Rohirrim
11-10-2012, 02:10 AM
Great article by Frank Rich in New York magazine captures the Wonderland inhabited by America's Right Wing. What amazes me is that they don't see it. They've learned absolutely nothing from this election. Like most fundamentalists, when challenged by reality they simply double-down on their faith based lunacy. As the writer points out, the Right leads this ominous new movement of "intellectual nihilism," selling to the American people that there is no such thing as facts, or science, or truth, and if such things do exist, they are at minimum, suspicious, and at worst, meaningless.
Fact checking doesn't matter. The truth doesn't matter. Remember Bush and Cheney's absolute disdain for truth? Now it's been encoded into the Right's basic operating principles. Romney had no compunction about telling out and out lies that were easily, and often, disproved as soon as he uttered them. I hate to bring up the Nazis, it's so cliched, but hey, does anybody see a correlation here? Walter Sobchak was wrong when he said, "No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of." There is something to be afraid of. How do you govern when almost half of the electorate disdains reality?
Noonan’s revealing summation of her thought process was this: “Is it possible this whole thing is playing out before our eyes and we’re not really noticing because we’re too busy looking at data on paper instead of what’s in front of us? Maybe that’s the real distortion of the polls this year: They left us discounting the world around us.” Thus is the post-fact worldview of today’s GOP boiled down to its essence. It assumes that any “data on paper” must be distorted, and yet doesn’t look at what is in front of its very own eyes either. Otherwise, Noonan might have wondered if the neighborhood in Florida with Romney signs, not Obama ones, was not representative of either Florida or the country but was instead a white enclave. Otherwise, Noonan’s fellow conservative honchos might not have taken until November 6, 2012, to recognize that you can’t alienate every minority group in the country (blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, gays)—not to mention the majority group, women—and hope to win a national election. It’s not as if these rapidly changing demographics have been classified information. Bill O’Reilly’s astonished Election Night revelation that “the white Establishment is now the minority” was almost pathetic in its tardiness. Next to him, Rove, and Noonan, even Pat Buchanan was ahead of the curve.
The rude jolt administered by the election does not mean that the GOP will now depart from its faith-based view of reality—though it will surely heed Laura Ingraham’s post-election call for changing “the language of dealing with Latinos.” (Presumably Marco Rubio—¡se habla español!—will lead the karaoke.) No sooner did Obama win reelection than Charles Krauthammer laid down the new party line for denying reality, asserting that the president had “no mandate” despite his large victory in the Electoral College and his clear-cut margin in the popular vote (a victory not achieved by modern presidents as varied as JFK in 1960 and George W. Bush in 2000). Two days after the election, Rove was already blaming the defeat in part on “the anonymous New York Times headline writer” who supposedly twisted Romney’s suicidal stand on the auto-industry bailout and the “hotel employee with a cell-phone camera” who had the gall to capture Romney’s candid take on the “47 percent.”
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/gop-denial-2012-11/
Fact checking doesn't matter. The truth doesn't matter. Remember Bush and Cheney's absolute disdain for truth? Now it's been encoded into the Right's basic operating principles. Romney had no compunction about telling out and out lies that were easily, and often, disproved as soon as he uttered them. I hate to bring up the Nazis, it's so cliched, but hey, does anybody see a correlation here? Walter Sobchak was wrong when he said, "No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of." There is something to be afraid of. How do you govern when almost half of the electorate disdains reality?
Noonan’s revealing summation of her thought process was this: “Is it possible this whole thing is playing out before our eyes and we’re not really noticing because we’re too busy looking at data on paper instead of what’s in front of us? Maybe that’s the real distortion of the polls this year: They left us discounting the world around us.” Thus is the post-fact worldview of today’s GOP boiled down to its essence. It assumes that any “data on paper” must be distorted, and yet doesn’t look at what is in front of its very own eyes either. Otherwise, Noonan might have wondered if the neighborhood in Florida with Romney signs, not Obama ones, was not representative of either Florida or the country but was instead a white enclave. Otherwise, Noonan’s fellow conservative honchos might not have taken until November 6, 2012, to recognize that you can’t alienate every minority group in the country (blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, gays)—not to mention the majority group, women—and hope to win a national election. It’s not as if these rapidly changing demographics have been classified information. Bill O’Reilly’s astonished Election Night revelation that “the white Establishment is now the minority” was almost pathetic in its tardiness. Next to him, Rove, and Noonan, even Pat Buchanan was ahead of the curve.
The rude jolt administered by the election does not mean that the GOP will now depart from its faith-based view of reality—though it will surely heed Laura Ingraham’s post-election call for changing “the language of dealing with Latinos.” (Presumably Marco Rubio—¡se habla español!—will lead the karaoke.) No sooner did Obama win reelection than Charles Krauthammer laid down the new party line for denying reality, asserting that the president had “no mandate” despite his large victory in the Electoral College and his clear-cut margin in the popular vote (a victory not achieved by modern presidents as varied as JFK in 1960 and George W. Bush in 2000). Two days after the election, Rove was already blaming the defeat in part on “the anonymous New York Times headline writer” who supposedly twisted Romney’s suicidal stand on the auto-industry bailout and the “hotel employee with a cell-phone camera” who had the gall to capture Romney’s candid take on the “47 percent.”
http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/gop-denial-2012-11/