RE: shills and lunatics
The thing you need to remember is that America is a big place. If one in every 50,000 nut-jobs manages to get a camera and a following, you still have quite a few high-profile nut-jobs. Likewise, it's easy to get the illusion of a high per-capita following when your low per-capita basket case fans still fill a large area when clustered together. Take any wacky cause, absurd ideal, or re-goddamn-diculous agenda and leave it out where the nation can see it, and by volume the crazies will come skittering out of the breaks in the stucco like so many obese, pallid silverfish to a week old lump of fruit salad on the linoleum. Adding delusions of deific patronage and heavy-handed, misguided symbolism to the mix is just putting a magnifying glass on the rotting banana slices and withered grapes. Don't worry too much about him. He's little people.