We’ve talked about it for a while now, being quite sure that the Republican Party has collectively lost its mind. But until today, we had no statistical proof. Now we do.

A new poll by Public Policy Polling reveals that 52 percent of Republicans believe that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Barack Obama. Another 21 percent aren’t sure.

Think about it for a moment. That’s 73 percent, nearly 3/4, about 60 million Republicans who don’t think that Obama legitimately won an election that he won by seven percentage points and no Supreme Court involvement.

That’s just insane. So too are the 9 percent of Democrats (?) and 18 percent of independents who think dirty tricks by ACORN are responsible for Obama’s win. Overall, only 62 percent of Americans, according to this poll, believe Obama won legitimately.

Holy fucking shit. I can’t think of anything better to say, so while I try, here’s Digby:

I had always thought they were gearing up for a full blown assault on “illegal immigrant” voting (and I would imagine that’s in the pipeline as the demographics continue to shift.) But with the election of an African American, the ACORN thing was more salient to the racist base.

The conservative movement has long held that Democrats can never be legitimate office holders because it is an article of faith that a majority of the country believes as they do. The Village agrees — they are always going on about how “this is a conservative country.” So they can’t compute how a person who doesn’t run openly and proudly as a conservative Republican could possibly legitimately win an election.

Policy is irrelevant to all this, by the way. This is about tribal identity and culture, not politics and governance.

Gosh. Only 42 percent of Republicans believe Obama isn’t an American citizen.

The GOP has been creating this voter fraud thing for a while now, only what they never tell you — and my colleagues are included in this — is that ACORN has never been engaged in voter fraud, which is a serious offense and concerns voting illegally.

What ACORN has been accused of, legitimately in some cases — although with caveats — is voter registration fraud. And that’s because they hire people to go out and register people to vote, paying them by the number of completed forms they turn in. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that it’s awful easy to make a few bucks by sitting at the kitchen table and putting random names in rather than actually doing the work.

Of course, not all ACORN registrars are such deadbeats. But plenty are, and ACORN frequently turns them in themselves. And besides, what they’re doing is filling out voter registration applications – they’ve still got to be approved by the officials.

But you won’t hear that on the nightly news,  and especially not on the cable news.

Nobody will tell you, either, that voter registration fraud almost never turns into voter fraud since you actually have to show up and show ID at a polling place to vote. I don’t think very many Mickey Mouses or Donald Ducks have ever done that. Hell, they didn’t even know they were registered.

Unlike Ann Coulter, however, who has at least twice voted at polling places that weren’t her own, but that’s another story.

No, the Republicans, with my colleagues as willing co-conspirators, have spent an inordinate amount of time whining about ACORN and their non-existent voter fraud. But the GOP base, we know, isn’t very big on facts. After all, they’ve got Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin to tell them the truth. And we all know that anyone who disagrees with those folks is the real liar.

So the more than half of Republicans who believe ACORN stole the election from John McCain have an excuse for their idiocy. They’re led by idiots.

And, as Digby pointed out, it’s really all about this bizarre tribal connection they seem to share. They feel persecuted, victimized. Their beliefs and their way of life are under assault by heathens (that’s us).

That’s what happens when your beliefs and way of life become obsolete. You circle the wagons, hide in fear, become more conservative and more willing to employ violence to keep the inevitable from happening. You cling to god and guns, to coin a phrase. And everybody who isn’t with you is against you, whether they are or not.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t make it a habit to go about trying to destroy someones way of life. What a waste of time. But neither do I kowtow to their beliefs, particularly when I know them to have no solid foundation in truth.

So here we are, with the Republican Party increasingly swimming out past the breakers. The lifeguards are on the shore calling for them to come back, but they don’t see the danger. They don’t know they’re being dragged out to sea.

Why, just today Virginia Foxx, that crazy congresscritter from North Carolina, declared that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a Republican measure that Democrats obstructed. Hello? Have we  slipped onto an alternate timeline without knowing it?

Some conservative writer, earlier this week (I’ve purposely forgotten his name) complained about Obama trying to thoroughly look at the Afghanistan situation before deciding to send more troops by urging him to make a decision, any decision, even if it’s wrong. Just don’t think about it. Blindfold the president and let him throw darts at various numbers. Better yet, put ‘em on a big Wheel of Fortune kinda thing and just spin it. Who needs serious thought around here?

These kinda days I feel like we’re standing in the middle of a malevolent maelstrom, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it but wait until it settles and hope we’re still alive to decide what to do next.

Maybe ACORN can fix it. Or steal it. Either way, I’ve a feeling the mess we have now will pale in comparison to the one that’s left when the storm of crazy passes.