How Would the Right Know It's Wrong?

[babylonsister]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/how-would-the-right-know_b_309844.html

Marty Kaplan
Director, Norman Lear Center and Professor at the USC Annenberg School
Posted: October 5, 2009 01:00 PM
How Would the Right Know It's Wrong?


While the left despairs of Barack Obama's capitulation to K Street and Wall Street, the right continues to insist that he's a Marxist, socialist, communist enemy of capitalism. What could possibly convince the right that it's wrong -- about that, or anything else?

Not the press. The right gets its facts from Fox News, talk radio, the screaming sirens on the Web and the mandarins of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. It maintains that the mainstream media is in the tank for liberals, which is hilarious, because the prestige press is so terrified of the right that it has substituted the diligence of he-said/she-said stenography for the challenge of refereeing disputes, and because the 24/7 chase for ratings and page-hits makes covering sex, celebrity and crime -- and celebrity sex crime -- way more important than figuring out what's actually important.

Not the political system. Demagoguery is fun. It wins airtime. Its plumage-ruffling signifies to the Beltway culture a mature appreciation for the virtues of pandering and partisanship. It's also profitable: polarizing plus demonizing equals fundraising. Whatever hopes the Founders had for the deliberative grandeur of our legislative system are mocked by the likes of Michelle Bachmann, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and James Inhofe.


snip//

No wonder our press couldn't settle whether Obama was palin' around with terrorists or not, and can't say whether a public option is a government takeover of health care or not, and wouldn't dream of holding entertainer Rush Limbaugh accountable for his poison. On the news, who's to say whether a protester toting an AK-47 is potential assassin or a Fourth Amendment advocate? Philip Morris shill Betsy McCaughey deserves equal time with CIGNA whistleblower Wendell Potter. "Socialism" isn't an actual idea with an actual meaning; it's just a slogan, whose definition in the eye of its beholder.

No wonder our political system can't solve big problems. Ruthless opposition and dingbat delusions are the currency of right-wing success, and sand in the gears of democracy. Whether they're cynical postures or sincere beliefs doesn't matter. The grand national conversation that was intended to enable citizens and their representatives to find common ground for conflicting values has become a grand national midway of carny-barkers and rodeo clowns.

If it weren't so scary, it'd be funny that the loons who spread the falsehood that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, who say that global climate change is a hoax and who want creationism to share equal time with evolution in our schools are the same furies who shout "You lie!" at the president and make insatiable demands for evidence of his American birth. Funny, because -- from Moliere to Stephen Colbert -- hypocrisy is part of the human comedy. Scary, because the epistemological checks and balances that are supposed to protect an open society from totalitarianism are pretty much impotent in an age of PoMo politainment.


Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/how-would-the-right-know_b_309844.html

[BlooInBloo]

1. Bastard took my idea. Hrmph.

:P

[babylonsister]

2. It's a great question, I think. They know, but prefer their

appearance of ignorance.

[BlooInBloo]

3. Heh. There's a bit more than *appearance*, methinks, but yah.