In her latest column Kathleen Parker calls it as she sees it regardless of her political leanings.  With the craziness that has enveloped the GOP involving the “birther movement” and the “townhall terrors” Parker officially announces that “Southern Republicans, it seems, have seceded from sanity.”

The curious Republican campaign of 2008 may have galvanized a conservative Southern base — including many who were mostly concerned with the direction Democrats would take the country — but it also repelled others who simply bolted and ran the other way. Whatever legitimate concerns the GOP may historically have represented were suddenly overshadowed by a sense of a resurgent Old South and all the attendant pathologies of festering hate and fear.

What the GOP is experiencing now, one hopes, are the death throes of that 50-year spell that Johnson foretold. But before the party of the Great Emancipator can rise again, Republicans will have to face their inner Voinovich and drive a stake through the heart of old Dixie.