Creating A More Congenial Reality

.....or at least one that fits your politics

Rush Limbaugh, the Oracle of the Right, came out today with the most convoluted tirade he's done in a while: Obama and his team are using FACTS to suppress the voters in the upcoming election.

"So now it’s not a referendum on Obama. It’s a choice between two guys, which means, of course, whatever Romney says matters. I’m here to tell you, folks, you have got to stay bucked up. The effort to depress you and keep you home, I’ve never seen it like this before in my life."
http://www.politicususa.com/rush-limbaugh-claims-obama-facts-polls-suppress-republican-vote.html

That would seem to fit in with the Romney team which announced last week that they were NOT going to let their campaign be "dictated by fact checkers." Yes..they only put a damper on things....

I read an interesting article that seems to put in perspective this alternative reality seemingly accepted without question on the Right. Republicans would not be Republicans today without it.

"My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality.  To preserve that worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their “just” desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried to point out that the world didn’t actually work that way.  I think this shows why Republicans put so much effort into “ creat[ing] our own reality ,” into fostering distrust of liberals, experts, scientists, and academics, and why they won’t let a campaign “ be dictated by fact-checkers ” (as a Romney pollster put it).  It explains why study after study shows -- examples here, here, and here -- that avid consumers of Republican-oriented media are more poorly informed than people who use other news sources or don’t bother to follow the news at all."

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/political-awakening-republican-i-had-viewed-whole-swaths-country-and-world-second?page=0%2C0

Aside from all the headaches this creates for the voters in this election, it also creates a more dire problem in the long run: too many people rely on the media to give them background on which they will base their decisions. OR they just sit there, soak in all the mistruths, and perpetuate the falsehoods.

"Whether all this helps the Republican Party in 2012 is of less consequence than the larger danger it poses to America. Democracy cannot thrive when truth becomes irrelevant. To the contrary, history teaches that this is how demagogues take root."

http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/reich/article/How-Republicans-reinforce-campaign-of-lies-3850026.php

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?