Dispatches from another dimension

I have a post sitting in draft form which surveys about a week or so of random listening to the Republican Noise machine, or AM radio world as I like to call it. I haven't gotten around to posting it yet because I haven't felt like taking the time to add in all the links and what not, but I'll get around to it in a day or so. But the whole point of the post is that if you plug into the noise machine and consider it a reliable source of information, it will disconnect you from this reality and replace it with an alternate, parallel reality constructed through a conservative movement glass, darkly.

Via Crooks and Liars, I see that Anonymous Liberal has captured a perfect example of this dynamic in action. After contrasting quotes from John Hinderaker of Powerline blog - one of the most influential conservative blogs - demonstrating his belief that Barack Obama is an ignorant fool barely able to speak while George W. Bush is "a man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius," AL observes

The alternative universe that these folks manage to create for themselves is really quite something to behold. In their world, a man who was the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review and a constitutional law professor at a top law school is some sort of empty suit who is incapable of thinking or expressing a coherent thought without a teleprompter. A man who spent much of his childhood in Indonesia, has travelled extensively overseas, and who, by all accounts, is an avid student of foreign policy is some kind of ignoramus who knows nothing about the world.

But a man who was notorious for his struggles with the English language, who achieved everything in his life by virtue of his last name, a man who admittedly had no interest in foreign policy and had traveled nowhere prior to becoming president . . . that guy is worldly beyond measure, a "man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius."

What's really sad is that Hinderaker is not alone in this belief. If you read the right wing blogs, it's just an accepted fact that Obama is a moron. It's as if they think that if they say it over and over again, it will somehow catch on with the public at large.

I don't believe that it's an effort to convince the public so much as it's a way they convince themselves. A way of reconciling the cognitive dissonance that must result from a Manichean, authoritarian worldview that requires that any Democrat in power be thought of poorly, while any Leader be exalted.