I know, it was a naive hope. It was but a brief moment of faith that the vitriolic and vociferous conservatives here, and elsewhere, would examine the results of the election for more than face value and ask one question before all others:
Why were we so confident, yet so wrong?
Karl Rove, on live television, famously became the poster child for what can only be described as the sudden intrusion of reality into a highly pressurized bubble of self-reinforcing propaganda, and the explosive decompression has been almost painful to watch.
As is being discussed everywhere in the press and on less partisan discussion sites, this cognitive disconnect has an obvious cause: a self-imposed bubble of manufactured reality and misinformation. Humorously, especially here on Newsvine, the existence of this bubble is universally accepted by everyone, be they conservative, liberal, progressive, or one of the conservatives posing as a libertarian or independent.
Of course, what's most humorous is that this bubble of alternate reality was most often depicted as enveloping the "libs". We simply couldn't see what was obvious. MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, our "savior" Barack Obama, and the vexing and intoxicating liberal media had hypnotized us all, and we were somnabulantly marching toward an abyss, threatening to drag the rest of the country down with us.
Thankfully, we had our devoted conservatives to condescendingly point out just how ignorant we were, how weak were our justifications for believing what our eyes, ears, and sometimes nose told us about the real shape of the political race or the true contours of the economic landscape. They then mocked our reasoning and logic, and most cravenly, our "religions" of science and math. They attempted to "unskew" us.
We all know how that turned out.
After the resultant very loud thud had dissipated, I generously expected some degree of self-examination on the part of the willing purveyors of reality denial, at least from the perspective of minimizing the odds future embarrassment, especially here on Newsvine. My admittedly minimal gloating (one article) generated little response, initially, and ultimately stimulated little in defense of the obviousness of the Right's self-delusion. I had anticipated at least a feeble attempt at bluster: "I've nothing for which to be to embarrassed" or some other such blandishment.
No, our predictable [at least to us] and righteous victory of reality over rote propaganda has largely gone unacknowledged by its architects and consumers, proving, I think, the whole embarrassment scenario.
Which brings us back around to the initial question, and much to my dismay, the fact that the conservative apologists have decided to ignore it. All signs point to the conclusion that even a brief exposure to the enlightening rays of reality proved too painful as it renders the thin skin of artificial legitimacy translucent, thus revealing the venal corporatist, xenophobic, homophobic, classist, and racist interests that lie within the false narrative.
In other words, taking no pause for self-examination, considering no likelihood that the strategy was flawed, thinking not for a second of an existence outside the bubble, the conservative movement monied interests (1%) have simply deemed the walls of the bubble too thin to support the pressure required for the narrative to effectively alter the liberal universe outside. They're not sure how we did it, because it was never existed, the reality outside the bubble that is, but somehow it crept into and corrupted the Fox News reality which is like a reverse-black hole. The narrative should flow out from Fox and consume all it encounters.
The reason that it didn't is simply not to be examined too closely. It's just a freak of nature, like a Platypus. The bubble has reformed, the walls have been doubled or tripled, and the super massive bullshit star at the center that is Fox News is once again building up to go Nova.
The result is that here in our little corner of the Universe, the false narrative meteorites are once again striking with, dare I say, a "vengeance". Of course, to us that live outside the bubble, it's just another season of little rocks headed our way at breathtaking speed, flaring brightly for a few seconds before either burning out completely or falling to earth with little to no damage or long term impact.
