Gosh, the Republican Party is succeeding so much with their "rebranding effort" that they can't seem to find anyone to run against Ed Markey for John Kerry's Senate seat. Well, I take that back. There's this guy, the Blowhard named Dr. Keith Ablow, who makes a career out of offering bogus, junk-filled Freudian analyses on Fox News.

You might remember him from other posts here on C&L, like the one where he offers ridiculous explanations for President Obama's normal, even mainstream policy choices by suggesting the president is working out his frustrations at being abandoned by his father. Or this one, where he profiled Media Matters' David Brock, calling him a self-hating narcissist. There's this one, too, where he calls for Vice President Biden to be examined for dementia. Or, you might make a judgment just on the basis of one single fact:

He actually co-wrote a self-help book with Glenn Beck.

Yes, this is the guy who has expressed an interest in running for John Kerry's seat.

But wait! There's more!

In Georgia, Rep. Paul Broun is widely expected to announce his candidacy to replace Senator Saxby Chambliss. Yes, THAT Paul Broun. The one who laughed off a constituent's comment about who would shoot the president. The same Paul Broun who boycotted and trolled the president's State of the Union address in 2011 after saying he wouldn't attend because President Obama would "spew venom," who compared progressives to Al Qaeda, who wanted to lower, not raise the debt ceiling in 2011, who wanted a "Year of the Bible" in order to school the nation on President Obama's sins, and the very same one who gets star billing on Jon Perr's Republican Confederacy of Dunces.

Listen to Paul Broun for ten minutes or so and the only point of confusion will be whether he is a Bircher or a Klansman. It's possible he's both. Yes, he is preparing to run for Saxby Chambliss' Senate seat.

In Iowa, wingnut Steve King is gearing up for a run at Tom Harkin's Senate seat. Yes, once again, THAT Steve King. The same guy who thinks workers are commodities, who empathized with the guy who flew his plane into the Austin, Texas IRS office, who considered the Hate Crimes Act a "pedophile protection act", who had no problem with the idea of a revolution similar to the one in Czechoslovakia in 1989 here in the United States, and who defends his racist remarks by admitting he just wants to see "if the pot comes to a boil."

Yes, these three are leading off the parade of wingnuts for open Senate seats in 2014. They do seem to have one thing in common: they're all spewing the Birch Society nonsense theories and mixing it with some serious race-baiting and hate.

On the wingnut but not a complete hater side, Geraldo Rivera is snuffling around a run for the Senate in New Jersey. Gee, Rivera and The Wingnuts would make for some interesting times on the Senate floor, but the country would be a shambles by the closing act.

However, Rachel Maddow has one thing wrong in her report above, where she maintains that Karl Rove wants to push these people out. As Jed Lewison points out, the Rove organization poured $400,000 into Steve King's race against Christie Vilsack in 2012 and bragged about it, not that they had much to brag about overall in 2012. Rove doesn't reject these candidates; he embraces them.

It looks like Eric Cantor and the TeaBirchers just got a fresh supply of lipstick, and they're smearing it all over that same old pig.

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While he works on launching a U.S. senatorial run in Massachusetts, Fox’s “Medical A-Team” psychiatrist, Keith Ablow, has his platform on the “fair and balanced” network to promote his candidacy. So this morning, when he visited Fox & Friends to discuss the psychological scars that might affect Ethan, the Alabama kindergartner just rescued after being held hostage for nearly a week, Ablow gratuitously attacked those who think this is another example of the need for stricter gun regulations and suggested they are so dedicated to an anti-gun agenda that they’d rather people get shot by the mentally ill than institutionalize them.

I’ve written many times about what a crackpot Ablow is and his propensity for diagnosing people without benefit of an examination. In this case, he diagnosed Ethan as more or less doomed to mental illness - without knowing much more than his first name. Reacting to a report that the boy has been “laughing, joking, playing and eating” after being reunited with his mother, Ablow rendered his opinion: These are “also the things that five- or six-year-olds do when they’re desperately trying to maintain some semblance of normality… I can tell you that the effort to maintain that sense of normality in and of itself has set the stage for all kinds of trouble down the road. So, as sad as it is, Ethan isn’t OK. He’s at tremendous risk for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol and drug abuse later in life. Fractured relationships. All manner of disabilities from psychological problems.”

Nobody challenged Ablow’s “evaluation.” Instead, Steve Doocy opened the door for Ablow to opine on policy by asking if maybe “somebody should have connected some dots” about the state of the abductor’s mental health.

Ablow replied:

Gee, ya think? And there’ll be people, by the way, who say this is an argument for more gun control. Those people are reprehensible. Because the bottom line is, this guy had a hearing for medicine coming up. You mean to say the court couldn’t have connected the dots between that and the fact that his neighbors said that he had threatened kids’ lives? And that he had beaten a dog to death with a pipe and said, ‘We are holding you in the psychiatric unit for evaluation against your will.’ Really?

Gretchen Carlson prodded for more by “asking” why they don’t do that.

With unintentional hilarity, Ablow said it’s because it takes “work” and “It takes not pontificating and trying to make political points by saying we’re gonna take everybody’s guns! …Obvious people who need help aren’t given that help when we could deliver it – because we have the expertise – but we’re not willing to allocate resources, partly out of stigma, and partly out of the fact that people would rather try to pander to certain voting blocs by saying it’s all about guns. Which it isn’t.

Doocy closed by validating the hypothesis: “It didn’t have to happen.”

[h/t Media Matters]

I'm not sure what part of the Goldwater rule faux shrink and Fox News commentator Keith Ablow doesn't understand, but if he can't even get this right, why should anyone trust his analysis?

The Goldwater rule is part of the ethical standards imposed on mental health professionals which constrain them from offering a diagnosis of people who they have not interviewed personally. Ablow can argue that he's dancing around this by speaking in general terms, but it's pretty obvious to me that his terms are anything but general.

First, he pronounces President Obama's push for gun control in the wake of the Newtown tragedy as a "hijack" of the issue in order to advance his "personal desire for gun control."

Ablow then goes on to say that the real problem is "untreated mental illness." While this may be part of the problem, it is not the only problem. Not at all. In fact, there is an assumption that Adam Lanza was mentally ill, but no evidence of that has been put forth, partly because of HIPAA limitations, but also possibly because he was not mentally ill at all. It's irresponsible to place all of the blame on the shoulders of the mentally ill, untreated or otherwise.

Aside from that, let's remember who dismantled mental health services in this country. It wasn't Obama, it was Reagan, and he did a great job of seeing to it they were not part of our shared collective responsibility. President Obama, on the other hand, made sure the Affordable Care Act included mental health treatment as part of the basic requirements all insurance policies must offer. But God forbid Ablow would acknowledge that when it's just simpler to lay it at the feet of the mentally ill.

You'd think a true conservative might be a little concerned about the idea of a national database of people with mental illness. What illnesses will be included? ADHD? Depression? Insomnia? If someone gets treated for PTSD, will they be included? Half the nation would qualify for that.

Keith Ablow, like his pal Glenn Beck, cannot resist drawing a large, grand conspiratorial picture around every single thing this president says or does. After Lou Dobbs sets up the question with the statement that President Obama is defined by having only one solution to every problem (government), Ablow happily complies, saying, "His solution runs psychologically in the direction of disempowering the individual every single time." When questioned by Dobbs about why that would be, Ablow drops the diagnosis, Goldwater rule or no Goldwater rule.

Claiming "the autonomy of others did him no favors as a kid when he was abandoned again and again," Ablow goes on to say that this abandonment led Obama to believe "the collective needs to be empowered and all the better if [Obama is] the center of the collective and the most powerful person."

In other words, all this talk of gun control has nothing to do with the rights of children and innocent individuals to live their lives without having them cut short by some lunatic with an assault rifle. No, really, it's just about how Barack Obama's mother left him with her parents in Hawaii while she earned a living and a PhD.

Perhaps Fox Business should stick to business and leave personal motive analysis to professionals.

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Fox News’ “Medical A Team” Psychiatrist (and resident wacko) Dr. Keith Ablow visited Fox & Friends this morning and delivered such a crackpot medical analysis of Vice President Biden’s debate performance that even the hosts argued against it.

Ablow – who never considered why Fox has been obsessing about Biden since the debate – acknowledged up front that Biden could have behaved the way he did “for stage presence.” Or, Ablow said, because he “has shown tremendous disregard for the perspective of others… In other words, don’t interrupt me with the facts.”

But then Ablow got to “the part I’ll hear about:”

I did not evaluate Joe Biden but if someone said to me, "Listen, we want you to do what’s really required to know what happened there," you have to put "dementia" on the differential diagnosis… If this were your Dad or your grandfather, wouldn’t you say, if you brought him to me, "Keith, you gotta tell me, is he suffering with dementia? Because he can’t seem to listen, he’s laughing inappropriately.

You know a Fox guest has gone over the edge when two out of three co-hosts start disagreeing with something anti-Democratic. Alisyn Camerota pointed out that Biden’s “command of the details was so solid. People with dementia can’t remember.” Dave Briggs added, “The substance was pretty solid.”

But Ablow stuck to his theory: “Not knowing every fact is not required to diagnose dementia. And I’m not saying he has it, I’m saying you put it on the differential.”

Ablow wasn’t through. He also said, “You want his alcohol level.”

By the way, this is the second time in less than two months that Ablow has come up with a psychiatric assessment of Biden without benefit of examining him. After Biden made his “chains” comment (which Fox also obsessed over), Ablow called it a “moment of truth" that reveals Biden's "contempt" for "financial success."

Ablow seemed to have forgotten all about that now.

Oh and one other thing? Ablow never said that Rep. Paul Ryan won the debate against this demented lush.