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Conor Friedersdorf, writing at Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish, has a thoughtful critique of Mark Levin's huge bestseller Liberty and Tyranny:

"In fact, the main antagonists that the American conservative vies with in politics are the independent, the liberal, the center left Democrat, the progressive, even some among the apolitical. The average people who support "Statist" President Obama's domestic agenda are apolitical African American women who work in cubicles, law firm associates who earn six figure salaries, and working parents who fret about being uninsured -- not utopian radicals bent on advancing a counterrevolution that destroys the freedom won by the Founding generation."

. . . I have resisted using terms like "socialist" and especially "communist" to describe the Democrat's ideology because by strict definition, they are not trying to destroy the free market, repeal individual rights (as always, making an exception for 2nd amendment guarantees), set up a dictatorship, or impose "tyranny - soft or hard - on the American people.

. . . This problem with mis-identification that Conor writes about as well as the wrong headed definitions of where Obama and the Democrats are trying to take the country, feed what has become a perceived paranoia among many conservatives that is driving people away from the movement rather than rallying them to our standard. At bottom is the argument I've been trying to advance in this series; that the excessive ideology fueling the rage that manifests itself in paranoid rantings on the internet against imagined socialism, the purging of perceived apostates, the obsession with ideological purity, and more recently, shouted down speakers at health care town halls - all of this damages conservatism in the eyes of people who might be inclined to support our cause. It also makes it extraordinarily easy for the opposition to paint conservatives as too emotional to trust with running the government.

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Moran is off-base on the crack about "shouting down" Obama-care apologists at Town Hells- we know that one's a red herring - but he's absolutely right about the danger of using paranoid-sounding rhetoric.

Sorry that this is not Michigan-centric, but I think it's pretty important.