Buckly and Goldwater Intelligence lacking in today's GOP

Good comment by slapchopsuey at Reddit:

"In the early 1960's when the conservatives couldn't handle the 'change' brought by JFK and were going unhinged, it took a tag-team of Barry Goldwater and William Buckley to confront the Birchers and the paranoid frenzy where even Eisenhower was a communist they were working themselves into, which was discrediting the Republican party of 1962 in the same way the Birther/Teabagger/Deather stuff is in 2009.

I look at this like some sort of mentally unhinging social contagion, a disease outbreak. Buckley and Goldwater were able to stop it in 1962 because it was still contained to the John Birch Society for the most part. The parallel moment in our time was many months ago, since then it has spread all over the right and even into their elected officials. The modern conservative equivalent of those two would have to do far more work to quarantine the crazy at this point."