Tristero over at Digby's blog has a good post up on the lunacy of a recent Ross Douthat column in the Times. The part I wanted to echo relates to what was said below about hypocrisy.
The worst part of providing the cognitively deranged a widely-seen forum for their distortions (eg, Douthat in the Times or Beck on Fox) is that an enormous amount of effort is spent in simply correcting their grossly misleading assertions and stating the obvious. It's a goddam waste of everyone's valuable time.
And that, of course, is the reason they do it. Because the more time we spend correcting them, the less time there's left for actually doing something constructive.
This is the way the cynical beat you--keep you mired in horseshit while the parasitical among us go about their business of eating you alive from the inside out.
I like this theory! I believe I'll feel less hopeless if I stop and think about this when I read crap that makes me nuts.
ReplyDeleteCrap that makes you nuts--This is a Republican strategy put to use in a cynical matter by those who know the "crap" masks their rapacious work; but also "given" to those that are easily co-opted into using this strategy as an argumentative stance against reason. One is a cynic; the other a lemming.
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