Mobs are particularly susceptible to myths. Le Bon says, “The creation of the legends which so easily obtain circulation in crowds is not solely the consequence of their extreme credulity. It is also the result of the prodigious perversion that events undergo in the imagination of a throng.”1
Ask any liberal if Sarah Palin boasted of her foreign policy experience by saying, “I can see Russia from my house.” In real life, Palin had responded to Charlie Gibson’s question about the proximity of Russia to Alaska by remarking that Russia could “actually be seen from Alaska.” The “I can see Russia from my house!” line was from a Saturday Night Live sketch. But facts are irrelevant to liberal beliefs.
Then in 2010, there were two famous videos, run on TV over and over again, that showed one thing, with liberals demanding that everyone admit the videos showed something else. It was like watching North Korean TV.
The first video was of several black congressmen walking through an anti-ObamaCare protest at the Capitol in March 2010 before the final health care vote. The media neurotically reported that the civil rights hero John Lewis was spat at and called the N-word fifteen times on the video—although the videos of the congressmen walking through the protest showed no such thing. Finally, Andrew Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could produce a video of any black congressman being called the N-word once, much less fifteen times, at a protest crawling with video cameras and reporters hungry for an act of racism. (Also, the charge of using the N-word fifteen times was ridiculous on its face. Have you ever stood in front of someone calling them the N-word fifteen times? Believe me, it’s not easy. After a while they start finishing the word for you, and next thing you know they’re rolling their fingers and doing that “yada yada N-word yada” thing. It’s a nightmare.)
At that point, TV anchors began claiming they had seen it—but, strangely, could never manage to locate the video in order to show it to their viewers. After quoting a guest on Larry King Live (me) who had said, “If you can show somebody saying the N-word, well then you can win $100,000 if you can produce that tape, because there is no tape of it.” CNN’s Don Lemon said that was a lie and he had seen the tape with his very own eyes and would get it up on air so his viewers could see it for themselves:
Lemon: OK. Listen, we have the tape here on CNN. I saw it on CNN’s State of the Union.… So the tape is there and we’ll try to get it on CNN so that you can see it and we’ll highlight it the same way that Candy Crowley did.
I guess Don’s producers couldn’t find the tape before the end of his program, or the end of the week, the month, or the year, since it’s never been shown on CNN or any other TV network. Damn it! If only TV stations had some mechanism to show videos to their viewers … To this day, the $100,000 reward remains unclaimed.
After weeks of liberals denouncing ObamaCare protesters for calling Representative Lewis the N-word—which never happened—no one, not one TV anchor, reporter, or commentator, ever apologized for this vicious lie. We just stopped hearing about black congressmen being called the N-word for a while.
But then time passed and most people forgot that when challenged, liberals had backed away from their claim that Tea Partiers had spat at black congressmen and called him a racial epithet. So liberals went right back to citing it as a fact again. After Jared Loughner shot up a Tucson Safeway, former congressman Alan Grayson went on MSNBC and reeled off a list of right-wing violence, including that a black congressman “was spit on.”2
In October 2010, a crazed liberal woman in a wig charged Rand Paul as he arrived for a Senate debate. The disguised woman, Lauren Valle, was blocked by Paul’s supporters, who, not being members of SEIU, did not immediately beat her up. Consequently, Valle was able to break away and make another mad dash for the candidate. When Paul’s supporters stopped her a second time, she collapsed to the ground in the famous liberal “You’re hurting me!” routine. This time, one of Paul’s supporters—and my new bodyguard—Tim Proffit, jammed his foot on her shoulder, saying, “Now, stay down.”
Inasmuch as the last ten seconds of the woman’s performance was replayed one million times on television, it was perfectly obvious that Proffit had stepped on her shoulder, not, as TV anchors kept claiming, “stomped” on her “head.” Perhaps there was another video showing the head-stomping, but—as with the N-word video—TV anchors never managed to get that one on air. Maybe Proffit stomped on her head. Maybe he pulled out a gun and shot her. Maybe Lauren Valle stomped on Rand Paul’s head. Unfortunately, we don’t have any footage indicating that any of that happened.
But type in “rand paul” on Google, and the first two “suggestions” from Google are: “rand paul” and “rand paul head stomp.” Such media mistakes are never made in the other direction. No wild misstatement of fact ever gets circulated that makes liberals look worse or conservatives look better. There would never, for example, be a widespread lie that instead of stepping on her shoulder, the Paul supporter had accidentally tapped her shin with his foot.
In 2010, John McCormack of the Weekly Standard—an actual reporter with press credentials—was merely trying to ask Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley a question when he was assaulted and knocked to the ground by an operative with the Democratic National Committee.3 If Lauren Valle’s “head” was “stomped,” then McCormack was knifed. But we didn’t hear a peep about that assault.
MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann won the prize for best imitation of a North Korean talk-show host, calling Rush Limbaugh a “damned liar” for claiming Valle’s shoulder was merely stepped on—as the video ran showing her shoulder being merely stepped on:
Olbermann: The bronze to Tokyo Rose Limbaugh, rationalizing the assault on Lauren Valle by lying about it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
Rush Limbaugh: … [N]ow in the video that AP itself posted, the man put his foot down on her shoulder in what looked to me like an effort to help restrain her.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Olbermann: You’re not only a damned liar, Limbaugh, you’re a damned bad liar. 4
That’s ideology trumping the process of your five senses. As Le Bon says, the “simplicity and exaggeration of the sentiments of crowds” result in the crowd’s knowing “neither doubt nor uncertainty. Like women, it goes at once to extremes. A suspicion transforms itself as soon as announced into incontrovertible evidence.”5
MSNBC was also Hoax Central for the claim, during the 2008 campaign, that someone in the crowd had yelled “Kill him!” in reference to Obama at a Palin campaign rally. Olbermann spent most of October 2008 issuing blistering denunciations of John McCain and Sarah Palin based on this absurdity. “There’s a fine line between a smear campaign and an incitement to violence,” Olbermann lectured. “If Senator McCain and Governor Palin have not previously crossed it, this week, today even, they most certainly did.”
Guest-hysteric Richard Wolffe, then of Newsweek, said it was “no excuse” that Palin couldn’t hear what the crowd was shouting, because “what you’re seeing here is a very conscious attempt to paint Obama as un-American, as unpatriotic and, yes, consorting with what they call ‘domestic terrorists.’ ” (Liberals reject the label “domestic terrorists” for former Weathermen, preferring to call them “future Cabinet members.”)
After beating the “Kill him!” story to death, Olbermann delivered one of his prissy “Special Comments” about the nonincident, demanding that McCain stop campaigning. He railed, “Suspend your campaign now until you or somebody else gets some control over it. And it ceases to be a clear and present danger to the peace of this nation.” Anything else, Keith? Should I just concede the election now—or would next week be all right? While I’m up, can I get you a sandwich? How about a hot towel?
As has now been conclusively established, no one ever shouted “Kill him!” at a Palin campaign rally. The Secret Service takes even frivolous threats against a presidential candidate seriously. In 1997, for example, the Secret Service searched the apartment of a student journalist at Berkeley for writing a column about the upcoming football game against Stanford that included the line “Show your spirit on Chelsea’s bloodied carcass, because as the Stanford Daily lets us know, she is just another student.”6
Needless to say, the Secret Service undertook a complete investigation of the claim that someone at a Palin rally had shouted “Kill him!” on hearing Obama’s name. They listened to tapes of the event, interviewed attendees, and interrogated the boatloads of law enforcement officers who had been spread throughout the crowd. The Secret Service’s conclusion was: It never happened. As even an article on the left-wing site Salon noted, “The Secret Service takes this sort of thing very, very seriously. If it says it doesn’t think anyone shouted ‘kill him,’ it’s a good bet that it didn’t happen.”7
Because liberals passionately believe their own myths, this wasn’t the only time they embarrassed themselves in public. Here are a couple of examples in just one week’s time during the 2010 midterms:
After Sarah Palin told a Tea Party crowd to wait for the November election returns before partying “like it’s 1773,” liberals instantly concluded that Palin meant “1776” but was too stupid to know when the Declaration of Independence was signed. PBS’s Gwen Ifill tweeted “Sarah Palin: party like its 1773! ummm,” and the Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas tweeted “Sarah Palin to supporters: ‘Don’t party like it’s 1773 yet.’ … She’s so smart.” These ignorant posts were retweeted by dozens of other liberal geniuses, and the Huffington Post reprinted Moulitsas’s tweet.
It never dawned on the liberal mob that, when speaking to a Tea Party group, Palin might be referring to the year of the Boston Tea Party, which occurred in … yes, that would be 1773. Only if you start with the premise that Sarah Palin is an idiot and therefore if she said something, it must be idiotic, would you not even bother to look up the year of the Boston Tea Party before leaping to the conclusion that Palin meant to cite the date of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
For liberals, Palin’s speeches are like one of those puzzles in a children’s magazine that say, “Spot the mistakes.” Palin was talking, so she must have made a mistake. The problem was, there was no mistake.
The same thing happened when Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell said that the Constitution does not mention a “separation of church and state.” Again, liberals believed their own fairy tales rather than the evidence. They’ve told themselves so many times that “the Constitution clearly provides for a separation of church and state!” no one ever bothered to check.
Whenever liberals talk about “constitutional rights,” they are invariably referring to some pronouncement inserted in an opinion by a rogue liberal judge fifteen years ago, which they now demand we treat as if it came from James Madison’s pen. One thing we know is that terrorists who intend to destroy us must be given civilian trials because that’s what the founding fathers wanted.
Really? Can I see the Constitution?
No, why would you ask?
Hey! That isn’t in the Constitution!
Yes, it’s right here, written in crayon, circa 2006.
Apparently some conservatives took liberals up on the invitation to read the Constitution and saw that the phrase “separation of church and state” is not there.
What liberals meant by “It’s in the Constitution!” was “It was slipped into a Supreme Court opinion around 1950 by Justice Hugo Black, a racist, redneck anti-Papist from Alabama who wanted to make sure no public money would be spent busing students to Catholic schools.” But that doesn’t sound as impressive as “It’s in the Constitution!”
True, the “separation” phrase comes from a letter written by Thomas Jefferson. He also wrote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” but you don’t hear conservatives going around citing the “tree of liberty clause” in the Bill of Rights. Like “the separation of church and state,” it’s not in the Constitution.
Indeed, a fair-minded person would look at the language of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause—“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”—and wonder why it was phrased so clumsily if the idea was to prohibit state involvement in religion. Why not just say, “Neither the federal nor state governments may enact laws favoring religion”?
The answer is: The framers were not only decreeing that Congress could not establish a religion, but also reassuring the states that they could establish religions and Congress couldn’t stop them. Inasmuch as a number of states had established churches both before and after passage of the First Amendment—decades after in some cases—the Establishment Clause obviously didn’t mean the states couldn’t establish religions. To the contrary, Congress was being forbidden from passing a law about the entire subject of—or “respecting”—an establishment of religion. That’s why they used the word “respecting.”
Liberals love to bellow “ ‘No law’ means ‘no law’!” but don’t want to explain why “Congress” doesn’t mean “Congress,” “respecting” doesn’t mean “respecting,” and “establishment” doesn’t mean “establishment.”
Back to Jefferson’s letter: It was written about a decade after the passage of the First Amendment—by a Congress of which Jefferson was not a member, incidentally. He was writing to the Danbury Baptists, who happened to be living in a place where Congregationalism was at that moment the established state religion of Connecticut. But neither Jefferson nor the Baptists objected to that. (The Baptists objected to the dancing—but that’s another story.) Their dispute was about the federal government’s involvement in religion. Even Jefferson’s “wall of separation between church and state” letter referred only to the federal government and assumed states could have established religions.
The invincibly ignorant eye-rolling from the students and professors at the University of Delaware at the O’Donnell-Coons debate suggests that American history is not really touched on by our educational system. I thought they just took the Bible out of public schools, but apparently the history books have been removed as well.
As with the liberals who agreed with one another that Sarah Palin was a moron for mentioning “1773” to a group of Tea Partiers, liberals cited the audible snickers of morons at the O’Donnell-Coons debate as proof that O’Donnell was wrong.
These people would have snickered at Galileo. They would giggle if you told them the millennium didn’t start on January 1, 2000. They would sneer if you told them Albany is the capital of New York. But you’d be right. It doesn’t matter if 99.99999 percent of the people listening to O’Donnell think she’s wrong. She’s right.
But that’s not how a mob distinguishes truth from falsehood. They defer to the crowd. Some students say 2 + 2 = 4, some say it’s 5—let’s have a vote!
As Le Bon says, a mob will believe its own myths even though they “most often have only a very distant relation with the observed fact.”8
The media have reveled in the one myth believed by more Republicans than Democrats: that Obama was not born in Hawaii, despite printed announcements of his birth that ran in Hawaii newspapers at the time, among other evidence. Congratulations, liberals! I’ve got dozens of myths believed by more Democrats than Republicans.
Which party contained the collection of idiots who believed:
• Sarah Palin’s infant child, Trig, was actually the child of her daughter.
• The Rosenbergs were innocent.
• The conviction of spectacularly guilty Mumia Abu Jamal, arrested while literally holding a smoking gun over the body of the cop he had just shot, was a frame-up.
• Alar on apples causes cancer.
• Power lines cause cancer.
• 150,000 women die of anorexia every year.
• Domestic violence against pregnant women is the leading cause of birth defects.
• Global cooling (circa 1976).
• Global warming (circa 2000).
• The Duke lacrosse players gang-raped a stripper.
• There is a “plastic gun”—that shoots bullets—invisible to metal detectors.
• Emergency room admissions for women beaten by their husbands rise 40 percent on Super Bowl Sundays.
• Justice Antonin Scalia threw the 2000 election to Bush so that his son could get a job with the Labor Department.
• Breast implants cause disease.
• O.J. was innocent.
• Dan Rather had documents proving Bush shirked his National Guard duty. (Hint: Rachel Maddow was one!)
• The Diebold Corporation secretly stole 700,000 Kerry votes in 2004.
• Bill Clinton did not have sex with “that woman.”
• Al Gore didn’t realize he was in a Buddhist temple.
• Heterosexuals are just as likely to contract AIDS as gays.
• Jim Jones was not a sociopathic cult leader but an inspirational visionary in the mold of “Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, Chairman Mao” (as put by California Democrat Willie Brown).
• John Edwards didn’t have an affair with Rielle Hunter.
• John Edwards’s campaign aide Andrew Young fathered Rielle Hunter’s child.
• Tawana Brawley was raped by policemen and a prosecutor.
• Someone shouted “Kill him!” at the mention of Obama at a Sarah Palin rally in 2008.
• A census worker found dead in the woods of Kentucky with “Fed” painted on his chest was murdered by a right-wing anti-government nut. (The census employee’s death turned out to be a suicide/insurance fraud scheme.)
• Everything that appears in a Michael Moore movie is true.
There you have it: the myth column of the fifth column. What’s so striking about liberal myths is not only how many there are, nor even that they’re given currency by the New York Times and the CBS Evening News and in the House and Senate, but that they’re so laughably implausible. If 150,000 women died of anorexia every year, the hospitals would be overrun with starving women. That’s three times as many people that die in car accidents every year.
Similarly insane was the Left’s terror of plastic guns. A gun couldn’t fire if it was made of plastic. The explosive force of the bullet would shatter a barrel made of plastic or ceramics. There has never been a gun made without using metal for the barrel. The “plastic gun” that liberals claimed could foil metal detectors was the Austrian Glock—which is 83 percent steel. Only the handle and frame of the so-called plastic gun were constructed of a modern polymer, making the Glock lighter and more comfortable to hold.
And yet, in the eighties, Democrats tried to ban the Glock, despite assurances from both the director of civil aviation security for the Federal Aviation Administration, Billie H. Vincent, and the associate director of the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Phillip C. McGuire, that “plastic guns” were easily picked up by the most primitive metal detector.9
In response, the Democrats produced some nut in Florida who claimed he had spent seven years drawing … a picture of a plastic gun. Yes, a picture. Liberals were terrified! Democratic representative Mario Biaggi said nonexistent plastic guns were a “triple-barrel terrorist threat,” and Democratic representative Robert Mrazek warned that the nonexistent gun was going to be “the terrorist’s weapon of choice, and certainly we ought to be able to stall it long enough to let technology catch up.”10 I’ve designed an invisibility potion—only on paper, so far. Imagine what the terrorists could do with that!
Then-representative Chuck Schumer demanded that Glocks be outlawed on the basis of unconfirmed reports that Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy had placed an order for more than a hundred Glocks.11 Of course, police forces and gun owners across the United States were ordering them, too, because they’re very comfortable and reliable guns.
Nonetheless, news articles reported, “The administration declined Wednesday to endorse legislation prohibiting the import or domestic sale of plastic handguns that terrorists could slip through airport metal detectors.”12
In the end, Congress passed a bill banning guns with less than 3.7 ounces of metal by a 413–4 vote in the House and a voice vote in the Senate. They might as well have outlawed Martian death rays. Even the Glock contains 19 ounces of metal. The National Rifle Association did not object to Congress banning an imaginary gun. With less toleration for fools, Representative Dick Cheney was one of four congressmen to vote against the ban on a nonexistent gun.
Liberals are like the contestants on Monty Python’s Stake Your Claim, but without the sense to concede the point.
Game Show Host: Good evening and welcome to Stake Your Claim. First this evening we have Mr. Norman Vowles of Gravesend, who claims he wrote all Shakespeare’s works. Mr. Vowles, I understand you claim that you wrote all those plays normally attributed to Shakespeare?
Vowles: (proudly) That is correct. I wrote all his plays and the wife and I wrote his sonnets.
Host: Mr. Vowles, these plays are known to have been performed in the early seventeenth century. How old are you, Mr. Vowles?
Vowles: Forty-three.
Host: Well, how is it possible for you to have written plays performed over three hundred years before you were born?
Vowles: Ah well. This is where my claim falls to the ground.
Host: Ah!
Vowles: There’s no possible way of answering that argument, I’m afraid. I was only hoping you would not make that particular point, but I can see you’re more than a match for me!
MSNBC manufactures bogus stories and pumps them out a mile a minute, while leaping on the slightest misstatement made on Fox News as proof of malice or lunacy. (Thus uniting the mob’s belief in myths and acceptance of contradiction in one dynamite combo platter!)
When the Mississippi River bridge in Minnesota collapsed during rush hour on August 1, 2007, killing thirteen people, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann wildly leapt to the conclusion, on the basis of no evidence, that it was Republicans’ fault. They had callously cut taxes and now people had died.
Forty-eight hours after the collapse, Keith cited the remarks of Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)—whom he called “Governor,” in the sort of misstatement he deems a firing offense if uttered by a conservative—and Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY) blaming Republicans for the tragedy. (When something is an actual “tragedy” involving no human will, liberals blame Republicans; when it’s an intentional attack, such as the Tucson shooting or the 9/11 terrorist plot, liberals call it a “tragedy.”)
Klobuchar blamed the bridge’s collapse on “messed-up priorities of spending half a trillion dollars in Iraq while bridges crumble at home.” Slaughter also blamed the Iraq War, calling the people who died in the bridge collapse “almost victims of war” because our “perpetual war depletes the funds available to maintain our infrastructure.”
Maddow laid the deaths of thirteen people directly at the feet of “Republicans, including Governor [Tim] Pawlenty [and] President Bush,” who “have demonized taxes and demonized any Democrat who ever said a tax hike could improve our lives, save our lives at home.” Saying, “there aren’t Republican bridges or Democratic bridges,” Maddow railed: “We’re a country that as a whole is paying this incredible deadly price for a brand of American conservatism that hates and demeans government, and that has defined any sort of spending on anything for the common good as something that’s soft headed and suspect.”
She traced the collapse of the bridge back to Ronald Reagan’s “first inaugural, where he defined government as the problem, and to Barry Goldwater before him, and the Republican Party defends itself as uncritical inheritors of the legacy.”13
All this was two days after the bridge collapsed, before an investigation into the causes had even begun.
A year later, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the bridge collapsed because of a design flaw.14 It had nothing to do with government spending on upkeep of the bridge, it wasn’t corrosion or cracks. It was a design flaw. The Democrats’ demand for more “infrastructure” spending wouldn’t have helped.
After polluting the airwaves with their irresponsible, baseless accusations, liberals never acknowledged that they were wrong, nor did we get an apology from Olbermann, Maddow, Klobuchar, or Slaughter.
In the last year of the Bush administration, terrified that the president would take action against Iran before leaving office, MSNBC and other conscience-of-the-nation types denounced neoconservatives, Zionists, and the right-wing smear machine for insulting the good name of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In December 2007 a report was leaked that all sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies had concluded that Iran had ceased nuclear weapons development as of 2003. The leak came after months of warnings from the Bush administration that Iran was pursuing a nuclear weapons program.
In October 2007, for example, President Bush had warned, “If you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”
The only people more triumphant than Ahmadinejad about the leaked report were liberals. In Time magazine, Joe Klein gloated that the Iran report “appeared to shatter the last shreds of credibility of the White House’s bomb-Iran brigade—and especially that of Vice President Dick Cheney.”15
Liberal columnist Bill Press said, “No matter how badly Bush and Cheney wanted to carpet-bomb Iran, it’s clear now that doing so would have been a tragic mistake.”16
Naturally, the most hysterical response came from MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. After donning his mother’s housecoat, undergarments, and fuzzy slippers, Keith brandished the NIE report, night after night, demanding that Bush apologize to the Iranians.
“Having accused Iran of doing something it had stopped doing more than four years ago,” Olbermann thundered, “instead of apologizing or giving a diplomatic response of any kind, this president of the United States chuckled.”
Olbermann ferociously defended Mahmoud (a fan of the show) from aspersions cast by the Bush administration, asking if the president could make “any more of a mess” than by chuckling “in response to Iran’s anger at being in some respects, at least, either overrated or smeared.”17 Bush had “smeared” Ahmadinejad!
Most sanctimoniously, Keith said, “Given the astonishment with which President Clinton’s lie about his personal life was met in the media, in the newspapers, where is that level of interest in this president’s lie? That first one was a lie about an intern and maybe some testimony. This is a lie about the threat of nuclear war.”18
Bush didn’t believe the intelligence. Clinton said he wasn’t sure if Monica Lewinsky performed oral sex on him.
Keith’s Ed McMahon, the ever-obliging Howard Fineman of Newsweek, said that the leaked intelligence showed that Bush “has zero credibility.”19 The next night, Keith’s even creepier sidekick, androgynous Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe, also agreed, saying American credibility “has suffered another serious blow.”20
Olbermann’s most macho guest, Rachel Maddow, demanded to know—with delightful originality—“what the president knew and when he knew it.”21 Again, this was on account of Bush’s having disparaged the good name of a sawed-off, Jew-hating nut-burger, despite the existence of a cheery report on Iran produced by our useless intelligence agencies.
Poor Ahmadinejad!
Keith, who knows everything that’s on the Daily Kos and nothing else, called those who doubted the NIE report “liars” and repeatedly demanded an investigation into when Bush knew about it. He was even happier than Ahmadinejad, who proclaimed the NIE report “a declaration of the Iranian people’s victory against the great powers.”22
A lot of Republicans were suspicious of the intelligence, from John Bolton to Dick Cheney. The report’s release was precisely timed to embarrass Bush inasmuch as it followed a series of bellicose remarks from the administration about Iran. Moreover, anyone who knows about these things knows that the United States has the worst intelligence-gathering operations in the world. The Czechs, the French, the Italians—even the Iraqis (who were trained by the Soviets)—have better intelligence. Burkina Faso has better intelligence—and their director of intelligence is a witch doctor. The marketing division of Wal-Mart has more reliable intel than the U.S. government does.
After Watergate, the off-the-charts left-wing Congress gleefully set about dismantling this nation’s intelligence operations on the theory that Watergate never would have happened if only there had been no CIA. This is a little like dismantling your car because you accidentally hit the mailbox. (Democrats are apparently opposed to intelligence of any sort.)
Ron Dellums, a typical Democrat of the time, who—amazingly—was a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, famously declared in 1975, “We should totally dismantle every intelligence agency in this country piece by piece, brick by brick, nail by nail.”
And so they did.
So now our spies are prohibited from spying. The only job of a CIA officer these days is to read foreign newspapers and leak classified information to the New York Times. It’s like a secret society of newspaper readers. The reason no one at the CIA saw 9/11 coming was that there wasn’t anything about it in the Islamabad Post. (On the plus side, at least we haven’t had another break-in at the Watergate!)
CIA agents can’t spy because that might require them to break laws in foreign countries. They are perfectly willing to break U.S. laws to leak national security secrets to the media, but not in order to acquire valuable intelligence on other countries. CIA officers spend their days finding reasons to do nothing and then, a month later, say, “Yeah, we heard that request a few weeks ago. Let me tell you why we can’t do it.” It was constantly being leaked that Dick Cheney was demanding that the CIA do something insane. You want us to infiltrate al Qaeda? We can’t do that!
But whenever anyone mentioned this about the Iranian nukes leak, Keith accused the “neocons” of choosing “to slander the intelligence community.”23
Even the New York Times, of all places, ran a column by two outside experts on Iran’s nuclear programs that ridiculed the NIE’s conclusion. Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control and Valerie Lincy of Iranwatch.org cited Iran’s operation of three thousand gas centrifuges at its plant at Natanz, as well as a heavy-water reactor being built at Arak, neither of which had any peaceful energy purpose. (If only there were something plentiful in Iran that could be used for energy!)
Weirdly, our intelligence agencies missed those nuclear operations.24 They were too busy reading an article in the Tehran Tattler, “Iran Now Loves Israel.”
Even if you weren’t aware that the United States has the worst intelligence in the world, and even if you didn’t notice that the leak was timed perfectly to embarrass Bush, wouldn’t any normal person be suspicious of a report concluding Ahmadinejad was behaving like a prince?
Not liberals. Our intelligence agencies concluded Iran had suspended its nuclear program in 2003, so Bush owed Ahmadinejad an apology. Any military response was scuttled. Indeed, then-Senator Joe Biden threatened Bush with impeachment if he bombed Iran.
Then, on February 11, 2010—about a year after Bush left the White House—Ahmadinejad announced that Iran was “a nuclear state.” So it would appear that Iran’s nuclear program hadn’t been completely abandoned in 2003. Can we get an apology from liberals? How about after Ahmadinejad drops his first bomb?
Once again, the Left had made triumphal accusations that turned out to be completely wrong—and then we never heard about it again.
In the fall of 2009, the naked body of census worker Bill Sparkman was found hanging from a tree in southwestern Kentucky. Liberals wasted no time in leaping to the conclusion that right-wing extremists had murdered him in a burst of anti-government hate.
A census worker? Lots of Americans—including the liberal ACLU—objected to the detailed personal questions included in the long form of the modern census that go far beyond the “actual enumeration” called for in the Constitution. So did lots of non-Americans worried about their illegal status being revealed to immigration authorities. Presumably, those people didn’t answer the personal questions on their census forms. Other than that, a census worker isn’t a particularly reviled figure. He’s not an IRS agent, who can threaten you with penalties and jail time, an EPA inspector with the power to declare your swamp a federally protected wetland, or an Agriculture inspector, who can arrest you, seize your tractor, and fine you hundreds of thousands of dollars for running over rats. A census worker just asks you to fill out a form but has no power to impose punishment.
Even the New York Times wasn’t buying the idea of a right-wing militia type murdering a census worker, running only a short, terse AP item about the death. Stranger still, Frank Rich sat this conspiracy theory out.
But the liberal idiocracy was ablaze with fantasies of a violent right-wing uprising sweeping America. After categorically announcing that the census worker’s death was “not suicide”—that’s “the one thing we know for certain”—the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan blamed “Southern populist terrorism” for his death, “whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts.”25
Newsweek’s story on the census worker’s death suggestively quoted a warning in the Census Bureau’s manual telling employees not to engage people who say “they hate you and all government employees.” The story ominously added, “Perhaps Bill Sparkman wasn’t given the time to follow that sage advice.”26
New York magazine ran an article about the dead census worker, asking, “Has Nancy Pelosi’s Fear of Political Violence Been Realized?” Somehow blaming Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN)—whom it called “wide-eyed” and “hysterical”—the magazine said a right-wing vigilante “wouldn’t be all that surprising, considering the sheer volume of vitriol directed at the federal government and the Obama administration these days by conservative media personalities, websites, and even members of Congress.”27 Poor besieged liberals! Americans were committing hate crimes against them by asking Congress to cut spending! (Liberals are still trying to figure out how to blame John Hinckley’s shooting of Reagan on conservative rhetoric.)
On CNN’s AC360, Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, said, “At this point, this was such a symbolic and personal anger, that I’m led to lean towards someone who has severe anti-government feelings, perhaps someone who’s seeking revenge.”28
But for truly crazy zealotry, we turn to MSNBC. Asked by Ed Schultz on The Ed Show whether political rhetoric was driving people to commit crimes, MSNBC analyst and former FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt said, “Absolutely. As I say, Ed, there are the fringe of the fringe. There are people sitting there saying, you know, you’re going to have to pry the gun out of my cold, dead fingers.… They listen to talk radio. They read blogs that are only on one side or the other. They watch programs that only have one side.… And for many of us, that just says, well, there, I believe it. For others, that says, by God, I’m not going to take it. I’m going to do something about it. And that fringe of the fringe, one more time, will pick up a gun.”29
But the one person most hysterically committed to the idea that a right-winger had murdered Bill Sparkman was MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Rachel’s main move is constant eye-rolling at the crazy things conservatives believe—which generally turn out to be true. But then she will transition in an instant to deadly serious earnestness about the possibility of, for example, anti-government right-wingers causing Sparkman’s death.
The week the census worker’s death first broke, night after night, Maddow devoted large portions of her show to fearmongering over this “troubling story.” Letting her feminine side come out, she started to seem more like her MSNBC colleague Keith Olbermann.
Beginning her show with this “very serious breaking news,” Rachel reported that the FBI was investigating and that the census chief had called it “an apparent crime.” The only reason the FBI would be involved, she said, is that “it is a federal crime to attack a federal worker on the job or because of their job.”
And so it went, with Rachel breathlessly reporting this “breaking national news” every night, quoting anonymous sources calling it a homicide and digging up rare video footage of Sparkman to show his human side.”30
One of Sparkman’s friends, retired state trooper Gilbert Acciardo, had been quoted in the Lexington Herald-Leader saying he had warned Sparkman to be careful working in that part of the state. Thinking she had found a fellow conspiracy theorist, Rachel invited him on the show. But despite Rachel’s portentous, leading questions, Acciardo repeatedly shot down her Deliverance fantasies.
Maddow: What—what in particular made you worry about him going to that part of the state?
Acciardo: Well … the road system over there is a little bit—they have smaller roads over there, and I was just afraid for his safety on driving the roads.…
Maddow: Did he ever express any concern to you about his work with the Census Bureau—any problems he’d ever had on the job?
Acciardo: No—just the opposite. He really enjoyed his census work, and he said people were really good to him.
Maddow: Are folks in this area familiar with the Census and its purpose? … Is there any fear that you’re aware of that the Census might be seen as sort of a government intrusion?
Acciardo: No. I’m not aware.…
The next night, Rachel led with “brand-new details which do not all dampen the worry that Bill Sparkman’s death was what we first worried it appeared to be—violence against a federal employee, because he was a federal employee.”
The “new disturbing details” were that Sparkman’s census ID had been taped to his body. Rachel reminded viewers over and over again that “of course, with the confirmation from the coroner today that the word ‘Fed’ was written across Mr. Sparkman’s chest and then this new information about the ID being taped to his otherwise naked body at the time, this is what’s leading us to worry that he was killed in fact because he was a federal employee.” Again, she reminded viewers, there’s “a strong suspicion of government generally among people who live in that area.”31
Rachel Maddow owned the Bill-Sparkman-was-murdered-by-right-wingers story.
With law enforcement authorities still refusing to say whether they even believed a crime had been committed, Rachel complained that it was taking them too long to rule out suicide or accident. “We’re starting to get to a point,” she said, “where it’s hard to imagine that this could be anything other than a homicide.”32
When investigators announced a month later that Sparkman had committed suicide as an insurance scam, Rachel’s guest host Howard Dean made the brief announcement, sparing Rachel the humiliation.33 From that moment on, the story of the census worker was buried in a lead casket and dropped to the bottom of the ocean, as Maddow returned to regaling her viewers with hilarious stories about conspiracy-theorist right-wingers.
Even after having been taken in by the dummied Bush National Guard documents, the collapse of the Mississippi River bridge, the laughably false intelligence report on Iran’s nuclear program, and the alleged right-wing murder of the census worker, Rachel didn’t pause before issuing the breathless claim, in the middle of Wisconsin’s budget crisis in February 2011: “I’m here to report that there is nothing wrong in the state of Wisconsin.”
Contrary to what everyone else was reporting, Rachel assured her viewers that “Wisconsin is fine. Wisconsin is great, actually. Despite what you may have heard about Wisconsin’s finances, Wisconsin is on track to have a budget surplus this year.”
She continued the breaking news: “I am not kidding. I’m quoting their own version of the Congressional Budget Office, the state’s own nonpartisan ‘assess the state’s finances’ agency. That agency said the month that the new Republican governor of Wisconsin was sworn in, last month, that the state was on track to have a $120 million budget surplus this year.”34
Unfortunately, Rachel hadn’t bothered to read the entire memo. In that same January 31, 2011, memo, Robert Lang of the Legislative Fiscal Bureau went on to describe an additional $258 million in unpaid state expenses, including a $174 million shortfall in Medicaid services and $58.7 million owed the state of Minnesota in a tax reciprocity deal. Those were just two of the debits that had to be set against the $120 million “surplus.”
The result was—as Lang concluded—Wisconsin was facing a $137 million shortfall, which, oddly, was very close to the $137 million shortfall Republican governor Scott Walker had claimed.35
Rachel had confused “0” with “$137 million.” Next up on The Rachel Maddow Show—a story you haven’t heard anywhere else: How Big Foot stole government workers’ pensions!
A promotion for Rachel’s program shows her sitting on the floor surrounded by index cards, with a Magic Marker in her mouth, as she says in a voice-over that news is about “what’s true in the world.” The promotion ends with Rachel at her anchor desk, opening her show with: “Good evening. We begin today with a story that no one is talking about.”
Given her record, there’s probably a reason no one is talking about it.
MSNBC’s celebrated African-American guest, Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell (now, Harris-Perry), has made a career as an eye-roller about Americans who, in times of economic insecurity, fear “the Other”—immigrants, Muslims, and black presidents. This is the sum total of left-wing social science from the 1960s to the present. And it’s manifestly untrue: Some of the most comfortable, cosseted people in America will apparently believe anything.
Unemployed mine workers in West Virginia, clinging to their guns and religion, for example, have shown more skepticism about Obama’s alleged Kenyan birth than Melissa Harris-Lacewell showed toward innocent Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of gang-raping a stripper in March 2006.
By May 20, 2006, the liberal legal reporter at the National Journal, Stuart Taylor, had written that the available evidence about the case left him 85 percent sure that the rape charge was a lie.36 Among the evidence that was then publicly known was the fact that not one speck of the DNA taken from the stripper’s body, clothes, or fingernails belonged to any of the lacrosse players, who had allegedly raped her anally, orally, and vaginally in a small bathroom.
It was also known that one of the three defendants, Reade Seligman, had an airtight alibi for virtually every minute of the only time period when a rape could have occurred—midnight to 12:31 a.m. on March 13. Phone records proved that Seligman was on his cell phone from 12:05 to 12:14 and that his last call was to a cabdriver. The cabdriver, who happens to be black, said he picked Seligman up at 12:19, drove him to an ATM, where a receipt showed that Seligman used his card at 12:24 a.m., then took Seligman to a fast-food restaurant, and finally drove Seligman back to his dorm, where his key card was swiped at 12:46 a.m.
It was also known that the accuser had a criminal record and had repeatedly changed her story about the alleged rape.37
More than a month after all this information had been released to the public, Harris-Lacewell wrote about what she called the “Duke Rape Case” on her blog and accused Duke athletes of “pervasive misogyny” and “brewing hostility.”
Everything about this story resonates with my experience.… The pervasive misogyny that clung to the men’s athletics programs and the thinly veiled racism of the university culture were palpable. I distinctly remember a crushing sense of vulnerability and dread when I interacted with some white males on campus. Although many were the model of respectable, genial behavior on the surface, I often sensed a brewing hostility beneath the surface. When I first heard the allegations in this case I wept because it felt like someone had finally revealed that unspoken anxiety I so often felt.38
Apparently, she perceives Duke athletes as “the Other.”
Contradicting Harris-Lacewell’s broad generalizations about white men at Duke were actual facts adduced by a Duke faculty committee two months earlier. Led by liberal law professor James Coleman, who, again, happens to be black, the committee had reviewed the conduct of the entire Duke lacrosse team for the previous five years. The committee found a few alcohol infractions, but concluded that none of the misconduct by the lacrosse players—again, going back five years—had “involved fighting, sexual assault or harassment, or racist slurs.” The committee also reported that “current as well as former African-American members of the team have been extremely positive about the support the team provided them.”39
But Harris-Lacewell was too busy inventing a myth about innocent men accused of rape to bother with the facts. In an interview on the Duke lacrosse case, she told BlackAmericaWeb.com that the “sense of entitlement and privilege at Duke is nauseating.” She also accused the Duke women’s lacrosse team of supporting the accused players because “given the entire history of white men sexually assaulting black women, we always know that white women have been on the side of white men.”40 The actual history of interracial rape—according to FBI crime statistics—is that, since the seventies, approximately 15,000 to 36,000 white women have been raped by black men every year, while, on average, zero black women are raped by white men. (The Department of Justice uses “0” to denote fewer than ten victims.)41
As Harris-Lacewell has said (when she’s psychoanalyzing Tea Partiers), we know “that there are individuals [who] have sort of a predisposition towards intolerance.” When “things start changing very rapidly,” people experience “this anxiety, and it creates precisely the kind of intolerance that we’re seeing.”42
Harris-Lacewell was understandably confused and anxious. She was upset that no one asked her to replace Starr Parker on The View—as she had proposed on her blog. She was exhausted from carrying that Princeton backdrop around with her for every TV appearance. She couldn’t understand why Rachel Maddow was always showering her with sickening praise that was not afforded Rachel’s white guests. All this may explain the intolerance we’re seeing from Harris-Lacewell.
As she might explain herself—at least when she’s talking about conservatives—Harris-Lacewell evinced a “certitude” about her own position and worried that her “way of life” was “under attack.” She showed a “capacity to dehumanize” white male athletes because she believes that “they are not as good as” she is. Those were factors 1, 2, and 3 in her explanation to MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann of the (nonexistent) “move to violence” among Tea Partiers.43 (There was never any actual violence by Tea Partiers—but they were moving that way!)
MSNBC’s other black guest, Eugene Robinson, was also a rape truther, long after the evidence suggested otherwise. (I’m going to embarrass Eugene by pointing out that he’s won a Pulitzer Prize. Why? Because it’s the law.) Invoking classic liberal stereotypes of “preppy privilege” and students who were “downright arrogant in their sense of superiority,” Robinson said, “It’s impossible to avoid thinking of all the black women who were violated by drunken white men in the American South over the centuries. The master-slave relationship, the tradition of droit du seigneur, the use of sexual possession as an instrument of domination—all this ugliness floods the mind, unbidden, and refuses to leave.”44
It having been established that the accuser had once stolen a taxi, led the cops on a high-speed car chase, and tried to run down a police officer with the cab, among her other prior crimes, and that none of the lacrosse players’ DNA could be found on her person or effects, a rational person would find it quite possible to avoid thinking of drunken white men raping their slaves two hundred years earlier. Me? I thought of Tawana Brawley. But the mob is immune to facts, preferring myths and images.
Liberals are the “some of the people” you can fool all the time. It’s easy to implant myths in the minds of mobs because they only grasp ideas in terms of images. As Le Bon explains:
Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. It is only images that terrify or attract them and become motives of action.
For this reason theatrical representations, in which the image is shown in its most clearly visible shape, always have an enormous influence on crowds. [S]pectacular shows constituted for the plebeians of ancient Rome the idea of happiness, and they asked for nothing more.…
Nothing has a greater effect on the imagination of crowds of every category than theatrical representations.45
Cut to: Maureen Dowd writing in the New York Times that a movie about Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson “makes clear that Plame was not merely ‘a secretary’ or ‘mediocre agent’ at the agency, as partisan critics charged at the time, but a respected undercover spy tracking Iraqi W.M.D. efforts.”46
The movie says so!
Not only that but Dowd noted that the movie “reiterates that Plame did not send her husband, who had worked in embassies in Iraq while Saddam and Bush Senior were in charge and was the ambassador in two African countries, on the fact-finding trip to Niger about a possible Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of yellowcake uranium.”
Dowd’s citation of a movie as proving this or that aspect of the Wilson-Plame fairy tale resembles Le Bon’s description of a theater manager who “was obliged to have the actor who took the part of the traitor protected on his leaving the theatre, to defend him against the violence of the spectators, indignant at the crimes, imaginary though they were, which the traitor had committed.”47
Precisely because of Plame and Wilson’s lies, the Senate Intelligence Committee was forced to hold hearings on these very topics. During those hearings, not only did the CIA’s inspector general testify that Plame herself told him she had “made the suggestion” that her husband go on the Niger trip, not only did the CIA reports officer testify that Plame “offered up his name,” but the committee actually obtained the memo in which Plame recommended her husband for the job. Indeed, there was no job until Plame came up with the idea of sending someone—perhaps her husband—to Niger.48
The movie may tout Wilson’s illustrious diplomatic career as reason enough for his being considered for a mission to Niger, but—as the New York Times reported back in 1990—Wilson’s so-called diplomatic career consisted of his being an administrator, “someone usually more concerned that the embassy heating and plumbing work than with what is going on in the host country.”49 Of course, the Times didn’t have the benefit of a Hollywood movie before reaching that conclusion.
Apparently, the movie also portrays Karl Rove and Scooter Libby vindictively leaking Plame’s name to the press in order to destroy her career as the single most important spy in the nation’s history. Dowd says, “The movie is a vivid reminder of one of the most egregious abuses of power in history, and there are deliciously diabolical turns by actors playing Scooter Libby, David Addington, and Rove.”
How many times do we have to go through this? As long as one Republican after another is required to go on MSNBC’s Hardball and stand up to the “birthers,” when will Chris Matthews stand up to Maureen Dowd? Can anyone in the Democratic Party stand up to Dowd?
After years of sturm und drang about Karl Rove and Scooter Libby “leaking” Plame’s name to the press, it finally emerged in August 2006 that it wasn’t anyone in the White House at all, but Richard Armitage, an Iraq War critic, who gave a reporter her name. The New York Times story on the shocking revelation began, “Richard L. Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, has acknowledged that he was the person whose conversation with a columnist in 2003 prompted a long, politically laden criminal investigation in what became known as the C.I.A. leak case.”50
Have you ever noticed how you have to tell liberals the same thing over and over? Liberals simply cannot learn. They’re like children who put their hands over their ears because they don’t want to listen to Mother. Most normal people just give up and let liberals enjoy their fantasies. Even when you force an individual liberal to look at evidence and admit the truth, leave him alone for a few days and he’ll go right back to spouting the same hokum.
Conservatives heard Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii, but then found out there were newspaper announcements of his birth and dropped it—except for the remaining two hundred Americans who still believe Obama was born in Kenya.
Conservatives—like everyone else—believed Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. After the invasion, however, no stockpiles were found. The former Iraqi general under Saddam Hussein, Georges Sada, wrote a book claiming Saddam had moved the stockpiles out of the country,51 but conservatives dropped it, refusing even to mention the nonstockpiled WMD that were found.
Conservatives thought Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague on April 9, 2001. We thought so because that’s what Czech intelligence concluded, and they have a better intelligence service than we do; because an eyewitness claimed to have seen the meeting; because Atta had had clandestine meetings in Prague before; and because the Iraqi intelligence officer wrote in his diary for that day, “Hamburg student,” which Atta was, and described himself as in his visa application. But the CIA and 9/11 Commission concluded that Atta was not in Prague on April 9 because, although no eyewitnesses saw him in the United States between April 4 and April 11, someone used his cell phone in Florida on April 6, 9, and 10.52
So conservatives dropped it, with Bush and Cheney never mentioning it again—and indeed, being taunted for having ever believed it.
Many conservatives believed Clinton’s granting pardons in exchange for donations to his presidential library or payments to his brother-in-law was a crime, but then found out they were wrong: The president has unrestricted power to grant pardons, except in the case of impeachments. So conservatives stopped calling it a crime.
Contrast that with liberals. Even having the New York Times acknowledge that: (1) Plame recommended her husband for the Niger trip, (2) Armitage told the press about her involvement, and (3) it was not a crime for Armitage to reveal her name—all that was not enough to get liberals to stop claiming that the leak of “secret agent” Valerie Plame’s name was a crime and that someone in the Bush White House had committed it.
Liberals can’t learn.
Wasn’t welfare reform such a triumphant success that Bill Clinton started claiming credit for it? In 2009, the Democratic “stimulus” bill largely repealed welfare reform. Didn’t we already prove that putting criminals behind bars would reduce the crime rate? Liberals are right back releasing criminals again. Haven’t concealed carry laws disproved the critics’ hysterical predictions and instead been magnificently successful at reducing crime? In 2009, the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress rejected a bill to allow “portability” of state concealed carry permits. (Everything must be national, except laws about guns.)
Ravens can learn to snatch fishermen’s untended lines to get fish. Worms learn not to eat harmful bacteria (as opposed to the tasty nutritious bacteria they normally feed on). Fruit fly larvae can learn to detect the scent of predators. But liberals cannot learn that the August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” had not a speck of what we call “useful information.”
I described the August 6 PDB in painstaking detail in my 2006 book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. The memo read like a fifth-grader’s book report that was left to the last minute and based on quickly cobbled-together information from Google. The only “warnings” of future acts by al Qaeda were completely wrong. Thus, the PDB contained blindingly obvious facts such as “Bin Ladin [sic] since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.,” while warning that bin Laden supporters might be planning an attack in the US “with explosives” and that they might be preparing to attack “federal buildings in New York.”
The 9/11 attack did not involve explosives. It did not target a single federal building in New York.
With liberals continuing to cite the August 6 PDB as if it had laid out the 9/11 plot in blinding detail, in frustration I even printed the full memo in the paperback version of Godless.
And still liberals cite the August 6 PDB as proof of Bush’s incompetence.
On December 3, 2008, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann ominously announced, “The title of the August 6th, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing, ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S’: It could have included copies of the terrorist itineraries and the message from the future. If a president did not act on it or perhaps did not even read it, it still wouldn’t have made any difference.”
In fact, if Bush had directed all members of the executive branch to drop everything and jump on the “warnings” in the August 6 PDB, bomb-sniffing dogs would have been wandering through our major cities and police lookouts would have been stationed at federal buildings in New York City—as planes smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Another plane might have crashed into some bomb-sniffing dogs in Pennsylvania, on its way to an unprotected White House. None of the 9/11 targets would have received special protection as a result of anything in the August 6 PDB. Nor, of course, was the single most important fact—that terrorists would use commercial airplanes as cruise missiles—mentioned as a possibility.
True, the title of the PDB was “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” I have a memo titled “Actress Determined to Succeed in Hollywood.”
This is textbook mob behavior. As Le Bon writes:
Evidence, if it be very plain, may be accepted by an educated person, but the convert will quickly be brought back by his unconscious self to his original conceptions. See him again after the lapse of a few days and he will put forward afresh his old argument in exactly the same terms. He is in reality under the influence of anterior ideas, that have become sentiments, and it is such ideas alone that influence the more recondite motives of our acts and utterances. It cannot be otherwise in the case of crowds.53
Bush was the enemy, Rove his evil genius, so it didn’t matter what the facts were. Hollywood would supply the rewrite.
There’s your “reality-based community.”