Check out this op-ed from Der Spiegel correspondent Mark Pitzke. It’s brilliant. Sometimes outsiders looking in can see things more clearly than those of us on the inside.

I’ll include a couple of snippets below in order to hopefully entice you into reading the entire article. Pitzke is right on: the outlandish extremism on the American right is frightening and dangerous — to a world facing the inevitability of climate change and shifting geopolitical power, and to religious, ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities, including LGBT people.

It’s true that on the road to the White House all sorts of things can happen, and usually do. No campaign can avoid its share of slip-ups, blunders and embarrassments. Yet this time around, it’s just not that funny anymore. In fact, it’s utterly horrifying.

It’s horrifying because these eight so-called, would-be candidates are eagerly ruining not only their own reputations and that of their party, the party of Lincoln lore. Worse: They’re ruining the reputation of the United States…

Gingrich claims moral authority on issues such as the “sanctity of marriage,” yet he’s been divorced twice. He sprang the divorce on his first wife while she was sick with cancer. (His supporters’ excuse: It’s been 31 years, and she’s still alive.) He cheated on his second wife just as he was pressing ahead with Bill Clinton’s impeachment during the Monica Lewinsky affair, unaware of the irony. The woman he cheated with, by the way, was one of his House aides and 23 years his junior — and is now his perpetually smiling third wife…

And so it goes. Read the whole thing. Seriously. It’s spot on.