Republican "Fantasyland"

Take a few minutes to read Frank Rich's analysis of Rethuglican "Fantasyland" in the New York Magazine. Rich looks under most of the rocks in the hermetically-sealed right-wing biosphere and names many of the lizard-brained life-forms he discovers there. Here's a sampling of the piece:

"The good news for Democrats this year was that the right’s brand of magical thinking (or non-thinking) bit the GOP in the ass, persuading it to disregard all the red flags and assume even a figure as hollow as Romney could triumph. (Retaking the Senate was once thought to be a lock, too.) The books chronicling what happened in 2012 will devote much attention to the failings of Romney’s campaign and to the ruthless and surgical rigor of Obama’s. But an equally important part of this history is the extraordinary lengths to which the grandees of the GOP—not just basket cases like Dick (“Landslide!”) Morris, Glenn Beck, and Andrew Breitbart, but the supposed adults regarded by the Beltway Establishment and mainstream media as serious figures—enabled their party’s self-immolating denial of political reality. This was the election in which even George Will (who predicted a 321 Electoral College win for Romney) surrendered to the cult of the talk-radio base and drank the Kool-Aid without realizing it had been laced with political cyanide. If a tea-party voter in Texas was shocked that Obama won, he was no less thunderstruck than the Romney campaign, or Karl Rove. Rove’s remarkably graphic public meltdown on Fox News—babbling gibberish about how his Ohio numbers showed a path for Romney even after the election was lost—marked not just the end of his careers as a self-styled political brainiac and as a custodian of hundreds of millions in dollars of super-PAC money. It was an on-camera dramatization of his entire cohort’s utter estrangement from reality. [snip]

"Daniel Patrick Moynihan might be surprised to learn that he is now remembered most for his oft-repeated maxim that 'everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.' Yet today most Americans do see themselves as entitled to their own facts, with one of our two major political parties setting a powerful example. For all the hand-wringing about Washington’s chronic dysfunction and lack of bipartisanship, it may be the wholesale denial of reality by the opposition and its fellow travelers that is the biggest obstacle to our country moving forward under a much-empowered Barack Obama in his second term. If truth can’t command a mandate, no one can."

We believe there will be no change in the estrangement from reality as long as the Rethuglican base is being fed lies, crackpot conspiracy theories, racist dog-whistles, and visions of Armageddon by the right-wing Rethuglican media and "establishment." That's good for Democrats, who can expect to have a "sanity" advantage for the forseeable future, but it's bad for the political health of the country, as Rich ably points out.