Inversion

That seems to be the basic rule of right-wing semantics over the past generation or two. Digby has some interesting insights on a specific example:

Indeed, until 9/11, the most vociferous objections to the ultra-conservative islamic regimes came from liberals (mostly feminists and gays, as it happens --- hardly the base of the Republican party.) It makes no sense to throw godless liberals in with Islamic fundamentalists, as conservative writers like Dinesh D'Souza finally realized when he wrote his book in which he basically --- you guessed it --- blames America first, for its godless liberalism. And let's not forget that the high priests of the religious right, Falwell and Dobson, blamed America first after 9/11, or as Barone puts it, "the parts of America they don't like."

The incoherence goes further than that, as when the authoritarian right argues intensely that "the constitution is not a suicide pact" as an excuse for undermining and usurping it. (Perhaps they should be known as "Trash the Constitution, Texas Republicans.") Their cries of "treason" and "unamerican" and "blame America first" are no longer salient as the people see that they were lied to and spun and manipulated into Iraq and the Republicans have betrayed every principle they supposedly held dear to rape the treasury, reward their friends and fail at the most basic functions of government.

Glenn Greenwald also had a few comments about the subject from a slightly different angle:

One of the reasons why I wrote about that HuffPost story when it was still nothing more than infected bile bubbling up in the right-wing blog sewers was because it was glaringly clear that it was going to worm its way through the standard channels and become a major media story. And the reason that was clear is because the tactic embodied by that "story" -- namely, finding isolated, obscure, stray, unrepresentative individuals or comments and obsessively focusing on them in order to imply that they are representative of "liberals" or "the Left" generally -- is a deceitful tactic that is one of the most commonly used by the right-wing noise machine, and the national media has been trained to ingest that tactic and disseminate it.

Digby also notes the role of the MSM in disseminating the talking points (almost by rote, it seems). An irony: the MSM has so far internalized the right-wing mantra of liberal bias that it's almost impossible to find a news source that is not biased -- toward the right.

It's broader than the insignificant instances of hate-mongering by right or left, of course. although I find it instructive that when HuffPo was apprised of the Cheney assassination comment, it was deleted; when LGF was apprised of the Carter assassination comments, LGF defended the commenters. Ironically enough, in a topic loaded with ironies, it's the left-wing, "bleeding heart" liberals who have said, in regard to the Christianists particularly, that we have to understand: it's their world view, that's how they see the world, so we have to make allowances. (I think this came up in some discussion of the Christianist "there's no such thing as a homosexual" trope, Ted Haggard variety. I think it was Jim Burroway's analysis of ex-gay Newspeak.)

Why? If your worldview is nonfunctional in terms of dealing with reality, you need to get help.

Of course, it's been very functional for them, in terms of grasping and holding power, but how long did they expect people to buy it? You can only lie to most people for so long, particularly when the lies are that big. Eventually, they start looking at what's actually happening and figure it out.

As far as views of America go, you can look at it several ways, as you can anything else. On the one hand, you can see it as a bunch of parts, which is ultimately destructive. Witness the state of American politics today, after thirty years of right-wing rhetoric: dirty, cheap, and nonfunctional.

Or, you can see it as an integral whole, a single entity with many facets. Then the goal becomes to understand how the facets work together, which seems to me to be a much more constructive approach.

And, like just about everything else, it's a continuum, with viewpoints scattered all along the range.

Greenwald has another comment specifially about the article by Michael Barone that Digby discussed:

But what is most notable about the column is that -- while repeatedly attacking what "they" think -- he never once identifies a single person who believes any of the things he is condemning. Supposedly, America is being threatened by this huge swath of people who fit the cartoon that is floating around in Barone's slothful and uncritical mind -- the "they" -- yet Barone cannot find a single example to identify. Nonetheless, the largest right-wing bloggers excitedly point to it as some profound illumination of what "they" think.

If someone can come up with hard evidence of a similar tactic on the left, I'd welcome it. I honestly don't know if this is a nonpartisan phenomenon or not, although I have to say that the examples I run across, even without cues from "liberals" like Greenwald or Digby, seem to cluster on the right. ("Hard evidence" in this case means quotes and links to specific statements by specific people, such as Orcinus did on a post I commented on recently. No attributions to "They" allowed.)

This is the kind of semantic manipulation that leads to headlines like this. Just think how your reaction would differ if the head were a little more accurate -- like "Pro-War Rally Outnumbers Anti-War Protesters." Of course, that probably would not get anyone pissed off, which I suspect is the point.

I think there must be two basic factors in the right's success over the past years: if you can just repeat things like this, you don't really have to think about anything. Most people, it seems, would rather not. (Possibly the one thing that Ayn Rand was right about, although John Brunner treated the phenomenon more elegantly.) And there are always people who would prefer to believe the worst. I guess it makes them feel better, somehow.

Franklly, I'd rather believe the best, although that's gotten me into a lot of trouble.