How did this monster get created? The decades of GOP lies that brought us Donald Trump, Republican f
How did this monster get created? The decades of GOP lies that brought us Donald Trump, Republican front-runnerby Heather Cox Richardson at Salon
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/19/how_did_this_monster_get_created_the_decades_of_gop_lies_that_brought_us_donald_trump_republican_front_runner/
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The campaign also hired a young television producer named Roger Ailes to stage “town hall” events for the candidate. Ailes hand-picked “regular” people to question Nixon in carefully managed shows from which the press was excluded. Ailes arranged applause, the set, Nixon’s answers, the camera angles, the crowd cheering the candidate, the careful shading of Nixon’s makeup. “Let’s face it,” he said. “A lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass.” But carefully managed television could “make them forget all that.”
It did. And so, after 1968, Republicans increasingly relied on their apocalyptic redemption story. America was in terrible trouble, because grasping minorities, women and workers wanted government policies that would suck tax dollars from hardworking white people. Democrats backed those policies because they would do anything to buy votes. It was up to Republicans to restore America to its former glory. In a time of dramatic economic and social upheaval, this story reassured voters left behind in the new conditions that the answers to their problems were simple, and that coming up with those answers required no great education or thought. It simply required the right principles.
The Movement Conservative story was never based in reality. Facts repeatedly gave way to the narrative that America was on the ropes because of Democratic social welfare policies that sucked tax dollars and threatened the nation’s safety. Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Queen represented the misuse of tax dollars for lazy African-Americans, for example, but he also incorrectly insisted that President Carter had slashed the nation’s military budget, and warned in his inaugural address that the nation was in a crisis that rivaled the Great Depression, a crisis created by government activism.
To avoid niggling fact-checkers, in 1987, President Reagan’s FCC abandoned the Fairness Doctrine, a decision that meant that public broadcasters were no longer required to provide their audience with opposing viewpoints. Within a year, talk radio had taken off, with hosts like Rush Limbaugh hammering home the vision of a nation gone to ruin, awaiting redemption from the latest Movement Conservative candidate. In 1992, Limbaugh began to broadcast a television show, produced by Roger Ailes, to take the story to viewers. By 1994, the show was carried by 225 television stations. Two years later, Ailes would become the CEO of a new media channel, Fox News, which used the same formula—albeit updated—that Ailes had used to package Nixon’s story almost 30 years before.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
"Truthiness" 
On a more serious note, this is an excellent article explaining how this level of conservative stupidity came about. I've read a few books on the subject, and of course it's way more complicated than one article can say, but it's definitely a good, concise history. It also had more detail on the early days of Phylis Schafly, which I was not familiar with.
My only tiny quibble is that, like most pundits, the author analyzes the reasons Nixon won in 68 without mentioning the biggest factor in his win: RFK's murder. RFK was much like Clinton: he had the substance, but also had the style to make a connection.
That's what honestly scares me about Trump: America is basically engaged in a nationwide reality TV contest. We have intelligent, reasonable contestants like Clinton and Sanders competing with loud mouthed lunatics like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, and at the end of the show viewers will call in and vote for whichever candidate entertained them better.
This country is going to hell in a bucket, and I'm not even enjoying the ride.
