2017: WHEN MATT TAIBBI AND GLENN GREENWALD HAVE BECOME VOICES OF SANITY. Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives: Whatever the truth about Trump and Russia, the speculation surrounding it has become a dangerous case of mass hysteria.

The psychic shock of losing an election they thought was in the bag, plus the need to hold the base together and distract from late-era Obama misdeeds, have combined into a toxic psychological stew. Plus:

This testimony was brought out by Virginia Democrat Mark Warner. Warner has been in full-blown “precious bodily fluids” mode throughout this scandal. During an interview with The Times on the Russia subject a month back, there was a thud outside the window. “That may just be the FSB,” he said. The paper was unsure if he was kidding.

Warner furthermore told The Times that in order to get prepared for his role as an exposer of 21st-century Russian perfidy, he was “losing himself in a book about the Romanovs,” and had been quizzing staffers about “Tolstoy and Nabokov.”

This is how nuts things are now: a senator brushes up on Nabokov and Tolstoy (Tolstoy!) to get pumped to expose Vladimir Putin.

Even the bizarre admission by FBI director (and sudden darling of the same Democrats who hated him months ago) James Comey that he didn’t know anything about Russia’s biggest company didn’t seem to trouble Americans very much. Here’s the key exchange, from a House hearing in which Jackie Speier quizzed Comey:

SPEIER: Now, do we know who Gazprom-Media is? Do you know anything about Gazprom, director?
COMEY: I don’t.
SPEIER: Well, it’s a – it’s an oil company.

(Incidentally, Gazprom – primarily a natural-gas giant – is not really an oil company. So both Comey and Speier got it wrong.)

As Leonid Bershidsky of Bloomberg noted, this exchange was terrifying to Russians. The leader of an investigation into Russian espionage not knowing what Gazprom is would be like an FSB chief not having heard of Exxon-Mobil. It’s bizarre, to say the least.

Cognitive dissonance, plus status anxiety, plus complicit news media yield a toxic stew indeed.