Say Anything

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Britt Hume of Faux Noise told his viewers that Valerie Plame Wilson lied under oath; Faiz at Think Progress debunks; see also John Amato. Of course, it doesn’t matter what the facts are. Next week this talking point will spill over into MSNBC, CNN, and various print media, carried by the usual rightie stooges. Watch especially for Ed Rogers and Kate O’Beirne to show up on Hardball to make this noise. I further predict Chris Matthews will not challenge whatever they say. And it wouldn’t matter much if he did; the True Believers will accept whatever lie the Right cooks up about the Wilsons without question, and no amount of facts will change their minds.

Friday I caught a little bit of a CSPAN program in which Brian Lamb took calls discussing the recent “confessions” of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Several callers declared that the confession proved that “torture works,” thereby displaying the critical thinking skills of moth larvae. Some of the callers clearly had no idea who KSM was and were under the impression he was someone the FBI nabbed inside the U.S. recently. One caller demanded to know how “these people” are getting into the U.S.; Brian Lamb helpfully explained that the CIA probably had flown him to Guantanamo from wherever he was before on a plane.

This morning I wrote about Iraq war supporters who got themselves worked up over what was surely an unfounded rumor that antiwar protesters planned to deface the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. Today they are congratulating each other for “saving” the monument from a threat that existed only in their own overheated imaginations.

For some reason the U.S. has always had a disproportionate number of whackjobs among its citizens; that ain’t new. And the whackjobs have had political influence at various times in the past, also. What’s different is that mass media and the Internet are allowing them to live in their own self-made Crazy World on a mass scale. And the Republicans are heavily invested in keeping them crazy.

7 thoughts on “Say Anything”

  2. Usually crawling out from under their rocks only occasionally, today’s political climate allows them freedom to run amok and even promotes their activities as “news”.

  3. “For some reason the U.S. has always had a disproportionate number of wackjobs among it’s citizens, that ain’t new”

    If they’re all wackjobs, THAT makes ME sane!
    Yeah Baby!!
    But seriously, what do you think allows for so many people to be so delusional? Between the hyper religious and the uber patriots ( plus the “saucer people” abductees and the hocus-pocus types), I mean WTF,is this problem unique to America?

    This is looking like a remake of the “Gong Show”
    I tune in FOX news every once in a while just to see how stupid it can be, and I’m NEVER disappointed.

  4. But seriously, what do you think allows for so many people to be so delusional?

    I honestly don’t know. And whatever it is, why is it leaving Canada alone? Weird.

  6. But seriously, what do you think allows for so many people to be so delusional?

    I think that a great part of the delusion is a result of the way that Karl Rove and his ilk have distorted America’s values to further their political agenda and the neo-con ideology. What we see as delusion, they see as truth and vice versa. It’s just a shame that their truth is a product of deception and manipulation.

    Britt Hume is a piece of work..I don’t know the guy except that I know he worked for ABC news. And for that reason, I must have credited him with a brain. It’s beyond me to reason how he could have come up with such a stupid statement given all the information provided by the Plame affair. I hope Congress pursues that issue of testimony that Britt Hume suggests Valerie Plame perjured herself with. Find out who inserted that lie into the intelligence committee’s report. That’s were the deception lies.

    Isn’t it a given that the government forfeited any claims to credibility since Bush came to power? Look at their track record.

  7. Britt Hume of Faux Noise told his viewers that Valerie Plame Wilson lied under oath; Faiz at Think Progress debunks; see also John Amato. Of course, it doesn’t matter what the facts are. Next week this talking point will spill over into MSNBC, CNN, and various print media, carried by the usual rightie stooges.

    This is why I tuned Plamegate out a long time ago. I’d love to be like everyone else on our side and believe that the exposure of the campaign against Plame and Wilson could enrage Americans — but it’s just never going to happen. The righty talking points are etched in stone and are taken seriously, they’re rebutted by our statements of how theoretically dangerous this is (and we’re right, but you can’t get average Americans excited about spioes in theoretical danger), and so it’s just at a left-right stalemate, and it always will be.

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