Jon Stewart on The Rachel Maddow Show [via Raw Story]:
"CNN sort of started it. They had this idea that, you know, the fight in Washington is Republicans and Democrats. So why don't we isolate that and we'll stand back here and Democrats and Republicans will go at it. Red and blue staters will go at it. What it does is amplifies a division that I actually don't think is the right fight," Stewart said.
"What I do believe is both sides have their way of shutting down debate and the news networks have allowed these two sides to become the fight in the country. And I think the fight in the country is corruption vs. not corruption. Extremists vs. regular [people]."
I don't know, Jon. How about fantasy vs. reality? How about "liberals are fascists" vs. "fascists are fascists"? How about, "You belong to the reality-based community" vs. "WE belong to the reality-based community." How about "Obama is Kenyan" vs. "Obama's father was Kenyan." How about "The federal debt 30 years from now is an immediate crisis!" vs. "Real unemployment close to 20% is an immediate crisis"? How about "global warming is a hoax" vs. "global warming is just one of several ways in which human activity is pushing the Earth beyond the limits of sustainability in its current state"? How about "Iraq had WMDs" vs. "Bush was developing war plans for Iraq before 9/11."
Now, MSNBC doesn't perfectly embody the "reality" side of the above. Nobody does. And there are folks--like Amy Goodman, for example--who consistently do it better. But as far as major corporate media entities are concerned, the FOX/MSNBC divide can be said to match "fantasy vs. reality" nearly as well as it matches "Red vs. Blue".
So it seems to me, Jon, that you might want to go back to the drawing board and ponder that a bit, before coming up with your next grand plan for how the media might should organize itself. Plenty of "regular people" wouldn't know reality if it came up and bit them in the ass:
And plenty of folks you might call "extremists" are "extremists" precisely because they are in touch with reality. Heck, they might even know that George Bush is war criminal.
Last night, Rachel Maddow had a segment on the crazy world of imaginary rightwing facts, such as the recent furor over Obama's trip to India supposedly costing $200 million a day, and involving 10% of the US Navy fleet. Of course it didn't... but all manner of wingnuts, up to and including Michelle Bachmann were utterly convinced it was true. Maddow touched on a number of other examples, including the infamous "death panels", which should be enough to tip folks off that this is not merely a matter of whacky annecdotal excesses. Here's the first 8 1/2 minutes of the full almost 19 minute segment:
This phenomena of a separate reality sustained by a self-contained conservative media universe has serious policy consequences. And the fact that Obama and the rest of the Democratic establishment doesn't realize this--they're in yet another anti-reality bubble of their own--also has serious policy consequences.
In the that spirit, I thought of two recent examples that show how conservative media fantasy bubbles impact our politics in ways that are central to our politics, although both these examples have roots going back decades, and have been significantly enabled by the M$M for years. Still, in both cases--as in the cases Maddow cites--there's a core of crazy kept alive by the conservative media bubble that's utterly immune to outside debunking.
The first involves taxes and the size of government. The second has to do with the fact that illegal immigrants have been leaving a number of states since 2005. I'll deal with that in a separate diary later on. For now, to preserve some semblance of focus, let's just focus on taxes. A recent post by Brad DeLong dredges up something I remember commenting on, but can't find a link to, from relatively-not-insane conservative Bruce Bartlet, "Ignorance Is Bliss for the Tea Party Crowd". It's about their wildly inaccurate sense of taxation levels, from a survey of folks at a Tea Party rally done by interns working for David Frum, another non-fringey conservative. A relevant passage:
Tea partiers were asked how much the federal government gets in taxes as a percentage of the gross domestic product. According to Congressional Budget Office data, acceptable answers would be 6.4%, which is the percentage for federal income taxes; 12.7%, which would be for both income taxes and Social Security payroll taxes; or 14.8%, which would represent all federal taxes as a share of GDP in 2009.
Not everyone follows these numbers closely and tea partiers may have been thinking of figures from a few years ago, before the recession when taxes were higher. According to the CBO, the highest figure for all federal taxes since 1970 came in the year 2000, when they reached 20.6% of GDP. As we know, after that George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress cut federal taxes and they fell to 18.5% of GDP in 2007, before the recession hit, and 17.5% in 2008.
Tuesday's tea party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times higher than they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median was 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944.
So, in short, if one were to offer those Tea Baggers to cut federal taxes by 40% from what they thought taxes were, that would be a pretty dramatic offer that should make them all really happy, no? Well, Obama could do that very easily---and thereby raise taxes to 24%, an almost 7% increase. In which case, why should he ever think of actually cutting taxes? Especially since by "cutting" them 40% he could easily manage the budget deficit as well.
The questioning moved on to individual levels of taxation, and the Tea Baggers wildly over-estimated these as well. Then they moved on to the direction of change in recent tax levels:
