The January 4, 2010 issue of USA Today contained a piece by Eboo Patel entitled "Moderate Muslims?  We're Everywhere".  Mr. Patel wrote of a hypothetical encounter with an extremist: 

In fact, if one of those guys had a single bullet in his gun and you and I were up against the wall, he would shoot me first.  He hates me more because not only do I not follow his perverse vision of Islam, I also represent an alternative interpretation.  He insists Islam requires domination; I suggest Islam inspires cooperation. 

Here can be seen the effects of "an irritable reaching for fact and reason:" the tendency extremists have to claim a completeness that cannot reasonably be claimed and the inevitable emergence of a moderating impulse that the extremists view as heresy. 

We can see this in the Republican Party trying to cope with the both the immediate and long-term consequences of the losses suffered in 2008 – the loss of Congress and the Presidency, and the long-anticipated demographic realities that put Barack Obama in the White House.  Their response?  An abhorrence of any moderating impulse in their own party, even in the face of the potential loss of support of centrists, who are critical to any hope of electoral success in the near term. 

Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of injecting religion into politics.  The fundamentalist begins by subsuming his or her identity to the doctrine, but the doctrine inevitably becomes a means to the end of personal political ambition.  Jeff Sharlet of Salon wrote a terrific expose of The Family, a shadowy Christian fundamentalist group that is the “power behind the throne” of many far-right politicians, in the July 21, 2009 issue.  Sharlet quite succinctly captures this confusion of the religion and personal ambition with this passage: 

Sen. Pryor explained to me the meaning of bipartisanship he'd learned through the Family: "Jesus didn't come to take sides. He came to take over." And by Jesus, the Family means the Family.

                        -- Salon 7/21/09: “Sex and Power Inside the C Street house.”

This dispatch was written with contributions from Brian Prioleau 

Pictures: Moktada al-Sadr, Pat Robertson