In answer to Jonathan Cohn, the explanation is that the Republicans got high on their own supply. This is mainly a new phenomenon. In the past, the right surely exaggerated the threat of communism, but who would honestly want to live in a communist country? It might sound good on paper, but it never worked well in practice. So, even if the right did convince itself that there were fifth column communists hiding under every desk, they had a point about the lack of freedom and opportunity in communist systems.
What we’re seeing now is different. Whether it’s climate science denialism, anti-Keynesian lunacy, irrational hatred of ObamaCare, the obsession with fake scandals like Fast & Furious, Solyndra, and Benghazi, or the birth certificate fascination, the right is sending out a hydrant of bullshit to their base and then consuming it themselves and actually internalizing it as the truth and then going ahead and believing it.
They opposed ObamaCare, but they would have happily voted for it if Romney had won the 2008 primary and election. They decided to oppose everything Obama wanted to do before he was even inaugurated, and that necessitated that they turn RomneyCare into the second coming of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was a grand exercise in self-delusion, and now they are full and truly deluded. They are basically clinically insane at this point, and they drove themselves crazy.
Look no farther than the debt ceiling for proof of this. If the Republican Party were a person, it would have to be put on a ventilator because it is too brain-damaged to operate its lungs. It literally has lost the ability to make the basic decisions needed to keep this country alive.
Some days it is genuinely hard to tell what they believe in, other than resentment. It is like dealing with a bunch of schizophrenics whose sense of self shifts wildly every few minutes.
These people are in need of a mass intervention plus medication. The intervention ought to be the American people throwing them out of office. The meds can start with a regular course of Zyprexa and Xanax, and in extreme cases, horse tranquilizers
This is so true. We are losing fights to a brain-dead guy on a ventilator. That is perhaps why certain segments of the online left are feeling so hopeless.
The problem is that we’re Siamese Twins. The government needs both parties to agree to do things like pay our bills. At a minimum, we’re forced to carry around their dead weight, but they don’t even make it that easy.
That’s a great metaphor. We are conjoined (more PC, Boo!) twins, and our sibling is addicted to crack.
It’s not just that he doesn’t care about paying bills; he’s desperate for another fix. And it’s in our bloodstream, now …
In our bloodstream:
Just saw that at, er … somewhere. Eschaton, maybe.
Then Constitutional convention time. And before you say that republicans would insert madness into the document, how many of their ideas actually meet the 75% threshold to get in there?
Motivated minorities roll apathetic minorities all the time.
Who do you think would pack the Convention? Pack the ratifying conventions? We already know who has the state legislatures covered.
The median voter who actually shows up for special elections is the very person who will be drawn to the convention process like flies to shit.
Assuming the people going into the process are rational actors with the country’s best interest in heart is very dangerous — and completely unsupported by any evidence.
So what on earth do we do?
Pray. Or appeal to the worst in people. The party that appeals to the worst in people begins every campaign a half-a-lap ahead.
The inherent depravity of mankind doesn’t always win, but it always covers the spread.
You can bet against Vegas and win. You can bet against St. Augustine and win. But you can’t bet against St. Augustine and Vegas and win.
I will cover all my bases by praying that we’ll soon start to appeal to the worst in people.
I fell sorry for you that you think that humanity has an inherent depravity and that that feature of humanity always wins. it’s not a fact, it’s an opinion or belief; I do not hold that belief.
You don’t have to hold it. You also don’t have to give your assent to water freezing at 32º F. either.
ok now you are in fundamentalist territory, presenting your belief as on the same level as science.
Pray??? What then??? Sacrifice a goat?
Prayer isn’t the fucking answer. The only thing that will fix this is for people to get off their asses and get involved in the process. In large part, we have gotten what we deserve in our governance. Now we are so far in the damn hole that we’re not sure we can even see daylight.
How do we get our people off their asses in sufficiently greater number than the Republicans get their people off their asses?
People get off their asses when you appeal to the worst in them.
They do? That’s not what gets me off my ass. If you want to talk about the left wing of the possible, is this really the best we can do?
It’s not mid-term elections, if it happens it’s the big time. Bigger than presidential. The biggest thing that’s happened in national governance in a centuries, if not since the founding.
Or if you want to put your hair out for a moment, consider a convention to propose amendments. It requires 34 state legislatures to demand it, and 38 states would still have to ratify any amendments which would guard against your fears.
It’s a glorified referendum. Where are the personalities? What’s the narrative?
It’s a glorified referendum. Where are the personalities? What’s the narrative?
I have no doubt personalities would emerge from that meeting. But the narrative? If this is done it’s going to be done over the objections of the establishment. That conflict is your narrative right there.
Vintage Booman:
If the Republican Party were a person, it would have to be put on a ventilator because it is too brain-damaged to operate its lungs.
Love it.
Dumbest idea ever seems quite popular in Republican circles.
Speaking of dumb ideas: ” The group is designing a symbolic “Obamacare card” that college students can burn during campus protests.”
Umm, whut? They seriously think they can organize “campus protests” and get students (well, maybe the Young Republicans) to burn symbolic cards? That’s not even dumb, it’s delusional.
Doesn’t Burr fear the primary? Alas, I disagree with you on one point, Boo. Even if Romney had been elected, there was no way the Republicans were going to reform health care. Kristol convinced them not to give ground to Clinton and this time around he said, “With Obamacare on the ropes, there will be a temptation for opponents to let up on their criticism, and to try to appear constructive, or at least responsible. My advice, for what it’s worth: Resist the temptation. This is no time to pull punches. Go for the kill.” They’ve been trying ever since.
Has it ever been left alone to try to work it out?
Has anyone?
Not recently.
If an ideology only works in a world where human interference is not a factor then it probably isn’t a sound ideology.
No ideology operates without human interference. But that wasn’t my point which I’m sure you knew.
Left alone?
I think that’s a very odd way of looking at the problems inherent in communism. For starters, it’s supposed to be a worldwide revolution, so they have no interest in leaving others alone.
Next, they are all about upending existing arrangements and taking people’s shit.
Finally, to operate their system, they want to tell you what you can and cannot do, and how you are supposed to do it.
Any system that is that insistent in fucking with people who are minding their own business has no right to ask to be left alone.
As compared with the US that leaves others alone? Hell, we were assisting with the destabilization of communism in Russia before Russians had settled their own revolution. And who are the communist “they” that you claim seek to export their economic system?
Oh, now the “they” you’re talking about is clearly the US.
Oh, crap, am I going to have to explain the general unpopularity of Socialism in One Country among the hard left? I don’t get paid enough for this shit.
Stalinism doesn’t equal communism any more than fascism equals capitalism. Both are extreme variants and share more with extreme religions than the economic systems theorists proposed.
Wonder how well we would have fared had Germany managed to decimate our country as well as it did the USSR?
We really should be careful not to conflate imperialism/militarism with specific espoused economic systems. Or ignore all the governments the US has toppled or assisted in toppling over the past sixty-five years in favor of authoritarian governments serving the wealthy.
That’s a rather spectacular missing of the point since your idea of communism closely aligns with Stalin’s.
.
And you divined that from what? Not from anything I’ve written here or anywhere. I have nothing good to say about that man or his dictatorship. Although he did come him handy to defeat that other madman to his west.
From your idea that communism could succeed if tried in one locality rather than globally. That was Stalin’s innovation. You are demonstrating a total ignorance of Marxism-Leninism.
Now this is turning into name-calling. I hardly think that ‘localism’ is Stalin’s signature contribution to communism.
Though it also seems pretty clear that there is something about the theory of communism that turns actually-existing-communism into mass-murdering totalitarian regimes on a scale never before witnessed.
Unless you count colonialism. That was almost, though not quite, the same scale of genocidal activity. Belgium, for example. Though the whole exercise of ‘who was the most murderous’ strikes me as a bit ghoulish. My uncles were all communists, which meant to them that they fought for labor rights, women’s rights, one joined the Abraham Lincoln brigade, and they were Jews. It’s impossible to know if communism would’ve developed into something less genocidal in Latin America, say, in the same way that capitalism (arguably) developed less-homicidally post-massacre-based-colonialism, if not for the CIA toppling anyone vaguely leftist and replacing with murderous scum. So the argument isn’t really worth having.
Personally, I’m more interested in reading about what communism brought to capitalism: the effect of class consciousness, labor laws, that sorta thing. Which capitalist countries are most ‘communist-influenced’ today? What do they do right, that we do wrong? WHat do they do wrong that we do right?
Is it true that, barring an external class-based threat like Communism, there is no reason for plutocrats to consider making any compromises?
As compared with the US that leaves others alone?
BooMan raises point Marie can’t answer.
Marie responds with “Hey, look over there! Mohammed Mossedegh!”
And who are the communist “they” that you claim seek to export their economic system?
Uh…the Russian communists? You know, the ones who spent sixty years working to export their economic and political system?
Let’s ask the Vietnamese, Koreans, Chinese, Albanians, Poles, and Afghans whether the Soviets sought to export their economic system.
J, Edgar Hoover couldn’t have said it better. Come to think of it, those were his talking points.
But capitalism is also supposed to be a worldwide revolution of “free markets”, so they have no interest in leaving others alone.
Next, capitalists are upending existing arrangements and taking people’s shit.
Finally, to operate their system, capitalists want to tell you what you can and cannot do, and how you are supposed to do it? Ever been employed? Ever lived in a red state?
Any system that is insistent in fucking with people who are minding their own business has not right to ask to be left alone.
Interesting that projection.
Small-c communism has been practiced by small local societies for quite some time. It doesn’t have many of these characteristics.
Cap-C Communism is best known in English-speaking countries through Friedrich Engels’s English translation of the Communist Manifesto (written for the 1848 revolution in Germany) that was done after Marx’s death. And through the so-called “socialist” revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam, which are very different from each other. Most folks today look at all of these as really state-capitalist in their operation. For all the tons of ink spilled over the last century and a half, there really isn’t a clear vision of what would constitute communism in a large-scale society.
In the context of US history, socialist and communist movements sparked the abolition movement, the labor movement, the women’s movement, and the civil rights movement but were very soon moderated and co-opted by political parties. And became the basis of reform. Especially the reform of the New Deal.
That creative force in US politics was amputated by efforts beginning with the Wilson administration and culminating in the Red Scare of the 1940s. A key actor in that effort was J. Edgar Hoover and the Americanism and Capitalism curriculum required of public schools from the 1950s onward.
The failure of the markets in 2008 has cause many folks to revisit Marx’s writings and look at them beyond the battle lines of Marxists’ and J. Edgar Hoover’s standard tropes.
Time to loosen up the boundaries of political and economic thinking in the US, don’t you think? The conventional models have failed to deliver. The Cold War is over; capitalism won and then proceeded to drive itself into the ditch.
We need some alternative that are not some Third Way type cover of differences but looking at why we keep repeating the same routines and getting the same lousy results. Without tossing out sixty-year-old red herrings.
While “small c communism” may not be aggressive in spreading itself, the subject was the Soviet Union, which most certainly was aggressive in its promotion of global communist revolution.
I would argue that has more to do with the political behavior of self-perceived empires than it does with the ideology that forms the civil religion of those empires.
In the particular case of Russian communism, that’s certainly true. The continuity in foreign policy between the Russian Empire and the USSR is really striking.
And yet, we can’t just ignore that both Marx’s works and the theories of Lenin both promoted global revolution quite heavily. Nor can we ignore the deliberate efforts of the Moscow Communists to take control of the Internationals.
Exporting revolution is a core plank of the philosophy.
It’s the way state capitalists behave.
Marx promoted global revolution because he saw that the global extension of capital would use arbitrage of labor costs to impoverish workers. It was the global nature of capitalism and its forcible export through imperialism that produced this response.
And yes, the Moscow Communists did try to control the Internationals much to much controversy in the communist and socialist movement. They were the inheritors of the Russian empire. And Mao did the same as an inheritor of a Chinese empire that had been invaded by the West. (Well, as much as China can be invaded.) Castro’s Cuba was a protectorate of the Soviet Union and North Korea remains a protectorate of China.
Castro’s export was nationalist revolutions to break the imperial hold of the US, which obviously played to the Soviet empire’s advantage. North Korea is essentially a buffer for China, like Eastern Europe was for the Soviet empire. Geopolitics was more important than philsophy.
Exporting “freedom” is one plank of the US empire’s philosophy and a plank of its civil religion. Exporting “free enterprise” and “free trade” became the replacements for “containing Communism” after the Cold War ended.
Actually the criticism of capitalism is much more developed in the philosophy of Marx than is more than an outline of what comes next. The Commmunist Manifesto predated the bulk of Marx’s work and very much more a polemic than a philosophy. Lenin pretty much winged it as far as what a revolution looked like. And essential mirrored imperialism in its exporting of revolution. Another become a dragon to fight a dragon fallacy.
The problem Marx apparently tried to answer was how did revolutions based on liberty, equality, brotherhood turn out to produce none of those. That is still a fruitful analysis to undertake, once one’s curiosity outstrips one’s cynicism.
Nope — the subject was “small c communism” — Booman changed the subject when I challenged him.
Ahem: It might sound good on paper, but it never worked well in practice.
Since, as you just wrote, “True Communism” has never really been tried, and we’re talking about countries that were communist in practice, I’m afraid not.
You are a bald-faced LIAR!
“Since, as you just wrote [lie #1], “True Communism” [lie #2] has never really been tried [lie #3]..”
Back to ignoring you.
My quote is a lie.
Got it.
Go on, ignore me as much as you want. I’m still going to point out when you bullshit.
I missed putting in the part about capitalism not being a popular name for the Western economic system, thus the euphemism “free market” system—until Malcolm Forbes branded himself and his magazine as a “Capitalist Tool”. That branding change co-incided with the election of Ronald Reagan.
And the fact that the conservative movement’s model for seizing power was based on what they perceived the Communist Party did in Russia and then in, in their words, “nation after nation”. Becoming a dragon to fight a dragon has a nasty habit of being dysfunctional.
So the GOP lemmings are not that much different from the enforced Communist Party of the Soviet Union lemmings in the Stalinist period or the Red Guards during Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
But there are folks who vote GOP who are not among those lemmings. So don’t take those PVI numbers as iron-clad.
Jesus Christ. Throwing Hoover in my face?
Are you serious?
Are you seriously just avoiding the death-toll and totalitarian butchery of Stalin and Mao and accusing critics of throwing out red herrings?
J. Edgar Hoover? Why don’t you try Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov.
And please give it a rest with the small-c communism. We are not discussing some commune. We are discussing the right-wing’s obsession with the threat of communism during the 20th-Century and whether it had more merit than some Donald Trump press conference.
I am aware of Jesus’s saying, “why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own?” But let’s not be ridiculous. The only thing Soviet Communism had in common with the American hard left was that they were both wrong about the merits of Soviet Communism. That meant both that the right was wrong to be so obsessive and that the the left embarrassed itself by not seeing clearly how awful Chinese and Soviet Communism was for the people who lived there.
Well, that was exactly your formulation.
I am not avoiding the death-toll of any of the 20th Century, which in wars and totalitarianism maybe numbered 700 million dead.
The right-wing used the fear of communism to defend businesses against organized labor, bigots against desegregation, to keep women “in their place”, to carry out a purge of homosexuals in government, and to put the leaders of those groups who were in no way communist into jail or to tar their reputations. Yes, there were significant people who refused to see how awful Chinese and Soviet Communism were. But even those who saw and criticized were tarred with the same brush, were blacklisted, were denied employment, and marginalized from political debate. You yourself profiled the Oliver Stone history of Henry Wallace.
The right-wing however has a blind spot for Richard Nixon’s destabilization of Cambodia which let loose the gates of hell of the Pol Pot regime. Just because Sihanouk sought neutrality. And the Bush family’s financial deals with Nazi Germany.
The right-wing fixation on Communism in the 1960s had two purposes–capitalize on the anxiety about the Cold War by arguing for unconditional surrender, just like World War II and more importantly using the perceived tactics of Communism as a fifth column movement to subvert the US government. The putsches in Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina very much follow that model.
The right wing’s obsession with and abuse of anti-communism does not change the reality of the totalitarian nightmare that was actual, existing communism, and does rebut criticism of that system.
Yeah, J. Edgar Hoover thought the Soviet system was rotten. So did a lot of people.
A better way of putting it is that by making the far left equal to treason, the right was able to weaken the more mainstream left. And that is a historical reality. The collapse of the far left also reduced pressure and led to a rightward lurch in the post-Cold War period. That’s also true.
But that has nothing to do with the merits of actual communism as practiced by dozens of countries in the 20th-Century, with uniformly deplorable results. This is especially true if you insist on caring about things things like the rule of law and personal privacy.
I agree with this formulation of what you were trying to say.
I’m not sure there was enough collective decision-making in any of the self-proclaimed Communist parties or governments by those parties to argue they were actually in form communist. And the few attempts at the grassroots to live out the vision were soon cut off by the oligarchies of the parties. I only wish I could see what historian a couple hundred years from now make of the whole thing.
Just so you are clear, I’m still pretty much a Jeffersonian democrat with a little Tom Paine thrown in in my philosopy. And neither of those guys had a great time with walking the walk.
Just so I am clear, if it wasn’t for Hitler, then Stalin and Mao would represent the apogee of horrid political behavior in the history of mankind. So, the people who pointed that out during the 20th Century should be respected and the people who denied it should be denigrated.
What was problematic was the treatment of left-wing governments in the third world as synonymous with totalitarian communism. Anyone who wanted to control their own resources was treated as a communist. As AG likes to point out, the Dulles Brothers did some real damage.
But they played patty-cake when you compare them to Stalin and Mao. They were girl scouts.
As AG likes to point out, the Dulles Brothers did some real damage.
But they played patty-cake when you compare them to Stalin and Mao. They were girl scouts.
I’m sure that’s real comforting to Archbishop Romero and a whole lot of Central and South America.
Shall we compare the Guatemalan coup to The Great Purge or the Cultural Revolution?
A better way of putting it is that by making the far left equal to treason, the right was able to weaken the more mainstream left. And that is a historical reality. The collapse of the far left also reduced pressure and led to a rightward lurch in the post-Cold War period. That’s also true.
Which a lot of Twitter armchair politicos(aka O-bots) don’t seem to understand.
Amazing that in 2013 anyone could post such a list of perceived deficiencies of communism without even noting the irony.
I like to be very specific, and use terms like “Maoism,” “Soviet communism” and “Marxist-Leninsim” specifically to avoid these types of disputes about small communes and theoretical history, and talk about the actual, existing communism that people are opposed to.
You never hear anyone talk about “real fascism,” which would have been so much better than the actual fascism we fought in the 40s, but Trotsky and Che Guavara woulda coulda shoulda delivered a decent, humane government.
Sure they would.
The utopian version of my dystopian vision of the future basically ends up being communist. Technological advances make it possible to:
This essentially eliminates scarcity and the basis of capitalism. Best case scenario, except for the small amount of effort needed to keep these systems running and basic food stuffs… maybe. Medical work probably also remains. Subsistence becomes a trivial matter. Ownership and gaining wealth become increasingly meaningless because anyone can have anything at just about any time. If no one owns anything, everyone owns everything.
If the GOP were a person, I would advocate euthanasia.
Right.
Oh god no. That’s crazy talk. The GOP would never in a million years endorse the expansion of Medicaid or the lavishing of subsidized premiums on the working class. In all their time in power, they never even feinted at any such thing. And the states that have rejected expanding Medicaid never endorsed the program in the first place, let alone tried to make it work for its citizens.
I can’t believe that I have to agree with sherifffruitfly(!!!), but I don’t get your inclination to flee from the elephant in the room at every turn, Booman. Barack Obama has irreparably tainted government. He’s black. And he hangs out with other black people. And he campaigns in black communities and claims to voice and represent their needs and concerns. And he hires other black people. And gays and commies and all the undesirables.
This is white flight. Except you can bail on a city and move to the suburbs, but expatriating from the country is a different kettle of fish. That’s why they can’t bring themselves to even fund the government. Because that endorses its tainted existence.
They don’t want him to play favorites, as is his right. They don’t want him to empower new stakeholders. They don’t want to be forced to pay their respects. They don’t want to celebrate his success on behalf of the nation. And they certainly don’t ever, ever, ever want to owe him anything.
On a different note, it kind of irritates me to see Benghazi listed as a fake scandal. Like enough time has passed now where can’t we admit that it was a legitimate intelligence SNAFU?
Our embassies get attacked sometimes, whatever. They’re prominent targets providing vital functions. But it wasn’t a real embassy yet. It was a CIA operation with one job in that city to keep tabs on the proliferation of weapons among traffickers and extremist groups. Obviously they didn’t do such a great job. Their security was infiltrated and then a bunch of jihadists torched and mortared the place intermittently for hours on end. It was a miracle only three people died.
Frankly all the Republican circus managed to accomplish was to take the heat off the CIA and avoid their own legislative culpability in shafting the State Department’s funding.
That’s not a scandal, that’s a tragedy.
Was not 9/11 scandalous? Things can be tragic and still raise questions.
Have you ever heard anyone call 9/11 a ‘scandal?’ A scandal requires political malfeasance, doesn’t it?
And Bushian administration idiocy regarding the threat OBL posed, or the immediate lies churned out for political fodder in the aftermath aren’t political malfeasance?
Not in our mainstream political culture, no. Have you heard anyone refer to ‘The 9/11 Scandal?’
That’s simply not how it’s identified. It’s like the Pearl Harbor Scandal. But the right is trying to create the Benghazi Scandal, instead of treating it as we’d normally treat tragic events that arose from a combination of bad actors and insufficient preparation.
It’s a war, Bazooka. A real, live shooting war.
Sometimes in a war the other side lands a punch. it doesn’t mean anyone on our side did anything wrong.
It’s a fake scandal because from day 1 the right acted like it was an impeachable offense worse than Watergate-exponent-Iran-Contra. Rather than an ordinary intelligence SNAFU the level of which happened dozens of times under the last 3 GOP presidents.
They’re lemmings.
From 1997-2001 they were all about killing the Department of Commerce and Education. Then, suddenly, they give us No Child Left Behind. They spent decades bitching about Medicare, letting it wither on the vine, but then they gave us Part D prescription drug coverage. They told us deficits don’t matter until the moment the Democrats were back in charge. They said Bosnia and Kosovo were overreach and gave us Iraq.
If Mitt Romney had wanted Massachusetts health care for the whole nation, they would have gone for it. Maybe he would have had to bribe some people, as Dubya needed to do for Plan D, but they’d get it done.
You make my point with the latter half of your argument.
I don’t see how I could be making your point for you when I call it white flight. That’s the furthest thing from a “mainly new phenomenon.”
Just ask the black mayors of the 20th century or the reconstructed southern governments of the 1870s.
You’re making my point that it is based in opposition to Obama, not any kind of pure ideology.
But Obamacare is their worst nightmare writ large, not some minor policy dispute.
It’s a black guy using government power to take hundreds of billions of (white) dollars to create a brand new entitlement. There’s a reason they were so quick to call it reparations.
This is the furthest thing from a new phenomenon.
Yeah, and when a Republican proposes it, it’s fine.
They want to operate like the powerless, liberated-from-governing opposition in a parliamentary system, but enjoy and exploit the protections the American system provides to legislative minorities.
That is the absolutely best point that you have made about the conservative movement in the past month, six months, year.
That is exactly one of the things about the conservative movement that William Buckley, Anglophile-in-chief, tried to get going–an ideologically-based party system to replace the messy big tent of the Wall Street, small town Main Street Republican party.
A funny thing happened during that ideological formation–the Southern strategy, then the Moral Majority, then the Tea Party — each wave seeking the ideological control of an ideological party.
Actually most politicians would like to operate as opposition back-benchers, re-elected for their rhetorical ability to take pot shots. It’s the easiest way to go. Just look at Goehmert, Bachmann, even Grayson.
Thanks.
I totally stole it somewhere.
That’s OK. We’re all a lot like Joe Biden in that respect.
I recently read an article, maybe on TPM, that Alan Grayson is actually operating very differently this time around. He’s submitting amendments to bill and getting Republican buy-in.
Being a politician who actually gives a crap must be difficult. You have to decide when to go out in front and yell to be heard, when to take on the crap that’s thrown your way, and when (and how) to actually make a practical difference. It seems that Grayson’s at least trying.
Amazing what can be accomplished if you stop listening to Matt Stoller.
And that’s why they don’t “need” to win national elections.
This is where it is going next.
Charlie Braxton, BET: Commentary: Justice for The Quitman 10+2 Is Justice for All
thanks for posting this.
Whether it’s climate science denialism, anti-Keynesian lunacy, irrational hatred of ObamaCare, the obsession with fake scandals like Fast & Furious, Solyndra, and Benghazi, or the birth certificate fascination, the right is sending out a hydrant of bullshit to their base and then consuming it themselves and actually internalizing it as the truth and then going ahead and believing it.
I’ve been noticing that for a few years now. First they make something up, then they all repeat in unison, and then they all believe it because they just heard it confirmed by very credible sources.
This phenomenon started on the right blogosphere, but it’s taken over the Republican Party apparatus. Hold on tight, everyone.
And there’s a new bunch of grifters looking to make up new stuff called Groundswell (which partners with Breitbart.com). The craziness is not ending until the mainstream media get bored from it.
You’re both right – and the mainstream media won’t get bored with it because frankly most of them buy into about 80% of it. Oh, they know not to listen to the birther shit, but that’s just because culturally the Washington Frat/Sorority media clique dismisses any and all conspiracy theories.
However, other GOP stuff like Social-Security-is-Broke or Deficits-are-worse-than-Hitler or Climate-Scientists-are-Alarmist or Govt-Spending-on-Minorities-has-exploded-under-Obama or School-Unions-are-Evil … well, most of the mainstream media people with influence totally buy into all of that. But mostly, the one thing that unites almost all of the highly paid punditry is a deep passion for military action – something else they share with the GOP rank and file (well, except for the few dozen real libertarians in their midst).
Another take on the same subject:
Rick Perlstein, The Baffler: The Long Con
Don’t see a date on it; it could be a blast from the past.