s a serious point to be made about the narrative incoherence of what passes for American conservatism these days. Love or hate our president, he’s a man of nuance, and he spent the 2008 campaign laying out a surprisingly detailed, non-pandering account of his vision for America. Meanwhile, what has the opposition got? A bunch of hyperbolic insurgency rhetoric that involves obtuse references to role models as diverse as Samuel Adams and the Taliban. As far as animating narrative goes, literally all they’ve got is the idea of a small power resisting a larger power. Along with some vague platitudes about the free market, family values, and so on.

Now perhaps based on that alone you could make the argument that people like Schultheis are only cynically manipulating a constituency consumed with directionless rage and outdated tribal resentments straight out of the pages of Nixonland. But every day it starts to seem more and more like the inmates are running the asylum; especially on days when the House GOP gets the chance to offer up their own proposals and instead give us a bad joke.

If they found themselves in control of all three branches of the federal government again tomorrow, they’ve got absolutely no fucking clue what they would do. This, ladies and gentleman, is what the gas-bloated corpse of a movement smells like once it really starts to ripen.