Groucho Marx, as a political leader in Duck Soup, yields to a plea for peace. The neighboring country, he is told, wants peace as much as he does. He is thankful. He will extend the hand of peace. He knows it won't be rejected. But suppose it is? How outrageous that will be! His anger at the prospect grows with each second.

I've always been entranced by the escalation of paranoia into indignation. I'm not talking about a clinical condition. Sometimes they really are out to get you. Remember Watergate?

Speculation based on no actual evidence transforms into outrage. It seems a contradiction to me. If a suspicion seems certain, something to be reasonably anticipated, part of the expected course of events, how can it be outrageous? If it is unreasonable, how would it be reasonably anticipated?

I suppose they'll do this. Why, how dare they!!!

When I encounter most anything written by CNN contributor Erick Erickson, I wonder if I will stumble into some new instance. Last year, just after Gabby Gifford was nearly assassinated and several of those around her were killed, a few folks falsely assumed the cheerleaders of violence, advocates of "second amendment remedies", might through their rhetoric have been partially responsible. I recall my own reaction, like most, as somewhat more confined.

Erickson's Groucho-like anger at President Obama was classic. Eric just knew, because it is so like those liberals, that they were advising Obama to put the tragedy to cynical use, and that the lamestream media would be predictably complicit.

We also know Barack Obama’s advisors are urging him to seize the moment and join the left in blaming the right for this violence. Not only is that disgusting, but should he, the media wringing their hands about the tone better call him out on it — but I won’t hold my breath.

Uh huh. He expresses peremptory outrage over the reasonably expected unreasonable actions. "Not only is that disgusting..."

So it was a pleasant surprise to find an actual insight last week. Okay. It wasn't exactly Erickson's insight. It was a spinoff from a Quentin Tarantino movie. Still, the application to a political figure was recognized. The insight is valid. Okay, it wasn't Erickson's insight, he discovered it in a TNR article by Chris Orr.

Still, we have to be impressed that a conservative reads The New Republic and occasionally recognizes, and is even open to, the wisdom that sometimes appears. Recognition of wisdom is a form of wisdom.

A Tarantino character riffs about Superman. Orr's summary is quoted by Erickson along with Orr's insight:

Superman was born Superman. It’s Clark Kent that is the invented alias, the pose, the “costume.” And in the way Superman plays Kent–weak, self-doubting, cowardly–we see his critique of the human race.

It occurred to me that the same is true of Romney’s desperate, if never terribly persuasive, impersonation of a conservative Republican. That persona–angry, simple-minded, xenophobic, jingoistic–is exactly what Romney (who is himself cultured, content, and cosmopolitan) imagines the average GOP voter to be.

That's good. I think my insight, the fact that Romney's most important constituency has an strange and unexpected distaste for him, may dovetail with Erickson's Orr-inspired epiphany.

The questions Erickson misses seem obvious. One is whether Romney's impersonation will work. And to the extent that it does, whether that means conservatives see themselves as he does. And to the extent that they see themselves that way, whether they, in fact are accurately self-defined. Which is to say they are "angry, simple-minded, xenophobic, jingoistic."

Here is the Tarantino clip from Kill Bill: Volume 2, and a good pre-impersonation, I suppose you'd call it, of Eric Erickson via Duck Soup.