The conservative mind
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he 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.”
Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush
When i first read this article, my initial reaction was “good grief, how arrogant can you get?”
Today, nearly 5 months after the defeat of the Republicans, I am convinced that this is the actual mindset of the conservatives. It fact, not only do they not believe in reality, they prefer “creating other new realities”, or what normal sane people call “delusion” and “unreality”.
The conservatives and the republicans have an obsession with things that aren’t real. It’s a fascinating pattern, yet difficult to write about.
There are some obvious references i could make, like the 2004 election between a REAL war hero…
…and a guy who likes to dress up as a soldier:
.
But there is SO much more.
For example, the conservatives just love Joe the Plumber, who isn’t actually a REAL plumber. The defunct conservative brain-trust known as Pajamas Media sent him to Gaza to report on the war but since he’s not a REAL reporter, his story was that reporters… should stop reporting because it’s unpatriotic:
I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think journalists should be anywhere allowed war. I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what’s happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I think it’s asinine. You know, I liked back in World War I and World War II when you’d go to the theater and you’d see your troops on, you know, the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for’em. Now everyone’s got an opinion and wants to downer–and down soldiers. You know, American soldiers or Israeli soldiers.
I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, “Well look at this atrocity,” well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.
He spoke at CPAC, but he’s not a REAL activist: he’s never done anything other than function as a mccain campaign prop. And yet they give the guy a platform. I hear he’s writing a book. About what, pretending to be something he’s not?
And then there’s this Glenn Beck guy. He’s basically copying Howard Beale’s schtick from the movie “network”. That’s right, Beck is pretending to be a fictional character from a movie, and the conservatives are eating it up!
Before that, the Glennster had a special called “We Surround them”:
Do you watch the direction that America is being taken in and feel powerless to stop it?
Do you believe that your voice isn’t loud enough to be heard above the noise anymore?
Do you read the headlines everyday and feel an empty pit in your stomach…as if you’re completely alone?
If so, then you’ve fallen for the Wizard of Oz lie. While the voices you hear in the distance may sound intimidating, as if they surround us from all sides—the reality is very different. Once you pull the curtain away you realize that there are only a few people pressing the buttons, and their voices are weak. The truth is that they don’t surround us at all.
We surround them.
has Glenn beck looked at an electoral map lately?
Um, Glenn? WE surround YOU.
It honestly baffles me. I get into debates with conservatives I know, and then realize that their “facts” are from the neighborhood of make-believe. I inevitably have to bow out, because they literally don’t know anything. Just look at these comments from yesterday in response to my posts about the Red Cross report:
Im sure if I was held in a detention center for an extended period of time I would also state that horrible atrocities were forced on me. Im sure some of the torture is true if you consider water boarding torture. Maybe what we should have done is decapitated all the captives and dismember their bodies the way the terrorists did to our people. Im amused that people like you want us to follow the Geneva Convention for terrorists, for people who do not follow the Geneva Convention. Yes, IN OUR NAME and for our protection!!!
and
and after they were done taking his leg away for the 3x time he gave up the info that he was withholding…these terrorists are trained to withhold info so they gotta do whatever they can to make them talk…say your son was kidnapped and you had the guy who took him but he wouldnt tell you where your son was being kept, what would you do?
It’s not like I neglected to point out, with supporting citations, that there were literally NO actionable results from the “information” extracted via torture. Quite the opposite: I demonstrated that torture doesn’t work. I might as well have written nothing at all, because i got the same old discredited and totally unreal response that “they gave up the information after the torture.” No. No they didn’t: the victims just said whatever they thought the torturers wanted to hear, and the results prove that this is so. There’s no question about it.
Coupled with their complete lack of foresight… well let’s talk about that for a moment. I love watching them freak themselves out imagining obama’s plans to drastically expand government, not realizing that they basically authorized this kind of thing during 2000-2008: No Child Left behind, which essentially federalized our public schools, ring a bell? Department of Homeland Security ring a bell?
And the black helicopter/ fascism is coming crowd is also a hoot, conveniently forgetting that they cheered on the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the repeal of habeas corpus, and warrantless wiretapping. Now, they’re horrified that such activity goes on! Did they simply discount the idea that maybe someone from the other party would win an election? Did they think that even if that happened, Democrats wouldn’t keep that power for themselves out of liberal-pantywaistedness? Or did they think that the powers one president accumulates doesn’t get handed over to the next one, as if everything post-Bush would reset to the way it was on November 1, 2000? And if so, does this indicate stupidity or insanity?
I’m going with the latter: conservatives are fundamentally, intrinsically mentally ill. There is something wrong with them. And that does not even begin to touch on their projection issues.
May 14th, 2009 at 9:57 am
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