| For years, I've been complaining that the primary failing of the Right is that it mostly lives in an insular media bubble, that once starts rattling around inside it that eventually it becomes a roar and no one inside it -- and this is most of your conservative vote -- can or wants to hear anything outside. This is why, over the years, I've had to point out regularly to various conservative friends of mine that the period between 1998 and 2008 didn't indeed start a period of global cooling, that Intelligent Design isn't actually science, and that Saddam Hussein wasn't ever going to unleash his fleet of nerve gas-carrying balsa wood gliders on Dubuque. You'd tell them once, and then they'd go back into the echo chamber, hear that reality was not reality, and re-emerge. Unfortunately, it took a lost election to drive home that the rightwing media echo chamber is often just full of shit. A long-simmering generational battle in the conservative movement is boiling over after last week’s shellacking, with younger operatives and ideologues going public with calls that Republicans break free from a political-media cocoon that has become intellectually suffocating and self-defeating.
Or, as Peter Sinclair might note, at this year's Thanksgiving, your dittohead brother-in-law might be ready to grapple with reality. The irony is that this comes a day after Nolan Finley's post election column in which he says that nothing should change for the GOP. I also note that the Detroit News is home to Henry Payne's Museum for Half-Formed Thoughts, where I first saw expressed utter certainty in a Romney victory and also a bunch of nonsense about how what happened in Benghazi was worse than Watergate. In fact, that last bit might have come from a Magic Frank column. You wonder why I constantly make fun of those people. The reason is pretty simple. To keep isolated in their echo chamber and to prevent them from polluting the rest of our minds. |
