David Frum, the former George W. Bush Speechwriter and exiled conservative thinker, confirms what I said last month: the GOP has created an entire alternate ecosystem to justify their reality-challenged myths. They are, essentially, entitling themselves to their own facts:
Of all the exiled Republican tell-alls in recent months (and there have been many, and indeed, the pace seems to be increasing) Frum's is probably the most damning. You should read it now.
Must Read Frum
Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama—whatever his policy errors—is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he’s a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) “the only place in the world where it doesn’t matter who your parents were or where you came from.”That, my friends, is what we call a sick burn. And it doesn't stop there.
Of all the exiled Republican tell-alls in recent months (and there have been many, and indeed, the pace seems to be increasing) Frum's is probably the most damning. You should read it now.