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Thursday, November 8, 2012

Did the Alternate Reality Bubble that is the Right-Wing Burst?

The Wednesday night after the election, Rachel Maddow on her show on MSNBC addressed the right-wing about their alternative reality and asked them, the same as I have asked my right-wing friends and family, to join the rest of us in the real reality. The same reality that all the other members of the human race are in that inhabit this planet.

Rachel Maddow said: (watch the video at the bottom of the page)

..."Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. And he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States, again. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to over sample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math. And Climate Change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone’s guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the Moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And UN election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism."


Decades ago, the right wing , backed by a lot of corporate money, built itself a massive media machine with the express intent of manipulating public opinion. And it worked! The nonstop flow of scripted propaganda convinced millions of Americans that they were under attack by gays and blacks and immigrants and liberals and terrorists and Muslims (same thing, really) and atheists and possibly even Bigfoot! It worked so well that Karl Rove declared that reality would henceforth be whatever they said it was.

Seriously, he actually said that:

    “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he (Rove) continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Of course, the problem is that reality is not terribly subjective and reportedly has a liberal bias. An orange is an orange. An apple is an apple. Trickle down economics has never worked. Allowing Wall St. to run rampant collapses the economy and insisting that Obama couldn't possibly have won Ohio doesn't actually change that he did.

What we have witnessed is an entire political movement buy into its own bullshit. Perhaps Fox is TOO good at its job because even Karl Rove, Master of the Universe, couldn't seem to grasp an idea that most of the world saw coming weeks and months ago: Romney was going to lose and he lose badly.

If we’re lucky, Maddow is right; the bubble will pop and the GOP will finally start having serious discussions about how to solve our problems. More likely, though, the right will contract on itself in a spasm of ideological purification and internal witch hunts. They will become even more extreme and insular. This will hurt in the short run as the Senate GOP filibustering and House GOP hostage taking will continue. The upshot is that the country has already rejected this fundamentalist attitude and will be repelled by more of the same to such a degree that the GOP will wither and die in a prison of its own making.

Bill Maher on his show on HBO as talked about the Right-Wing bubble and each week he puts another stupid right-wing nut in his bubble to show how idiotic they are. How their alternate reality is so far beyond comprehension.

The unusual delay by Mitt Romney the night Ohio went to Pres. Obama could be justified that he wanted to hear from Ohio officials directly before throwing in the towel. That is understandable. But what was coming out of his campaign to the media was so odd that it was hard to understand what was happening with him. His staff announced that Sen. John McCain was going to talk first to the media. Why would you have the prior loosing presidential candidate speak at your concession speech?  Very, very odd.

Earlier in the day, the Romney campaign told the press that Mitt Romney had only written an acceptance speech and not a concession speech. He was so confident that he would win, there as no need to write a concession speech. Thus when it was obvious that he had lost, he and his staff had to rewrite his acceptance to a concession. If you listen to it carefully, you can tell that the beginning was the rewrite and then it starts to sound more like a acceptance speech and what he was going to do to heal the nation as president.

Mitt lived in this alternate reality, the FOX News reality. He believed in the conservative polls and the statements by Karl Rove, who is the political master mind of the right-wing and such disgraced political hacks as Dick Morris who said that he had a very reliable source, who he could not name, tell him that Romney was going to win by a landslide, taking all the key battleground states.

When FOX announced Pres. Obama won reelection, Karl Rove nearly had a tantrum on FOX, denying that Pres. Obama won Ohio and most like Florida and Iowa. The shock on the FOX News commentators was priceless.

The FOX News crew, Karl Rove and Dick Morris all started to actually believe in their lies and deceit to the point that it was their new reality. They believed that all the polling that showed Pres. Obama ahead in the pre-election polls was skewed and not valid. When Pres. Obama won, all that came crashing down. Did it burst that alternate reality bubble they built around them? Time will only tell, but I don't think so. It is so ingrained in the liars and in the millions that watch them religiously that they will proclaim there was a conspiracy to steal the election from those who were actually trying to steal the election for Romney.

If FOX News finally joins the rest of the world in the actual reality and stop with the lies, then maybe their audience will slowing return to reality also.

Rush Limbaugh said something very interesting, in a tweaked way of admission of lying. He too had been proclaiming that Mitt Romney would win by a landslide. The day after, he rambled on and on and to address his statement of that landslide win he proclaimed, he said he never said it privately to anyone. Just ask his brother and other personal associates. WHAT!  You lie to your audience, but to keep your credibility to you ditto head audience you tell them that you really didn't believe what you told them, so please continue to believe in what he is telling you now. Is that just crazy? If his audience accepts that, then they are so lost in that alternate reality that they will accept anything he says. That is very dangerous when you have millions of people following you like you are a prophet.


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