NPR had a really excellent story about just how fringe and nutty the Secessionist’s Saturday Fundiefest is. Just look at this cast of characters.

—John Hagee, a San Antonio evangelist whose endorsement was rejected by John McCain in 2008 because of Hagee’s anti-Catholic statements.

—Mike Bickle, a founder of the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Mo., who’s called Oprah Winfrey a “pastor of the harlot of Babylon.”

—Alice Patterson, founder of Justice at the Gate, in San Antonio, has written that there is “a demonic structure behind the Democratic Party.”

—And then there’s John Benefiel, head of the Oklahoma-based Heartland Apostolic Prayer Network, who once said this about the Statue of Liberty: “You know where we got it from? French Freemasons. Listen, folks, that is an idol, a demonic idol right there in the middle of New York Harbor.”

This is an incredibly stupid way to kick off a presidential campaign. Even St. McCain had to refudiate Hagee after some reporter did a Google search. This is the Hagee endorsement on steroids.

I keep telling people that the Secessionist is a terrible politician with lousy instincts and that he’ll flop if he tries to get elected outside the state of Texas, and this hasn’t exactly convinced me otherwise.