To the last item, a friend writes:

I don't know. Have you ever been on a college campus and started asking liberal students their opinions and justifications thereof? Many of them sound like total idiots/sheep/whatever too. Some of my best friends have been college republicans (hah...no really!). For a while my two roommates were the NJ CR state chairman and the president of the Rutgers CR chapter. I assure you some interesting debates took place in that apartment. One of them was an idiot much like you see in this video. The other one was intelligent and reasonable. I surely didn't agree with him on many things, but we could actually discuss issues. I learned a lot from him and hope he would say the same of me.

I guess my point is, if I videotaped conversations with both them and wanted to edit it in such a way as to malign a whole ideology, guess which one I would show.

I know, there are plenty of dumb or dumb-sounding people everywhere, and I'm glad no one filmed me in college either.

But this wasn't a bunch of random conservative college students - it was the College Republican National Convention. It really is a direct feed into the party that's ruling the country. I've never seen a Democratic (or liberal, whatever that means these days) equivalent, in college or anywhere... not surprising because the Democratic Party is more or less an average centrist political party, not a radical movement (except in a College Republican's imagination); it's not really interested in courting leftist activists, dumb or smart. Joe Liberal College Schmoe isn't likely to be doing anything in particular about his vague opinions. (This is not to malign liberals, but J.L.C.S. is the vast majority of college students, and the vast majority of people in general don't do much about things.) His cousin Radical Schmoe may get into something useful, and usually local... or if he's a crusading joiner, he may go to the Spartacists or some such group that has about five bucks and a pamphlet.

The national Republicans these days are a powerful radical movement. They're doing a different kind of sheep-farming - these college groups are incredibly well funded and directly connected to the party, and the stuff they're teaching these kids is being put into practice right now with awful results. And I hope that your reasonable roommate will go on to do good things, but I'm afraid he's really not the kind of person they're looking for.

See very creepy New Republic article about CR elections (needs login - check bugmenot.com) - also Washington Post - also Salon.

Update: Yami McMoots tells me something interesting:

I volunteered with the Young Democrats in 2004, though I never officially joined b/c I didn't want to sign on to the Democratic Party. I'm not sure how the relationship between the Democrats and the various youth arms really works, there are probably some differences from the GOP's way of doing things, but I definitely got the sense that there was a grooming mechanism in place for anyone who was seriously interested in party politics.

Some of those people were quite intelligent and passionate about their incremental improvements to the status quo... but man, some of them were total fucking tools.