In a column last week, David Brooks asked, "Do you ever get the sense the whole world is becoming unhinged from reality?"

Well, hmm, yes, if "ever" corresponds to about 33 times even on relatively tranquil days. That includes, but is hardly limited to, finding the always sane, exceptionally linear and nicely wordsmithed columns of Mr. Brooks on the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times, which, if not yet fair and balanced, are at least slouching toward estimable conservative representation.

Publishing Brooks in the same theater of operations as the venerable William Safire may so thoroughly box the ephedraic bile of Paul Krugman with the oh-so-trendy splatter writing of Maureen Dowd the effect could approximate the devastation of the legendary Raoul Duke’s nutcracker flail, that mythical law enforcement device of a previous paranoiac time in America (obscure cultural references representing one of the conceits of a certain scrivening cognoscenti).

Just in the last few weeks, ample other manifestations of unhinged reality have scratched their fingernails across the chalkboards of our consciousness.

Hillary Clinton’s attempt at the humor of bigotry — her banal Gandhi "joke" — and the non-reaction thereto was unhinged reality. The only thing we can figure is that she got up one morning, read of the unhinged reality of Republican Governor George Pataki posthumously pardoning Lenny Bruce in the name of free speech and decided to let fly with her own off-key riff. Her remark was neither funny enough nor mean enough to qualify as A-level stuff, so she really needs to keep her day job, which she obviously can do because the PC police went quiet like unto mice on that one.

Simply uttering the word "Halliburton" as full-blown political invective is unhinged reality, but seemingly as effective as an interminable Pete Seeger sing-along in agitating self-proclaimed intellectuals into paroxysms of righteous anger. Madonna’s endorsement of General Clark’s presidential candidacy? The world has gone too weird for that to even qualify. It is reality.

MoveOn.org’s little dust-up with commercials equating President Bush with Hitler is unhinged reality, of a particularly troubling variety. If we understand the story correctly, the radical leftist group is holding a contest for anti-Bush commercials, allowed two real nasties to be put up on the website, then started backing and filling like an Enron auditor when called on them. The fact is that while MoveOn may well use millions of George Soros’ money to influence a lot of folks who have problems accepting that 2 + 2 equals 4 without first screaming Euclidian conspiracy theories, interacting with grown-ups requires at least a modicum of maturity, restraint and ability to discern. Do any of these anti-capitalist numbskulls have a clue as to how Mr. Soros made that money?

Former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill is unhinged reality talking. He was from Day One of his tenure and improved not at all when he indicated his greater fondness for the worldview of some stadium singer who calls himself Bono than affinity for first-string politics or sophisticated public policy. One of O’Neill’s knocks on the President is that the President was more interested in a cheeseburger than a discussion at hand with O’Neill, to which we can only say "good choice, Mr. President."

Finally (just in the interest of not stretching this beyond anyone’s reasonable attention span), we come to Howard Dean, whose presidential candidacy personifies unhinged reality of such sprawl that it buggers the brainwaves. In fact, reading Dean’s rapidly expanding collection of sputterings and utterances, one becomes wistful for the comparative logic of Professor Irwin Corey, the relatively distinguished comedic presidential campaign of Pat Paulsen (see Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, circa 1960s).

The sobering thought about the Dean phenomenon is not about the diminutive candidate himself, but about the minions of citizens good and true who believe in their minds and feel in their hearts that there fulminates someone qualified to be President of the United States. That, friends, represents unhinged reality as epidemic. The ballot box may well eliminate the symptoms, but we shall still need a cure for the disease.