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Politico's VandeHei and Allen report on GOP cries of "blatant bias," adoringly quoting Haley Barbour and Ari Fleischer and observing that "Republicans cry 'bias' so often it feels like a campaign theme:"

It is, largely because it fires up conservatives and diminishes the punch of legitimate investigative or narrative journalism. But it also is because it often rings true, even to people who don't listen to Rush Limbaugh...

Not that it is true, mind you--just that it supports their persecution complex. At American Prospect, Paul Waldman points out that working the refs continues to work for the Right:

VandeHei and Allen's article is a masterpiece of unsupported claims, false equivalences, speculations about what news stories "imply," and Republican complaints taken not as complaints but as truths. [...]

Let's examine this, shall we? The bias charge, they say, "often rings true." But is it true? Well, that's a complex question, so why bother trying to answer it at all? It feels true, so that's good enough. The "imbalance" in coverage, which has been alleged by Republicans but we don't know is actually true, is nevertheless doing "unmistakable damage to Romney." Really? Any evidence for that? Nah, but it sure feels true.

Media Matters explains what 'liberal bias' claims are really about, snarking "Republicans? Alleging liberal media bias? Pardon me while I find some pearls to clutch:"

The conceit behind this whole affair is that Haley Barbour and Ari Fleischer told Allen and VandeHei that "liberal bias" is real and it's devastating, and Allen and Vandehei believe them...

People who level the "bias" charge aren't looking for balance. They're not interested in journalistic good practices and they certainly don't give a damn where a story appears in the Washington Post. They're looking to game the refs.

It's all about discouraging journalists from turning a critical eye on Republicans and conservatives, lest they be tarred with the "liberal bias" epithet.

Salon calls the Politico article a "deeply stupid piece" that "could be the latest installment of Breitbart's whiny, posthumous 'Nobody Vetted Obama So We Have to Do It, By Printing Stuff We Know is False!' investigative series." It's useful to remind ourselves that these same "liberal media" outlets haven't given Obama a week of positive coverage in almost a year (h/t: Eric Boehlert), as the conservative "cottage industry" of media grievance "that pays the bills for talk radio, fills endless hours of commentary on Fox News, and produces content for right-wing authors" remains dominant. Pew studied the media from January to early April this year, concluding the following:

Of all the presidential candidates studied in this report, only one figure did not have a single week in 2012 when positive coverage exceeded negative coverage--the incumbent, Democrat Barack Obama. [...]

While Republicans have jockeyed for their party's nomination for the last year, the Democratic president has been hammered with negative press coverage. And it's coverage whose harsh tone has been matched only by its week-in and week-out consistency.

Behold the liberal media.

update (6/1):
James Fallows examines Pew's research into press coverage of Obama and Romney, noting that "At no time in the past year has coverage of President Obama been as positive as that of Governor Romney:"

Indeed, at no time in the past year has it been on-balance positive at all.

You can argue that negative coverage of the administration is justified. You can argue that incumbents are -- and should be -- held to a tougher standard, since they have a record to defend. But you can't sanely argue that the press is in the tank for Obama, notwithstanding recent "false equivalence" attempts to do so.

Politicus USA comments on the latest fact-free factoid floating around the conservative media cesspool, that Obama's consumer protection adviser Elizabeth Warren "is basically a Communist [because] she's a supporter of everything conservatives hate." Of course, as Politicus points out, "most of us know that communist (like Nazi and socialist) is a term conservatives like to throw around without really comprehending what it means:"

And not just the average ignorant Tea Partier but congressmen like Allen West, who is convinced that there are between 78 and 81 Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party.

On the surface, it would seem both West and Carmenker are on agreement: a communist is one who is diametrically opposed to conservative ideology. This is all very Cold War and McCarthyesque and it's no wonder it's an attractive thesis to conservatives. It's a simple appeal - emotional and "patriotic" and it requires little thought - everyone knows that those commies were the enemies of American democracy and since conservatives are "real Americans" communism must be its opposite, right? (remember too that witch-hunts have historically been conservatism's response to people getting uppity and thinking for themselves).

Politicus comments on the factoid's source:

They claim that "For a refreshing and informative change in where you get your news, log on to OneNewsNow.com." If by informative they mean dishonest and misleading, they are apparently spot on and certainly in good company... [...]

Apparently, conservative viewers and readers want to be liberated from the world of facts and from the millstone that is a fact-based universe where fantasy is not allowed to have its way with reality. If one hate-filled group says something the hate-filled news service has to report it and certainly won't violate the precepts of the agreed upon fantasy universe to question it. Why introduce facts when the fantasy is so congenial?

I know that it covers well-trod ground, but the study "What you know depends on what you watch" (PDF) from Farleigh Dickinson shows yet again that NPR listeners are the best-informed, and Fox viewers are the worst-informed:

People who watch MSNBC and CNN exclusively can answer more questions about domestic events than people who watch no news at all. People who only watch Fox did much worse. NPR listeners answered more questions correctly than people in any other category.

As these two graphs indicate, the Fox audience is even less informed (believe it or not) than the no-news audience:

Fox: when you want to know less than nothing.

Chris Mooney writes that "we live at a time when Republican 'Big Lies'...are everywhere," looking at PolitiFact's analyses:

Republicans were overwhelmingly more likely to draw a "false" or even "pants on fire" rating (the worst of all). Out of the ninety-eight politicians' statements that received these dismal ratings, seventy-four were made by Republicans--or 76 percent.

Mooney weighs the suggestion that "PolitiFact is biased against the right" against "another possibility: the left just might be right more often (or the right, wrong more often)." Also interesting is the Washington Post "Fact-Checker" column, where Republicans got nearly three times as many "four Pinocchio" ratings as Democrats. Rather than "liberal bias" among fact-checking organization, Mooney suggests "A potentially simpler explanation for these results:"

...that the fact-checkers are simply doing their job--and Republicans today just happen to be more egregiously wrong. Democrats, meanwhile, are certainly not innocent when it comes to making misleading statements, but their pants are not on fire.

Mooney continues by observing that "psychology... suggests that one's politics are driven partly by one's personality, and Democrats and liberals are simply more open to new information and experiences as well as more tolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty:"

Moreover, this difference has been exacerbated by a well-documented turn toward psychological authoritarianism in the Republican Party over the past four decades. Increasingly, the GOP has become the party of those who are more rigid, less given to compromise, and more inclined to see the world in black and white.

When talking about political polarization, don't just blame Republicans. TNR's William Galston spreads around the blame for the "complex story" of political polarization. He makes two key observations--that the electorate has polarized while the parties have become ideologically homogeneous, and also notes that "conservatives and liberals have come to understand the practice of politics differently:"

Unlike most other Americans, conservatives seem to believe that compromise represents defeat [and] intransigence represents their only hope; never mind the risks.

Big lies - compromise = disaster

Jonah Goldberg [of Liberal Fascism infamy] writes that Chris Mooney's Republican Brain "purports to show that conservatives are, literally by nature, more closed-minded and resistant to change and facts:"

His evidence includes the fact that conservatives are less likely to buy into global warming, allegedly proving they are not only "anti-science" but innately anti-fact, as well. "Politicized wrongness today," he writes "is clustered among Republicans, conservatives and especially Tea Partiers."

"The data might be correct," Goldberg avers, but "the conclusions are beyond absurd."

Oblivious to the anti-factualness of his criticism, Goldberg blunders onward. He parodies scientific analysis as an "algorithmic whirligig" and calls Mooney's research "inherently undemocratic and ... self-serving bigotry that allows liberals to justify their own closed-mindedness on the grounds that Republicans aren't even worth listening to."

Mooney's response points out that Goldberg "extensively misrepresented The Republican Brain:"

He talks about Republicans having "bad brains," as if this is something that I allege. This is both inflammatory and false. I say no such thing.

...it is hard to miss the irony here. Conservatives are reacting defensively to a book about how they react defensively...just as the book predicted they would.

As for Goldberg's latest screed, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, Mother Jones points out the following:

Jonah Goldberg argues that liberals craftily use innocuous-sounding yet hackneyed phrases such as "social justice" and "diversity" to obscure their nefarious intentions. Never mind that issue-framing is nothing new in American politics and that conservatives are pretty darn good at it. And never mind that Goldberg's last book, Liberal Fascism, indulged in the very argument-by-sloganeering that he now decries.

AlterNet's Joshua Holland wonders why the conservative brain is more fearful, and wants us to "Consider for a moment just how terrifying it must be to live life as a true believer on the right:"

Reality is scary enough, but the alternative reality inhabited by people who watch Glenn Beck, listen to Rush Limbaugh, or think Michele Bachmann isn't a joke must be nothing less than horrifying. Research suggests that conservatives are, on average, more susceptible to fear than those who identify themselves as liberals [which] has implications for our political world.

The "nightmarish landscape[of] the world around them" is indeed frightening:

The White House has been usurped by a Kenyan socialist named Barry Soetero, who hatched an elaborate plot to pass himself off as a citizen of the United States - a plot the media refuse to even investigate. This president doesn't just claim the right to assassinate suspected terrorists who are beyond the reach of law enforcement - he may be planning on rounding up his ideological opponents and putting them into concentration camps if he is reelected. He may have murdered a blogger who was critical of his administration, but authorities refuse to investigate. At the very least, he is plotting on disarming the American public after the election, in accordance with a secret deal cut with the UN and possibly with the assistance of foreign troops.

On issues as diverse as immigration, terrorism, violent crime, "sharia law," "death panels," global warming "hoaxes," gay "indoctrination" in sex-ed classes, rampant voter fraud, and the ever-popular "War on Christmas," Holland implores us not to "look at these specters haunting the right with exasperation or amusement, but just consider for a moment how bleak the world looks to those who buy into these ideas." It's hard to be empathetic toward their self-inflicted fantasies when they're burying us under a blizzard of bullshit, but we must try.

In his piece on anti-gay pseudoscience, Mooney examines "the underlying psychology behind how conservatives, especially religious ones, can believe such falsehoods" about same-sex marriage (such as Amendment 1 in North Carolina) and asks "Don't Christian conservatives want to be factually right, and to believe what's true about the world?:"

And shouldn't a proper reading of this research actually come as a relief to them, and help to assuage their concerns about dangerous social consequences of same-sex marriage or civil unions? If only it were that simple. We all want to be right, and to believe that our views are based on the best available information. But in this case, Christian conservatives utterly fail to get past their emotions, which powerfully bias their reasoning.

"Christian conservatives," he observes, "rely on their gut emotions to come up with wrong beliefs:"

Their deep emotional convictions guide the retrieval of self-supporting information that they then use to argue with, to prop themselves up. It isn't about truth, it's about feeling that you're right -- righteous, even.

"In the end," he concludes, "facts are facts -- and emotions and gut instincts are an utterly unreliable way of identifying them:"

We can try to be understanding of people different from us -- even when they're manifestly failing at the same task. But the latest research makes it more untenable than ever to base public policy on gut-driven misinformation.

update (5/3):
Amanda Marcotte contemplates the psychology involved, and asks, "Do they really believe this shit?"

I'm not so sure. I've said it before, but I think it's worth repeating: I think they only "believe" it. Which is to say, there are two kinds of ways people believe something. They have things they believe because they're factually accurate: That it's raining outside, that items dropped will fall, that Barack Obama is President. Then there's stuff that isn't real that people believe: that there's a God in heaven and an afterlife, that miracles happen, ghosts exist. These are things you don't really believe in the same way you believe in truths. It's more that these beliefs are convenient to apply a belief-like approach to, because the stories make you feel good or, more commonly, because joining in the belief connects you to your community.

In the end, she writes, "I don't think they believe-believe this stuff:"

I think they're just confused about the difference between fake belief and real belief, though I think they're highly motivated to be confused about it. After all, that confusion helps generate right wing identity. They may even mistakenly believe it's politically beneficial, though the available evidence shows that it instead causes everyone else to think they're nut jobs.

Republicans--by way of Faux News and the Moonie Times--are claiming that Obama's just-unveiled slogan "FORWARD" is actually a word that has "a long and rich association with European Marxism:"

David Badash ridicules their silly sliming:

Forward is a leadership position in football, basketball, and rugby. The Forward is also a Jewish-American newspaper. Forward is also the name of several towns in Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Forward is also the name of a truck sold in the U.S. by Isuzu. And Forward is the name of an album recorded by American Idol semi-finalist Ayla Brown.

Interesting that Fox News and the Washington Times didn't bother to make those sports, journalism, geographic, automotive, or musical references.

Conservatives' antipathy to the concept of forward progress is instructive, and points toward a new slogan for their standard-bearer-of-the-moment Mitt Romney:

update (1:34pm):
Ron Chusid mocks the manner in which conservatives tremble in fear of moving forward:

To the frightened reactionaries of the right, the priority is avoiding Marxism, despite the fact that (except in their imaginations) there aren't enough supporters of Marxism left to present any threat. To the right wing, liberal ideas such as individual liberty and a market economy which everyone has the opportunity to benefit from, as opposed to oligarchy and plutocracy, are terrifying ideas.

update 2 (5/4):
After further reflection, I have two better solutions:

This one preserves the original "R" as well as reversing the period's position to the wrong end of the word. Also, it makes me chuckle.

So does this one:

In stop CISPA in 5 minutes, Business Insider writes that "if we want to keep the Internet free of over-governance and widespread state surveillance without warrant, opposing CISPA is crucial:"

It has already passed the House and now heads to a Senate vote. Here's a quick action kit you can use to make your voice heard -- in as little as 5 minutes, you can do almost everything you can "reasonably" do to help prevent CISPA from becoming the law of the land.

Educate yourself, sign a petition, call your Senators, and follow the situation online...that's pretty much it.

Can we warn millions of Americans in time? Can we all present massive opposition to CISPA as it is currently worded? Absolutely.

Slate notes that CISPA will flood the US government with more data that it can handle. Leaving aside the "centralized, paternalistic, 'trust us with your personal data' approach," the author notes that CISPA "makes little technological sense given the complexity and growth trends of today's digital networks, systems, and services:"

Over the last decade or so, thoroughly analyzing the world's data to identify potential cyberthreats has gone from difficult to impossible. The volume of digital information has become far too large.

Last year's online data creation and replication amounted to approximately 1.8 trillion gigabytes, and the article notes that "thoroughly analyzing all of that traffic...is simply not possible."

It's also not appropriate in an ostensibly free nation.

...in a rhetorical sense, of course:

H/t to Chris Bowers at DailyKos, who noted that "This may well be the first time a protest movement will air a positive branding ad."

Do you remember the conservative accusation that New York City workers deliberately slowed down blizzard cleanup? An investigation into the allegations "found no evidence of an organized slowdown:"

In fact, the report found, Mr. Halloran had no evidence for his accusation, and his account of conversations with two workers differed sharply from what the workers told investigators.

"In toto," the report said, "Mr. Halloran's information about city employee statements contributed no actual evidence about a possible slowdown."

H/t to Oliver Willis, who summarizes:

It's almost as if conservatives, Republicans, and the conservative media pushed a fraudulent story simply to kick unions in the balls as part of the decades-long attempt to bust unions and screw over working-class people. Wait, that's exactly what happened.

Inconceivable!

Michael JW Stickings writes about Palin's upcoming bus tour, asking "Notice how she's back in the news? Notice how we're writing about her again?"

This is what she wants. This is what she needs. This is what feeds her. Like any celebrity whose time is almost up, she's desperate for more, for the spotlight to shine brightly once more, for all the attention that fame brings. This is why she's back, and why she's dipping her toes into the pool.

And if and when she loses? Well, so what? She'll have been martyred and her admirers will be all the more devoted. And she'll be able to blame the loss on her usual targets, the coastal elites, the "lamestream" media, even the GOP establishment, anyone and everything beyond her bubble of self-aggrandizing delusion.

Newt's spokesweasel Rick Tyler fired a floridly full-bore fusillade against critics of his boss:

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment's cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won't be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

It's ridiculous to suggest that Newt is anything but a Washington insider who makes his own living from distortions and falsehoods, but Rachel Maddow ridiculed the statement as "The Epic of Gingrich" for its overblown heroic rhetoric:

The text has also been adapted into a delightful cartoon (h/t: Alex Pareene at Slate):

(Click here to see the whole thing.)

Here are the beginning and the end of Jon Perr's excellent piece on Republicans rewriting history to credit Dear Leader W with killing bin Laden:

The only thing more predictable than Americans' jubilation over the killing of Osama Bin Laden is the Republican campaign to give George W. Bush credit for it. [...] Bush, after all, shrugged off Bin Laden's escape after the U.S. failure at Tora Bora by proclaiming, "I truly am not that concerned about him." And it was President Obama who as promised tripled American resources in Afghanistan and authorized unilateral strikes without the permission of Pakistan. [...]

It would have been helpful if President Bush had been worried about Osama Bin Laden when it could have made a difference. Bush, after all, responded to the infamous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief (the one Condoleezza Rice later told the 9/11 Commission, "I believe the title was, 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.'") by telling his CIA briefer:

"All right. You've covered your ass, now."

According to one Israeli source years later, it was precisely Bin Laden's ass Bush was focused on. In a review of a 2007 biography of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli paper Ha'aretz included this purported exchange between President Bush and the now-comatose Sharon:

Speaking of George Bush, with whom Sharon developed a very close relationship, Uri Dan recalls that Sharon's delicacy made him reluctant to repeat what the president had told him when they discussed Osama bin Laden. Finally he relented. And here is what the leader of the Western world, valiant warrior in the battle of cultures, promised to do to bin Laden if he caught him: "I will screw him in the ass!"

Whether that story was apocryphal or not, George W. Bush did not screw Osama Bin Laden in the ass. And, sadly for the Republican propaganda machine, he wasn't responsible for killing him, either.

Blue Gal shows where the GOP's historical revisionism may wind up:

Politico reported last night on a "mother lode" of information on al-Qaeda:

Navy SEALs snatched a trove of computer drives and disks during their weekend raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, yielding what a U.S. official called "the mother lode of intelligence."

The special operations forces grabbed personal computers, thumb drives and electronic equipment during the lightning raid that killed bin Laden... [...] The material is being examined at a secret location in Afghanistan.

"Hundreds of people are going through it now," an official said, adding that intelligence operatives back in Washington are very excited to find out what they have.

CNN provided more details:

Among the items taken from the compound were 10 hard drives, five computers and more than 100 storage devices which include disks, DVDs and thumb drives, a senior U.S. official told CNN.

I hope that this intel will enable us to keep overturning the right rocks, and continue neutralizing those who would do us further harm.

I hung this outside my office this morning:

We've paid way too much attention to this non-event.

That is all.

Richard Florida's analysis in The Atlantic of this Gallup poll observed that "Conservatism, at least at the state level, appears to be growing stronger:"

Ironically, this trend is most pronounced in America's least well-off, least educated, most blue collar, most economically hard-hit states. Conservatism, more and more, is the ideology of the economically left behind. The current economic crisis only appears to have deepened conservatism's hold on America's states.

Chauncey DeVega dissented at AlterNet, noting that the survey depended on the slippery notion of self-identifying with a political label:

Conservatives and the Right-wing echo chamber will be crowing about their success in light of Gallup's findings. They will scream that Conservatism is on the march and that Gallup's polling data is a vindication of their ideas. Those who live in the reality based world can easily foil those claims. But, the cries of victory will appeal to the true devotees nonetheless. Sadly, the foot soldiers of Conservatism do not understand that they are winning a Pyrrhic victory, one which indicates a deep and systemic rot in this country, as opposed to a triumph of ideas and values that can lead us through the decline of empire and towards a brave new future.

Donald ("I was a very smart guy") Trump, now a birther conspiracist, was speculating on Faux News last night (h/t: HuffPo) about Obama's birth certificate, stating "there is a doubt as to whether or not" he was born in the US. [There is no doubt, except among those who lack basic reading comprehension or common sense.] Trump says "He doesn't have a birth certificate:"

"He may have [a birth certificate], but there is something on that birth certificate. Maybe religion. Maybe it says he's a Muslim. I don't know. Maybe he doesn't want that. Or he may not have one."

The inanity of manufacturing a religious identity for a newborn is something that Richard Dawkins mentioned in The God Delusion:

A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose--or reject--when she becomes old enough to do so. (p. 382)

[This is, of course, what Obama did: he rejected his largely irreligious upbringing in favor of Christianity.] Birthers are still hunting for a mythical long-form Kenyan birth certificate that will prove not only that Obama is a Marxist/fascist/socialist/radical/Muslim, but that he's also the Antichrist. It's a sad and ultimately fruitless quest, but their loopy theories and lazy forgeries are sometimes entertaining.

In the same interview, by the way, Trump made this announcement:

"I'm opposed to gay marriage [because] I just don't feel good about it."

Well, Mr Trump, perhaps you'd care to explain why your emotions should have any bearing on the legal recognition of other people's marriages. [Like Newt, Trump is on his third wife--so it appears that he's fond of marriage, just not marriage equality.]

Scott Bradner's Network World column mentions McCain's prediction that net neutrality [see here and here] will "stifle innovation, in turn slowing our economic turnaround and further depressing an already anemic job market." Bradner suggests that McCain is "someone has absolutely no idea how the Internet works or what it is used for:"

The only way such an objection makes sense is if you only look at the carriers and assume that they will be worse off if they cannot get a piece of the action for the business that is done over their networks.

A h/t goes to my friend Bill for mentioning the piece by Dave Davies (from Philadelphia station WHYY) about the media rush to judgment over the fake NPR scandal. Based on James O'Keefe's 11-minute version (deceptively edited, it should be noted) of 2 hours of footage, Davies notes that "NPR condemned [NPR exec] Schiller's comments as appalling before anybody at the network had even seen the raw tape:"

Once NPR came out with its hands up, every news organization had the network's surrender on the record, and a narrative was established: A senior NPR executive said horrible things on tape, confirming conservative stereotypes of the network at the worst possible time, forcing NPR into frantic damage control.

Instead of letting wingnuts drive the discourse, Davies suggests a thought experiment:

Suppose NPR had taken a few more hours before offering a substantive comment, then said something different: that while this fundraiser, who is leaving the company and who has no role in producing NPR content expressed some troubling opinions, the video was edited to misrepresent the conversation in significant ways; that remarks Schiller made about the Republican party that appear to be his own were actually his re-telling of the views of others; that in the lunch meeting Schiller said positive things about the Republican party and the intelligence of conservatives; that he told the make-believe Muslims a half dozen times that no donation would get them influence over network content; that the video depicts Schiller laughing agreeably to a statement that the phony group promoted Sharia law, while in fact he was reacting to a trivial comment about the lunch reservation.

The narrative might then have been different - a debate between O'Keefe, claiming to have exposed bias in NPR, and the network arguing it had been slimed by an ideological cheap shot artist. Other news organizations would have then been compelled to go to the full two-hour video, make their own judgments and talk to both sides.

That's been the conservative MO for some time now:

1). Make a sensational claim (about trickle-down economics, Iraqi WMDs, ACORN election fraud, Obama's birth certificate, death panels)

2). Garner free publicity from conservative-friendly media outlets.

3). Rely on voters' incuriosity to ensure that the initial claims won't be corrected

update (3/26):
Bill Moyers has some very fine comments about conservative accusations of "liberal bias" at NPR:

When it comes to covering and analyzing the news, the reverse of right isn't left; it's independent reporting that toes neither party nor ideological line. We've heard no NPR reporter -- not a one -- advocating on the air for more government spending (or less), for the right of abortion (or against it), for or against gay marriage, or for or against either political party, especially compared to what we hear from Fox News and talk radio on all of these issues and more. [...]

So what do conservatives really mean when they accuse NPR of being "liberal?" They mean it's not accountable to their worldview as conservatives and partisans. They mean it reflects too great a regard for evidence and is too open to reporting different points of views of the same event or idea or issue. Reporting that by its very fact-driven nature often fails to confirm their ideological underpinnings, their way of seeing things (which is why some liberals and Democrats also become irate with NPR).

The GOP's resident pseudo-intellectual, Newt Gingrich, has once again demonstrated his utter lack of principle--this time over Libya. A few weeks ago, Newt was all for the idea of a no-fly zone over Libya to punish Qaddafi's dictatorship. When asked "what would you do about Libya?" Newt's answer was forceful:

Exercise a no-fly zone this evening. ... We don't need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we're intervening.

As soon as Obama took action, though, Newt abruptly changed his mind:

I would not have intervened. I think there were a lot of other ways to affect Qaddafi. I think there are a lot of other allies in the region we could have worked with. I would not have used American and European forces.

Newt is spinning furiously, but the truth is clear: he is driven far more by political opportunism than by principled intellectualism.

update (3/24):
ThinkProgress pointed out that Newt, despite his tendencies toward flip-flopping, disdained the practice in 2004 [see my piece on the Bush/Kerry campaign]:

Gingrich on Neil Cavuto, 9/17/04: "You can't flip-flop and be commander-in-chief."

Gingrich on Hannity & Colmes 9/27/04: "I think Kerry's problem is one of identity... He can't quite decide, you know -- and so I think what you're going to see more likely with him is a kind of schizophrenia. And if the moderator's at all serious with Kerry, and puts Kerry on the spot as saying, now, you said a, and you said b. Which is it? I think Kerry's got a big problem."

Gingrich on Hannity & Colmes, 5/5/04: "I think maybe the pretzel should become the symbol of the Kerry campaign, because he kind of twists himself into a pretzel trying to fit every group he shows up in front of and trying to appeal to each group on the national issues. I'm beginning to think it's not such a shock he's running for president. It's a little bit of a shock he survived as a Senator."

As always, IOKIYAR.

update 2 (3/25):
TPM has more examples of Newt's reflexively anti-Obama rhetoric, showing that he flip-flopped not just on the no-fly zone and humanitarian justifications for it, but also on the issues of air-power efficacy and the propriety of Obama's personal involvement.

I'm not sure if Newt has enough popular support to make it in today's GOP, but he certainly has the pandering down to a science.

update 3 (3/26):
It's not just Newt who's busy pandering to the Right's reflexive anti-liberalism. As shown by Salon's Alex Pareene in flowchart form (h/t: Bluegal at Crooks and Liars), there's a soundbite for every right-wing pundit.

Looking at the labor demonstrations erupting across the nation, Chris Hedges reminds us that power concedes nothing without a demand. "The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance," writes Hedges, "and forgotten about justice." As most media outlets have come to function as "a shameless mouthpiece for the powerful and a magnet for corporate advertising," he continues,

Legitimate news organizations, such as NPR and The New York Times, are left cringing and apologizing before the beast--right-wing groups that hate "liberal" news organizations not because of any bias, but because they center public discussion on verifiable fact. And verifiable fact is not convenient to ideologues whose goal is the harnessing of inchoate rage and hatred.

Hedges sees our situation as both dire and pregnant with possibilities, as "The only place left for us is on the street. We must occupy state and federal offices. We must foment general strikes:"

The powerful, with no check left on their greed and criminality, are gorging on money while they busily foreclose our homes, bust the last of our unions, drive up our health care costs and cement into place a permanent underclass of the broken and the poor. They are slashing our most essential and basic services--including budgets for schools, firefighters and assistance programs for children and the elderly--so we can pay for the fraud they committed when they wiped out $14 trillion of housing wealth, wages and retirement savings. All we have left is the capacity to say "no."

The title of Hedges' essay comes, of course, from Frederick Douglass:

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. [...] Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. [...] If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others.

ThinkProgress mentions that yesterday's pro-worker rally in Wisconsin was the largest yet--and at 100,000 people, it was as large as (or larger than) any of the Teabagger rallies.

Liberals and labor don't get the wall-to-wall media coverage routinely granted to the astroturf Teabaggers, though, because real grass-roots efforts are threatening to the corporate media.

update:
As the eloquent John Cole put it:

The size of the protest only matters if half of you are in Medicare scooters with "Jesus is my CoPilot" stickers on the back, and the other half of you are carrying signs taking the Founding Fathers out of context. If you do that, then the media will pay attention to you like they do the tea parties.

Or it might be that the oligarchs running the media and all the newsmen making 200k+ a year are much more interested in tax cuts and "limited government" so they cover the tea parties, but couldn't give a shit about unions or teachers. But that would be crazy talk.

Frances Fox Piven commented on her Glenn Beck experience [see my post the Beck-Bullshit Strategy] in "Crazy Talk and American Politics:"

Propaganda and its place in American politics is not my academic specialty. But I have been prodded to think about it a lot in recent months because I have been made into a central character in Beck's stories about the evils that have befallen America.

She also touches on the media's endemic Islamophobia as well:

Lunatic though they are, the ravings about our plan for an orchestrated crisis to destroy capitalism--or a Muslim caliphate that will devour Europe--are important because they provide theories of a sort to people who are made anxious by large-scale changes that have overtaken American society. [...] The blank space in the democratic process is an invitation to propaganda by those who want to limit the democratic influence of the public, and propaganda is flourishing in American politics today.

It is indeed, and nowhere as consistently as at Beck's network.

This morning, noted IRA supporter Rep Peter King (R-NY)--who once remarked that "we have...too many mosques in this country"--held a hearing on "The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response." King admitted to the hearing's purpose as carefully staged political theater and used his opening statement to hit back against pre-hearing criticism:

This Committee cannot live in denial which is what some would have us do when they suggest that this hearing dilute its focus by investigating threats unrelated to Al Qaeda. [...] Al Qaeda is actively targeting the American Muslim Community for recruitment. Today's hearing will address this dangerous trend.

King complained about "a lack of full cooperation from too many people in the Muslim community," but I wonder: are the gun nuts and Christianists, the militia groups and neo-Nazis on the Right known for their cooperation with federal law enforcement organizations? David Neiwert writes that right-wing domestic terrorists should also be the subject of hearings, but pundits such as Bill O'Reilly can't understand why:

"Are you kidding me? The radical right? The last terror act assigned to them was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. [...] How many people have the radical right killed?"

Neiwert responded:

Well, Bill, just to get you up to speed: There have been many, many more right-wing terrorist acts on American soil since 1995 -- including the bombing of the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, just for starters. [...] We've documented, to date, 22 cases of domestic terrorism since July 2008 involving right-wing extremists of various stripes, all inflicting (or attempting to inflict) violence on a variety of "liberal" and government targets.

ThinkProgress notes that non-Muslim terrorists are nearly twice as common in the US. In the post-9/11 era, "Muslims have been involved in 45 domestic terrorist plots. Meanwhile, non-Muslims have been involved in 80 terrorist plots." While Muslim-originated domestic terrorism is disproportionately high given their small numbers, violence committed by right-wing extremists (combining anti-government/anti-tax radicals with KKK/NeoNazi/White supremacist movements) is much more frequent. The Right's violence targets broad areas of modern civilization (in service of their sexism, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia), but let's look at just one: their anti-abortion attacks. Over the period from 1977 to 2009, anti-abortion activists have been responsible for:

216 arsons and bombings
97 attempted arson or bombing
643 bomb threats
184 incidents of assault and battery
416 death threats
4 kidnappings
14293 incidents of hate mail or hate phone calls

(That's in addition to 9 murders and 4 attempted murders; all by firearms.)

You'll almost never hear the phrase Christian terrorism used in the (conservative) corporate media, though, because right-wing extremism is rarely examined--they'd rather keep rehashing the Sixties. (For one example, see the uproar over the DHS report on right-wing extremism.)

Although I can't countenance Islam's bigoted irrationality, I'll gladly stand with Muslims against the Peter Kings of the world--particularly if the hearings degenerate into questions like "Are you now, or have you ever been, a Muslim?" The Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness & Housing protests in NYC last weekend had the right idea:

This clip from Jon Stewart's Daily Show has been making the rounds (AmericaBlog and Ed Brayton), and it is so perfect in its evisceration of the zombie economic lies of Faux News corporatocracy that I couldn't resist posting it:

This clip tackles so many of the classics: the income disparity double standards (bankers making $250K are "not rich" and are "actually close to poverty," but teachers should be satisfied with a fraction of that), fears of a talent exodus from bailed-out financial firms if their executives' income is restricted (with no comparable concern for the teachers who have already made economic sacrifices, and are now fighting to preserve their future bargaining rights), and the inviolability of contractual obligations (only when it applies to Wall Street bonuses, never teachers' benefits).

This cartoon tackles the same subject, but from the Right' blame-the-unions perspective:

(Jim Morin/Miami Herald)

update:
Mark's piece on "The Republican Model of Shared Sacrifice" at NewsCorpse is great, as is the accompanying illustration:

In the process of dispensing these hardships, working people are castigated if they object that the contracts to which they agreed are being broken in order to pare back their lavish lifestyles. But any suggestion that the Wall Street crooks who created this recession in the first place be asked to forgo their extravagant bonuses, paid for by the people via government bailouts, is an affront to the order of business and the contractual benefits they negotiated with their executive pals.

So remember, when contemplating the value of shared sacrifice, that if you support firefighters and factory workers getting fair compensation, you're a socialist. But if you support hedge fund managers and insurance company CEO's getting millions in government handouts, you're a patriot. That's shared sacrifice in right-wing America.

The smarmy unctuousness that exemplifies Newt Gingrich is on full display in his new Newt Explore 2012 website:

America's greatness lies in 'We the People.'

We are a nation like no other. To remain so will require the dedicated participation of every citizen, of every neighborhood, of every background. This is the responsibility of a free people.

We are excited about exploring whether there is sufficient support for my potential candidacy for President of this exceptional country.

links:
Ed Kilgore writes about Newt's liberal history:

Everything we know about the adaptable Gingrich tells us that he will bend over backwards to give Republican audiences what they want, whether or not it comports with what he was saying the day before yesterday. In this strange environment, that might be all that's necessary.

John Avlon describes Newt's descent to pandering hyper-partisan flame-thrower:

The Newt Gingrich of 2008 would be a serious presidential candidate, worthy of broad-based support.

The Newt Gingrich of 2011 doesn't deserve to get anywhere near the Oval Office.

Michael JW Stickings bemoans the continuation of Newt's "self-aggrandizing bullshit:"

Maybe he's convinced himself that it's his time and that he could actually beat Obama -- highly, highly unlikely -- but I'm not buying it. He can't even bring himself to form an actual exploratory committee, after all, just to set up a website, and thinking "seriously" about something isn't exactly the same as actually doing it. He's not serious about running, just about keeping his name in the news and remaining a key player in the Republican Party, and I suspect we'll learn soon enough that his "framework" is just as full of shit as he is.

MediaMatters rounds up Newt's greatest hits: the smears, falsehoods, and inflammatory rhetoric that have made him (in)famous, while ThinkProgress lists 10 things Newt doesn't want you to know about him (focusing on Newt's contradictions, hypocrisies, and flip-flops)

John Boehner's speech to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention was chock full of nuttiness, particularly on the subject of network neutrality. Boehner claimed that "freedom and free expression are under attack by a power structure in Washington populated with regulators who have never set foot inside a radio station or a television studio:"

We see this threat in how the FCC is creeping further into the free market by trying to regulate the Internet. 'Network neutrality,' they call it. It's a series of regulations that empower the federal bureaucracy to regulate Internet content and viewpoint discrimination. The rules are written vaguely, of course, to allow the FCC free reign.

The last thing we need, in my view, is the FCC serving as Internet traffic controller, and potentially running roughshod over local broadcasters who have been serving their communities with free content for decades. [...] As far as I'm concerned, there is no compromise or middle ground when it comes to protecting our most basic freedoms. So our new majority in the House is committed to using every tool at our disposal to fight a government takeover of the Internet.

At Ars Technica, Nate Anderson points out that "net neutrality is Boehner's top bogeyman, reminding us just how seriously Republicans take the issue"--including references to the FCC as "vampires" and "federal bloodsuckers." Josh Silver wrote at FreePress.net that "Speaker Boehner's cautionary stories and bold stands would be inspirational if they were connected to reality:"

Instead, he is parroting talking points from industry lobbyists, and front groups and intentionally misleading the public. The FCC's Open Internet rules will have the opposite effect of what Mr. Boehner claims: They would prevent companies from unfairly blocking or degrading Internet websites and applications. [...]

Speaker Boehner knows full well that real Net Neutrality has nothing to do with a government takeover of the Internet. He's playing dog-whistle politics and stoking irrational fears of government repression, while raking in campaign contributions from the phone and cable companies. All a ban on Net Neutrality would do is hand over our online freedom to Comcast, Verizon and AT&T - with no recourse for the public when they block or discriminate against content they don't like for any reason.

There's no government takeover, there's no censorship, and there's no gatekeeper when there's Net Neutrality -- that's the whole point. The government doesn't decide what's available, and neither does your Internet service provider. Speaker Boehner knows the truth, but telling the truth won't help his patrons on K Street.

My previous comments on the Orwellian slogans of network neutrality opponents are echoed by the Kerry/Wyden/Cantwell/Franken letter (PDF) on GOP plans to prevent Neutrality enforcement. The authors note that although Net Neutrality opponents "claim to stand for freedom...the only freedom they are providing for is the freedom of telephone and cable companies to determine the future of the Internet, where you can go on it, what you can attach to it, and which services will win or lose on it."

Evgeny Morozov's Boston Review article on why net neutrality is worth saving calls it "a simple idea with powerful implications:"

A neutral net would, for example, prevent cable providers from slowing down their customers' connections or, worse, banning them from running certain services. That is good for customers, who get equal treatment whether they are streaming movies on Netflix, chatting on Skype, or shopping on Amazon. And it is also good for Netflix, Skype, and other companies that have grown using an Internet infrastructure they do not own and have been able to innovate without worrying about shifting rules of the road.

With those credentials, net neutrality seems like a winning policy. But what about the network operators? They are not so happy with net neutrality, and it is easy to see why. If they respect net neutrality, they cannot impose special burdens on consumers who occupy lots of bandwidth by running data-intensive applications during periods of peak use. Nor can they ban Internet services that compete with their own offerings of cable TV or telephony, thus denying them a lucrative source of revenue. The result may be an underinvestment in infrastructure improvement, which is not good for Netflix and Skype, which depend on fast and ever-improving networks. Predictably, then, network operators prefer that the government not tell them how to run their networks and embrace industry self-regulation instead.

Morozov also notes that "the outcome of the net neutrality debate has geopolitical ramifications:"

Discriminating between different types of content on networks requires monitoring that content, so the network operator would have to deploy software and hardware tools that reveal the kinds of data passing through its system. Comcast may only wish to throttle peer-to-peer file-sharing services, but many of the tools it would need could aid authoritarian states in censoring political speech and spying on dissidents. Iranian authorities are already moving in this direction, with their tight embrace of "deep packet inspection" [see here] technology.

links:
Wikipedia has articles on the principle of net neutrality and on its legal history in the US

OpenInternet.gov

Save the Internet

Tim Wu's Network Neutrality FAQ

The Nation reminds us that the Right's recent attacks on unions, ACORN, and Planned Parenthood are part of a coherent whole. "While it's obvious that the right wing is out to break the back of the progressive movement," notes author Ilyse Hogue, "it's easy to miss the strategy that guides their selection of specific targets:"

Their attacks are all carefully aimed at the same critical juncture: institutions that work for people in their daily lives and in the political arena, those that connect people's personal struggles across the country to the political struggle in Washington.

Paul Waldman points out how unions in particular "connect your problem to larger political issues" and help to "define those people's identity in economic terms:"

Conservatives, on the other hand, want them to define their identity in any terms other than the economic. You're first and foremost a Christian, or a gun owner, or a heartlander, or whatever, so long as you're not defining yourself by economic class. Break the link between economics and identity, and the party that advocates for the welfare of the wealthy has a much, much easier time persuading you to side with them.

As an example of this divide-and-distract, don't-look-behind-the-curtain tactic, see RightWingWatch's note that wingnuts are planning to hear "testimony" from a 9-week-old fetus (which they call an "unborn baby") in a session of the Ohio state House:

Two in-utero babies will appear live before the committee by an ultrasound projector which is able to not only show that baby's moving arms and legs, but also display--in color--the baby's beating heart.

[I would remark that a functioning brain is far more relevant a criterion than a beating heart, but many anti-abortion activists would fail that test.] Conservative stunts are effective in manipulating the media, which William Rivers Pitt points out when discussing Wisconsin in "The Liberal Media Strikes Again:"

We have a huge story in the making here, rife with old and new politics that cuts across virtually every segment of American life - blue collar workers, unions, protests, Tea Party governors, fleeing Democratic senators, teachers, budget issues, new media, old media, and the power of simple shoe leather - and yet those who represent the protesters in Wisconsin had to fight like wolverines to get just one of their representatives onto the Sunday political talk shows. Just one. As far as the American "news" media is concerned, Wisconsin simply doesn't exist. [...] Were it not for the alternative/online news media, the protests in Wisconsin would be taking place in a virtual information blackout.

Pitt reminds us that this is very different from another recent group of protests that were, when one looked beneath the propaganda, far more corporate-friendly:

Remember the first stirrings of what came to be termed as the "Tea Party" uprising? Never mind that it was created by powerful conservative corporate entities like the Koch Brothers. Never mind that the "Tea Party" was nothing more or less than the GOP base with a new coat of paint. Never mind that virtually everything they were yelling about was based on lies and deliberate misinformation. Never mind that most of them really didn't know what they were talking about, and couldn't spell to save their lives.

Three blivets wreathed in American flags and automatic weapons could stand on a streetcorner with signs reading "Keep Your Damn Government Hands Off My Medicare," and they would find themselves surrounded by camera crews from CNN, MSNBC and, of course, Fox News. But put 50,000 people a day out on the streets of Madison, put tens of thousands more on the streets in every state in the union, and those same news cameras are suddenly too busy covering the Oscars and Lindsey Lohan's ongoing crime spree to make an effort at coverage.

For just one example: the pro-union rallies on Saturday that drew hundreds of thousands to demonstrations across the nation were ignored by the (allegedly liberal) CNN in favor of--you guessed it!--a celebration of the Teatards' second anniversary. (The lesson from this is, I guess, that only right-wing rallies are newsworthy.)

The Right's talent for storytelling is something those of us on the Left should learn to emulate in our often-too-dry discussions. You may have seen a variant of the following analogy recently; if not, it's a good example of what we should be doing:

A union worker, a Teabagger, and a CEO are sitting at a table--in the middle of which is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies for himself and whispers conspiratorially to the Teabagger, "Watch out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie."

The CEO's claim on those cookies is the crux of the matter--after all, he didn't bake them.

Tomorrow will see nationwide rallies in support of the Wisconsin workers, billed by MoveOn as the Rally to Save the American Dream. Joshua Holland writes at AlterNet:

Inspired not only by the protesters standing tall in Wisconsin, Ohio and a half-dozen other states but also by the seismic upheaval taking place around the world, progressive America, long overshadowed by the media-friendly Tea Parties, will show up in force in all 50 states this Saturday to demand that budgets aren't balanced on the backs of working people and the most vulnerable among us.

Also at AlterNet, Tana Ganeva writes that the Right's authoritarian tactics are being fully deployed. In addition to the usual barrage of Faux propaganda, they are also planning to sabotage demonstrations and threatening layoffs in addition to using police intimidation and the threat of military force--along with suggesting that baseball bats and live ammunition are appropriate negotiation tools.

As pointed out by Paul Krugman, the powers-that-be appear to be implementing Naomi Klein's shock doctrine:

From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display.

(Note: If you can't attend one of these rallies, one of the US Uncut rallies against corporate tax avoidance would be a great alternate activity.)

Michael Lind says that the media's "constant mockery of...bloviating right-wing demagogues" [he names Palin, Bachmann, and Beck] is "likely to backfire on liberals" for several reasons:

• It makes other far-right Republican conservatives look moderate.
• It makes liberals look like snobs.
• It's a reactive strategy that gives the initiative to the right.
• It's a waste of effort and attention.

Lind writes that although most Americans don't get more than a high school education, "[t]hat does not mean they are stupid or ignorant:"

Many have a life-long interest in world affairs and the American economy and American history. It speaks well of their civic engagement and intellectual curiosity that many Americans, in the absence of alternatives, are drawn to "village explainers" like Ross Perot with his charts, which liberals mocked two decades ago, and Glenn Beck with his blackboard diagrams, which liberals mock today.

The center-left needs its own village explainers, with their own charts and their own blackboards. In the plain language used by FDR for his Fireside Chats, they could show how liberalism is rooted in American values and history, instead of being an alien transplant from socialist Europe. They could sketch the relations between today's radical right, with its loony theories about a Muslim-leftist world revolution, and the similar conspiracy theories of the Liberty Lobby in the 1930s and the John Birch Society in the 1950s. They could put up diagrams on the screen to explain elementary Keynesian concepts and show the need for public spending, or exports, or both to make up for depressed private consumption in a near-depression like the present.

The best part would be that liberal explainers wouldn't have to lie as prolifically as their conservative counterparts; while writing a guest post at Pharyngula, Iris Vander Pluym defends media figures from Lind's accusations. Pluym writes that "Even if Lind were right about any of these things, there is a far greater danger in ignoring or dismissing the deranged rantings of prominent right-wing conservatives. We do so at our grave peril:"

Left alone to fester and spread with nothing to forcefully counter them, the destructive dogmas of the fringe right-wing ooze into mainstream political discourse, and calcify there. That is what legitimizes those ideas, and makes them seem moderate. With a mass media more concerned with appearing "fair and balanced" than debunking pernicious falsehoods, we need more, not fewer people willing to pick up the torch and chase bad ideas back into the shadows, where they belong.

Thanks to Glenn Beck's chalkboard of conspiracy, professor Frances Fox Piven has been vilified as the co-author of the allegedly nefarious Cloward-Piven Strategy--although neither Beck's minions have apparently been too busy making death threats to read what Piven actually wrote. Her 1966 piece from The Nation, entitled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty" asks "How can the poor be organized to press for relief from poverty?" while noting that "a vast discrepancy exists between the benefits to which people are entitled under public welfare programs and the sums which they actually receive." Rectifying this disparity, the authors observe, "would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis."

It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations, militant anti-poverty groups and the poor. If this strategy were implemented, a political crisis would result that could lead to legislation for a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty.

"By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere," wrote Cloward and Piven, which they believed would necessitate "action by political leaders to stabilize the situation." They hoped to direct this action toward the establishment of a universal guaranteed income--a far cry from the slanders of the Becktards. The Chronicle of Higher Education notes that Beck "has called her an 'enemy of the Constitution' and one of the 'nine most dangerous people in the world,' and accused her of trying to destroy the economy and incite violence." In the pages of The Guardian, Piven responded that although Beck's "orchestrated crisis theory...elicited many hundreds, if not thousands of rude and insulting postings directed at me, and many lurid death threats, as well," she's not focusing on her own safety:

It's harm not to myself, but to American democracy that I fear from the Fox News host's paranoid theories of social collapse. [...]

By telling simple fairy tales that trace these big and complex changes to the machinations of particular people, Beck makes the changes comprehensible in a way, and also makes the people who are presumably responsible the targets of his listeners' frustration and outrage. Partly because it is utterly irrational, and partly because it is an effort to bully and intimidate his political opponents, this is dangerous for democratic politics.

Ed Brayton's How the Right and Left View America helps to illuminate this issue. Brayton writes, although not specifically addressing Piven/Beck, that "Progressives love their country... enough to demand that it does the right thing rather than the most convenient, most dishonest or most profitable thing:"

They love it enough to demand that it love up to its ideals and promises rather than ignore them. And because they don't hold such a cartoonish version of the world, they don't have to pretend that it's perfect in order to warrant such loyalty.

These are concepts the right, I fear, will never understand.

Well, it's certainly clear that Beck and his minions don't understand those concepts--or, it appears, much of anything that they read.