From Pine View Farm

Bubble Boys 4

TPM tells me that

Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) on Friday warned students at an elementary school that newspapers represent a menace to the state, the Bangor Daily News reported.

“My greatest fear in the state of Maine: newspapers,” LePage told students at St. John Catholic School in Winslow, Maine. “I’m not a fan of newspapers.”

which leads in nicely to Harvard professor Lawrence Bobo’s (no relation to David Brooks) discussion of rightwing intellectual inquiry as something hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar and buried under Funk and Wagnall’s back porch. If you wonder why Republicans so easily tout and believe stuff that just isn’t, that hermetic seal explains a lot.

A snippet:

Of course, there are those who will claim that MSNBC — the cable news network of the left — is at least as biased as, if not even more biased than, Fox News. They can even point to a Pew Research Center report, “Winning the Media Campaign 2012,” that shows that the “tone” of MSNBC coverage of Romney was more negative than Fox News coverage of Obama. One has to wonder if this is because the basic accuracy or truth quotient from the Obama campaign itself was higher?

There is a deeper problem of delusion here, fed by a closed, self-reinforcing sound bite universe of howling distortions that span television news (e.g., Fox), radio (e.g., Limbaugh) and the right-wing Internet (for example, Public Policy Polling shows that half of GOP voters believe that ACORN stole the 2012 election for Obama). Ironically, the depth of this problem is revealed by the suggestion from Jindal and Barbour that stupid comments alone are what got the Republicans in trouble and is keeping them in trouble. I don’t think so (though this doesn’t help).

Share

4 comments

  1. George Smith

    February 3, 2013 at 8:38 pm

    I read the Washington Times a few times a week and white it is by no measure an important newspaper in the traditional sense, over a decade ago it did actually publish things that were worth reading and largely adhered to the real world. Now it reflects a world that’s one massive and complex ball of delusions. It’s readership is small but it is the newspaper of the GOP pol in the capitol. Every GOP politician uses its editorial pages, if they have a staffer who can write, to put out their lines. And weekly, there’s always someone writing that Hillary Clinton is a traitor, the global warming is a hoax and this year has been cold, that Barack Obama wants to turn the BSA into the Gay Scouts of America, that shariah law is on the march in the US and on and on. It is not a stretch to say that 90 percent, everyday, is vigorous lying about everything. Last week, the new GOP fetish, telling people not to read newspapers. This, front page news, Ted Cruz, the Texas Tea Party rep, asserting that no one should read the New York Times. And a frankly astonishing and bigoted piece that claimed the Obama plan was to make the country the United States of Mexico because that was what had been done in California, where the GOP is dead, because of all the ‘illegals, environmentalists, single mothers, homosexuals and teachers unions.’ When you get right to the core, the GOP has turned itself into a neo-fascist party and this goes beyond well beyond stupid — this is a demographic of people who can’t stand reality, who must have propaganda because they have been fed it for so long it’s damaged them and they can accept nothing else.

     
  2. George Smith

    February 4, 2013 at 7:59 pm

    I thought they already had their own social networks at the Blaze, Drudge, the Freep, etc. Like I said — neo-fascists. Perhaps they should work on replacing Google, too. 

     
  3. Frank

    February 4, 2013 at 11:24 pm

    “Paranoia strikes deep.  Into your life it will creep.  There’s a man with a gun over there . . . “