Monday, March 19, 2012

Update: I'm Not Alone

I was beginning to think I was living in my own alternative reality, that I was looking at things differently than most intelligent people. But alas, I found I'm not alone. Today I read this:


Paul Krugman         NY Times Opinion Pages

The Mighty Wurlitzer in Acton

Read the comments on today’s column and you’ll find many, many references to the alleged fact that the estimated cost of the ACA has risen by a trillion dollars — which happens to be a complete lie.
The remarkable thing is how quickly the lie has become part of what everyone on the right knows. And even if some of the people citing this “fact” could somehow be convinced that it wasn’t so, they’d brush it off, because there’s such a pattern of liberal duplicity, demonstrated by lots of other supposed facts — all of which are also lies.
This is the reality of modern American politics: a large and cohesive bloc of voters lives in an alternative reality, fed fake facts by Fox and Rush — whom they listen to out of tribal affiliation — and completely unaware that it’s all fiction.
It’s also, by the way, why attempts at outreach by Obama will fail. Even if he gives the GOP 95 percent of what it wants, these voters will never hear about it; they will still know, just know, that he’s a radical bent on destroying America.

The problem remains: how do we combat this perception? Are we doomed to be overwhelmed by the radicals on the Right and their well organized (and funded) propaganda machine? Have people lost all common sense? Or are we too far down the rabbit hole these days to pull ourselves out?



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