Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Suckers

The Governor says the New Mexico Supreme Court is 'laughable'.   Her right wing supporters in the media did not dwell on that.  Can you imagine what would have happened if Governor Richardson had said that?  Three weeks headlines in the Journal for sure.  The Journal protects its favorites and punishes its enemies.

The danger in the Journal repeatedly spewing right wing editorials and unbalanced news coverage was finally made clear to me in that Bill Moyers interview I have been talking about the last few days.  The Reagan republican, Bruce Bartlett, explained it this way.  He says the Tea Party types that are running the GOP are predominantly fundamentalist Christians.  They have learned in their lifetimes to take dogma as a matter of faith.  No matter that facts, science and commonsense might prove that dogma greatly flawed.  And so, as the right wing media and corporate America continually say that taxes are responsible for all our problems and only cutting government services solves our problems,  it becomes a matter of faith with the tea party types.  They keep hearing it, so they have faith that it is true.  They become stupefied and entirely brainwashed into ignoring reality.

I am beginning to believe that there is nothing that can cure this.  This ability for being suckered into nonsense beliefs  is wired into these folks brains.  Certainly, if they were cut off from social security safety nets, health care and government services they might begin to question their faith.  But then it will be to late.

1 comment:

Vicki said...

The John Birch Society wasn't able to get any traction among mainstream Americans throughout the 50's and 60's, despite the Red Scare and Joe McCarthy. Barry Goldwater was nominated through their work but he could not get elected so long as there was a somewhat free and independent press with well-respected news anchors delivering a rather uniform nightly news format for 30 minutes in the early evening. Unregulated by the FCC, cable news has changed the face of news broadcasts. In particular, for past three decades, the Fox News Corporation has been very successful in getting the majority share of viewers and has been able to influence the broad masses of mainstream voters with it's fear-mongering style of news and right-wing slant presented under an Orwellian slogan of "Fair and Balanced". In my opinion, this is one of the major reasons for so many people accepting the stories being told by the dogmatists as the true reality.