The Bullshit Isn't Working Anymore, But, By Now, They're Addicted To It

This is perhaps too obvious to be worth blogging about, but a significant factor in both the rise and the currently-occurring fall of the American rightwing has been the fax machine.

Conservatives tacitly agreed a few years back to all use carefully-scripted talking points, often faxed to them by Grover Norquist or Karl Rove. John Stewart illustrated the result in his famous video-quilt of one conservative talking head after another calling John Kerry the "most liberal Senator ever" over the course of a few days and a raft of tv shows during the 2004 presidential campaign. The strategy has been successful, with a compliant media almost always picking up the talking point, using the conservative catch-phrase, and suddenly finding an "issue" that only really existed in Norquist's twisted little mind. The Democrats never seemed to figure out how to defend themselves against the fax attacks, nor how to play the game themselves.

But I think that the success of the strategy carried, as is so often the case, the seeds of its own destruction. I was reminded of this point by this post from Media Matters, describing how conservative radio host Neal Boortz jumped on the recent rightwing talking point that blames rap stars for denigrating women (because we know how the rightwing just loves itself some women's rights) as a foil to deflect criticism of Don Imus:

Will we finally end the denigration of black women through rap music? Personally, I think its jealousy. ... I mean, on the part of the rappers, because, you know, I mean, look at black women, black men. Who are the higher educated, who has -- you know, is there a higher percentage of black women in college or black men? Black women. Moving up the corporate ladder -- black women, black men? Black women."

The problem, as MM points out is that Boortz himself recently said that "former Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) 'looks like a ghetto slut,' for which he later apologized."

Lots of Americans were already figuring out for themselves the point that John Stewart emphasized: that what they were hearing was really just a talking point, not serious debate about an issue nor something that the speaker even really believed. The effectiveness of the blastfax talking point is further undermined when it's so easy to show that the head doing the talking, see above re: Boortz, is being completely inconsistent. Americans don't, after all, think that what's happening in our country should be reduced to the level of seventh-grade sophistry.

Boortz also "responded to a statement released by Media Matters for America President and CEO David Brock identifying Boortz as one of many sources of bigotry in the media by asking, '[T]hat George Soros-funded group Media Matters, who are they going to focus on next?'" The MM-is-funded-by-George-Soros talking point is an old one and one that MM and others have shown to be completely false over and over again. Boortz knows this and neither he nor any of the other rightwingers dutifully repeating this lie have ever, to my knowledge, offered ANY support for their assertion. (We'll leave for another day the slimy anti-Semitic tactic itself. Even if it were true that Soros, a liberal contributor, did fund MM, that wouldn't make MM's points less valid.)

Live by the blastfax, die by the blastfax. By now, conservatives are so used to grabbing the prescribed talking points (never mention MM without saying that it's funded by George Soros) and blabbing them, that it's become completely irrelevant to them that a talking point may be completely untrue. Not just a point that they've neither considered nor with which they necessarily agree and not just a point that's inconsistent with one that they parroted before and not just one that's hypocritical. Untrue. Fake. False. A lie. A deliberate lie. We saw this during the 2004 campaign, as well, when Tucker Carlson kept asserting that John Edwards had made his fortune as a personal-injury lawyer specializing in "Jacuzzi cases." As Atrios noted at the time: "This was an allusion to the horrific disembowelment of a young girl who'd been sucked into an open swimming-pool drain. When informed of the facts behind his cruel phrasing, [Tucker] snapped, 'Oh, I know. I've heard that.'"

I know that these folks think that they "make their own reality," but reality doesn't work like that. Reality works a lot more like a boomerang. And you can't lie all the time and not expect people to eventually figure out that you're a liar. And once people decide that you're a liar, they begin to ignore you and to look elsewhere -- for information, for leadership, for policy. We see it in the polls showing that no matter how many times the junta asserts that we need to stay in Iraq, Americans want us to leave. We saw it in the 2006 election when, even with Bush himself chanting the talking point that if the Democrats took control of Congress the terrorists would win, Americans put the Democrats in control of Congress. The talking points aren't working any more.

There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."