Thank Christ, I thought it was just me

So Jesse also expresses some confusion on this issue, in a little entry we like to call, "Pandagon: Word Derivation":

Okay, I understand where "wingnut" came from. Someone is a right wing nut...they're a wingnut. I don't understand where moonbat came from. And it seems to have become the all-purpose response to wingnut, but it just looks like a seven-letter compound word.

Where did it come from, and how did it come to refer to members of the far left (which may or may not include every liberal, depending on your partisan stance)?

There's links to some (slightly sketchy) answers in the comments over there. I'm still holding to my initial definition, "Something the warbloggers call people who disagree with them for no particular reason whatsoever."

Don't think I've ever been called that. Lots of other things, yes, and tourists are encouraged to use the convenient MT Search function to make sure they're at least being original with their insults.

Missed that final episode thingee. My life is the poorer for it, I'm sure. On the other hand, finally got 'round to reading Casualty of War over at GQ:

On the basis of her indignation, Rice may have sounded convincing, except that a few days earlier, Powell's chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, had told me just the opposite. As he put it, Taiwan is "another place where you get a lot of tension, because there are literally people from the Defense Department on that island every week. Every week. And have been for three years. And many of those people—I know, because some of them are my former colleagues and friends—are delivering messages to Taiwan that Taiwan needn't worry. Meanwhile, we're trying to maintain a more balanced attitude."

And yet even after I had read Wilkerson's quote aloud to Rice, she refused to budge from her script. "As a government," she said weakly, "we use all of the elements together in order to effect policy. They're working always in concert."

Of course, this was even more absurd. The notion that the departments of State and Defense are "always in concert" is not only false; it has never been true and isn't supposed to be. If anything, a certain level of tension between the two departments is a good sign, a reflection of a working government, of the push and pull between diverging interests, the balance of power between military might and diplomatic maneuvering. The idea that the departments of State and Defense are "always in concert" is actually somewhat scary and Orwellian. Fortunately, it's a lie. Unfortunately, the truth is scarier than the lie.

Sometimes I wonder why Powell and Rice are so often lumped together, seeing as the former is (despite his service with the current administration) well-known, respected not only across the political spectrum here in the US but also abroad, and appears at least competent, while the latter. . . not so much.

Then I remember, or rather Google for the exact quote, James G. Watt, Reagan's Secretary of the Interior describing an advisory panel:

I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple.

And it all becomes. . . ok, not clear, exactly, but I remember how their brains work. Or fail to work. Or something.