Following on yesterday’s batty Nancy Pelosi statements about investigating the Ground Zero Mosque opposition, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has a new web ad out along the subject of “extreme.”

This is quality stuff, and it can generate a quality discussion. We like it when the Republicans actually talk about the future of the country instead of playing stupid gotcha games on who’s sleeping with whom and so on (it’s inevitable that stuff like that will happen in a primary, but general elections need to be about differing visions for the city, state or country). And the ad does so, in a fashion.

Because Senate candidates like Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, Ron Johnson, Rob Portman and Ken Buck might be of various levels of physical attractiveness, they might come from backgrounds the legacy media would disparage as not suitably Ivy League and they might occasionally make a gaffe. But those candidates represent the first sizable batch of true small-government conservatives – and a departure from the “Me, too” Richard Lugar/Bob Bennett/Lindsey Graham/Susan Collins gang already ensconced in Washington – to come along since 1994. They share a philosophy which has its roots in that of our Founders, and the far Left has no choice but to call them extreme.

But in the Age Of Obama, when religion is to be despised unless it’s Islam, when American exceptionalism is only acceptable when it’s apologized for as unexceptional, when class warfare is so entrenched as government policy that the world’s highest business taxes are non-negotiable among the party in power, when the concept of federalism is so perverted that a state passing a law to mirror federal legislation finds itself on the business end of a Justice Department lawsuit, what Democrats and their allies in the legacy media term “extreme” is embraced by large portions of the public. And the Republican candidates they disparage merely represent the will of the American people who are disgusted with the statism, arrogance and corruption of the ruling class and seek to rein it in.

This will be a signature election cycle. Most pollsters are now showing a GOP takeover in the House and the previously-unthinkable possibility of a Republican Senate majority is now within the realm of possibility. But what is perhaps even more important is what the new Senators and congressmen the 2010 cycle produces will mean for the Republican Party. A Rubio replacing Mel Martinez or a Lee replacing Bennett will force the party’s Beltway wing to accept that the GOP can no longer slide by as a friendly repository for K Street dollars or be complicit in inching the country leftward; the new additions will drive the party away from the politics of its disgraceful Bush-era big-government “conservatism.”

Because polls repeatedly show that it’s not Lee, Angle, Paul or Rubio who are “fringe.” Their positions are favored, in large measure, by majorities or pluralities of the American people. The fringe is in Washington, New York, Hollywood and the halls of academia. The fringe is governing, and it’s being rejected.