Grover Norquist, the influential conservative insider who runs Americans for Tax Reform, has never been one to take the high road. He’s compared bipartisanship to date rape, wants to make government small enough “to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” and likened taxation of the rich to Nazi persecution of Jews.

So it’s not surprising to see more outlandish rhetoric from him in the latest issue of the Washington Monthly.

First, he has a long letter criticizing an Alan Wolfe article titled “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern,” which argued that conservatives in power end up “expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding.” Norquist’s response concludes with this remarkable passage:

Big government doesn’t work well. The East Germans really truly believed. There was no lack of faith in government in the Politburo. Limited government can do the limited number of things that governments can do if they are not constantly distracted by trying to do the imposible with the blunt force of the state as their tool.

Norquist is likening believers in “big government” to dictatorial Communist regimes, and suggesting that the failures of those regimes disproves Wolfe’s argument. It’s an absurd point — does the chaos resulting from the lack of a functioning state in Iraq disprove his belief in limited government? (I also love the tautology “Limited government can do the limited number of things that governments can do” — maybe they should teach logic at Norquist’s famous insider meetings.)

Elsewhere in the magazine, Monthly editor Rachel Morris quotes Norquist making a hilarious “joke” about sending Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), a staunch opponent of illegal immigration, to Guantanamo:

Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, described Rep. Tancredo as “the face of the Republican party losing elections for the next 20 years.” (He added that the GOP might have avoided this problem by “sending Tancredo to Guantanamo”).

Like I said, he’s one charming fellow.