This is a little lecture on an important topic: how the opposition thinks. It's also going to be fun. I wish.
First, the wingnuttia brains assume that any evidence which doesn't support the wingnut worldview must not exist. If it still seems to exist, well, then it must be a forgery! Just consider this example on the memo about the Schiavo case:
It has become an article of faith among right-wing bloggers -- and, as of yesterday, the Washington Times -- that a memo identifying the Terri Schiavo case as a "great political issue" for Republicans was a fake, planted by the Democrats or created out of whole cloth by the liberal media conspiracy.
Only it wasn't.
As the Washington Post reports this morning, a staffer for Republican Sen. Mel Martinez admitted yesterday that he wrote the memo. The admission -- and with it, the resignation of Brian Darling, Martinez' legal counsel -- came after Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin revealed that Martinez had handed Harkin a copy of the memo on the Senate floor during debate on the Schiavo bill. Like every other Republican senator, Martinez had previously insisted that he'd never seen the memo before.
It worked in the past, of course, especially with the Rathergate. Most totally forgot that the topic under discussion: George Bush's military escapades, was under no dispute whatsoever. All that we remember is FAKE! Clearly, this strategy is always worth trying. Like suggesting that the Devil has planted fossils to lead us astray about all the evolution crap.
Second, if winguts dislike something in the news which they can't pretend to be a fake they can also yell that the presenter in the news is in cahoots with terrorists! This worked really well during the initial stages of the Iraq war when all those "the-emperor-really-is-butt-naked" people were shamed into silence. Now the wingnut blogs have tried it for pretty much everything. The most recent example is how to criticize the Pulitzer Prize the AP photographers won for their work in the Iraq war zone: biased, pro-terrorists, terrible! I have read several blogs on this but won't link to them because I care about you, my dear readers, and you don't want to go to those blogs.
The idea is to argue that one side of the war is favored by the so-called liberal media, the one that shows dead people and suffering and so on. The other side (which would show exactly what?) is not covered so this is bias. We shouldn't give Pulitzer Prizes for biased photographs. In fact, we shouldn't even mention those aspects of the Iraq war which make the American troops look bad, because this helps the terrorists.
Now some right-wing blogs admit that the AP photographs were not arranged to make Americans look bad, which is good to hear. Until this bit:
And while [Craver] reiterates his belief that the mainstream media "has done a terrible job of balanced news coverage from Iraq" because it "wants to be the voice of opposition," irony doesn't get a whole lot richer than with his take on the Michelle Malkins and Little Green Football throwers of the world:
"It's not like these Web sites to go off half-cocked with such limited information," Craver says. "The MSM are the experts at rumor, speculation and innuendo -- let's not follow their example."
So the idea is still to scream LIBERAL BIAS! They probably will use this one after the Gilead arrives and we all live under the Christian fundamentalist version of the shariah law.
Which brings me to my third and final point about the wingnut philosophy: wingnuts are always the underdogs. Yes, they are the oppressed, and harassed ones, the ones discriminated against. This might be true here on my own private goddess blog, but it's not true out there. Unless you think that being in control of almost all branches of the government is being an underdog, unless you think that having Randal Terry on mainstream television being treated with respect is a clear sign of victimization and unless you think that the voices of Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter are never heard loud enough because of the oppressive fist of the liberals is pressing down on their lips.
Then there is the dreadful fact that Soros gives money to the liberal and progressives! Such unfairness! Never mind that the Schaifes of this world have been funding the whole wingnuttia infrastructure and the wingnuttia think tanks for decades, that most wingnuttia newspapers would fold overnight if they were not funded by some extremist sugar-daddies, that the Washington Times itself has never made a profit to its radical cleric (I'm the New Jesus) owner.
And I seriously believe that most of the wingnut trolls we meet on the internet are getting paid by some secret sugar-daddy, too. But that's just my own private delusion.