At what point, based on which evidence, will the teabagging consumers of Fox "news" realize, much less -- Hannity forbid! -- admit that they've been lied to, played like a bugle from the Revolutionary War, whose values they claim to love but fail to follow at every turn? How many years of non-confiscatory federal gun laws, for example? How many reminders that the only gun law Obama has signed was the one that allowed them in national parks and on Amtrak?
When might they agree that Michele Bachmann's head is filled with canaries and that there never were and never will be FEMA reeducation camps? Or that Obama didn't arrange for 12 year olds to mass at the southern border after being trained as terrorists? Or produce Ebola as payback for slavery?
How many claims by Lindsey Graham over the Foxified airwaves that we're all about to be killed by ISIS (not just Christians, mind you: all of us!!!) before they start to worry about his ability to survive anywhere but under his bed? How often will they peer at Jeanine Pirro before they see her as an insane fear-mongerer whose wild claims are rooted either in some very peculiar personal demons or a shockingly (but not unusually, for Fox) cynical desire for ratings? Will they cower in fear that Bill Clinton's home state is about to come under attack, or start to wonder if their potential leaders are either nuts or without a semblance of ethics?
Might actual data about the Affordable Care Act convince dry-mouthed Foxolimbeckians that it's lowering the deficit, strengthening Medicare, and helping hospitals reduce unpaid care? I suppose not. I guess they'll look at the data like Rush Limbaugh looks at the latest employment numbers.
Sure, we'll always have insane citizens, paranoid and hateful. But only one network gives voice to them, all day, every day. There are precious few that call them out for their ignorance; besides, of those who need to hear it, who listens?
And there's the problem, and the answer to my opening questions: our right wing has become entirely refractory to factual input. Their party is filled with paranoid, cynical, lying, elected and protected lunatics (Bachmann, Palin, Gohmert, King, Broun, Paul, Perry, Jindal, soon-to-be-federalized Hice; and fueled by dishonest, stupid, and demagogic mouthpieces: Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, the Fox and Friends crew, The Four and a half, O'Reilly, Jones, Savage, Cain... need I go on?) whose wild claims are ingested without chewing by voters too comfortable in and dependent upon their own hatreds and paranoid fantasies, too certain their guns and their religion are about to be swallowed up by Kenyan armies and UN-led Muslim commies, too afraid (and too selfish) to face cataclysmic problems of our own making, to even consider that there might be a more rational way to look at things. That those telling them otherwise haven't the slightest concern for the real interests of any American but the most wealthy. Donors, that is.
Oh, and here's an even bigger question, with the same answer: when will the right wing understand that states don't have the right selectively to deny civil rights to a class of people? And that the very reason their beloved founders established the federal court system is precisely to prevent, among other things, states from doing so. The argument, which we're hearing several times daily, from such leading teabags as Ted Cruz (who, un-ironically, conflates refusal to act with "judicial activism") and others equally confused, that "unelected" courts have ignored the "will of the people" misses the point by 180 degrees.
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