Whether it is Newt Gingrich inadvertently acting as unpaid lobbyist for colonialism in Africa, or Rick Santorum denouncing the audacity of the storming of the Bastille or Mitch McConnell reenacting mummification, Republicans have been on the march back. It appears Americans of the 21^st Century do not wish to return with them.

While Republicans have yet to actually raise the slogan, Back to Feudalism, with the rawness of their defense of the rich against the rest, the new blatancy of tax and economic policies treating the wealthy as a protected class of hothouse daffodils and the rest as ungrateful drones, they may as well.

And just when you thought it was safe to pop a birth control pill or don a condom, here come the medievalists again. Not only is contraception controversial again in the Republican Party, the top three Republican candidates for president now have signed a pledge they will eradicate the scourge of porn once they have been elected. Surely that will be the political wood-killer heard around the world.

The good news is that the more these guys reveal who they actually are and what they actually want (the Republican primaries indeed are the reactionary id unleashed) the more Americans are wondering how exactly this political operation escaped the cuckoo’s nest.  Over the last several months the public has been siding with President Obama by enormous margins on just about everything: the rich paying more in taxes,  leaving Social Security and Medicare alone, now backing him on birth control provided in insurance plans.

Worse for the primordial gadabouts President Obama’s job approval ratings have reached or exceeded 50% in several polls now. In states where collective bargaining for workers was put on the ropes by radical Republican time travelers citizens have rebuffed their attempts. In swing states like Ohio Obama decisively beats Republican challengers head-to-head.

The large win in the 2010 midterms (a protest vote against an anemic economy and high unemployment) combined with their now ingrained zealotry seems to have convinced Republicans their radically retrograde ideas were actually popular, and emboldening them to diverge from their usual careful subterfuge, not only in congress but in the primary campaigns for a nominee.

Republicans may be headed back to the chamber pot, but the rest of America is sticking with plumbing.