Do you have to be a moron or a nutjob to be a right-winger? No, but at least that would give you an excuse

We don't blame crazy people when they talk nonsense, do we? Or people who are truly too dumb to know better? That's the basis of my plan for restoring a measure of sanity to public discourse.

"This book and books like it destroy our political culture, undermine fair elections, inhabit the slippery space between politics and slander. . . .

"These books destroy civic debate on purpose -- and are fundamentally at odds with democracy. The goal of Corsi's project is not to discuss facts -- it is to destroy the very possibility of discussion by implying that a Presidential candidate is a sleeper-cell terrorist -- and doing so in the context of a huge broadcast media effort to convince the country of the same thing.

"That is not just factually wrong. It is wildly immoral. Whether or not Corsi published lies is not even half the discussion we should be having."

-- Jeffrey Feldman, in an August 2008 Frameshop post,
"What America Needs to Hear About Jerome Corsi"

by Ken

I've lifted the above quotation from my colleague Jeffrey Feldman straight out of a previous post, because it made a point that I hadn't seen made so explicitly and that bears directly on the subject "I wrote about earlier this week: the loony Right's compoundly and unabashedly delusional" discovery" that Hitler was a leftist -- just like President Obama! (It's a network of delusions so complex and so contrary-to-fact that it's almost impossible to discuss. Which is what reminded me of Jeffrey's point: that the Right's leap into a free-for-all where they are in no way accountable to facts has as its goal "to destroy the very possibility of discussion."

When one party to the "discussion" feels free to say any damned thing that comes into its head, asserting for all its blitherings the dignity of claims to fact, there is truly no possibility of discussion. And as Jeffrey suggested, it's hard to believe that this isn't the intention.

The piece I wrote earlier this week was "How the 'Hitler twisters' have helped me understand the Holocaust deniers." and made the rash claim to have a proposal for returning political discourse disabled by right-wing nuttery to rational bounds. It's far from foolproof, and it's a bit tricky, but I'll offer it for what it's worth.

It came to me partly as a result of reading a post the other day in which Glenn Greenwald made wicked fun of Reason magazine editor-in-chief Matt Welch for accusing President Obama of "multiple lies and distortions" in a Tuesday statement about the CBO. His first point of attack was that that serially lying, distorting devil in the White House uses "the verb 'reports' to describe what the Congressional Budget Office does." It seems that Reason, the Pseudo-Intellectual Journal of Right-Wing Imbecility (technically I guess it's really "Pseudo-Intellectual Libertarian Imbecility), has done a "foundational feature" on the CBO, in which it explained that the CBO "does not 'report,' it 'projects,' in highly speculative fashion, what a proposed piece of legislation may cost." This screed, Glenn informed us, appeared "next to a photo of Obama with a Pinocchio nose."

So according to Welch, Obama "lied" because he used the word "report" to describe what the CBO does and because he suggested the CBO's projections are reliable. What, then, does that say about numerous Reason editors and writers, who wrote the following back when Reason loved the CBO because it was reporting that Obama's health care proposal and other policies would increase the deficit? Using Welch's "reasoning," it must mean that Reason's staff is filled with outright liars.

From here the yuks came fast and furious as Glenn provided a series of six instances going back to last December of Reason pseudo-journalists reporting on CBO "reports" or "reporting."

Of course the issue isn't only, or principally, semantic. As Glenn documented, when the CBO reports, or projections, or whatever you want to call them, could be used to argue against Obama initiatives, the Reason gaggle treated the CBO with reverence, as a font of unassailable wisdom.

When it suits them -- meaning when the CBO issues negative findings about Obama's domestic policies -- Reason holds up the CBO as an authoritative oracle not to be questioned. Three weeks ago, Reason's Nick Gillespie warned of "massive premium hikes" based on "the CBO's latest assay of the Senate's health-care reform plan."

[And he added a host of other examples, including one from editor-in-chief Welsh himself.]

However, "These same individuals then completely and shamelessly shifted gears once the CBO began reporting that the revised iterations of the proposal would actually decrease the deficit. And the 'principled non-partisan libertarians' at Welch's Reason led the way in this rank intellectual dishonesty." In an update, Glenn excerpted a Washington Post by Welch and Reason's Nick Gillespie referred to a "warning" on health care costs from "the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office" as "expert feedback."

So essentially what Welch is saying is: "I am a lying piece of filth. The truth is for suckers and sissies. I am an intellectual hooligan, and every word out of my mouth or word processor is designed to prevent actual discussion. If you dare contradict my lies, I'll call you names that will make 'liar' sound like a compliment, and probably impugn your grandmother's sexual preferences in the bargain."

It was in the course of reading this illuminating account that I thought up my plan. Basically, the idea is this. It's not true, as some people say unfairly, that to be a right-winger (or conservative, or Republican -- they all seem to be the same thing at the moment) you have to be either crazier than a coot or dumber than doody. The fact is that, no, you don't have to be either (a) insane or (b) too stupid to know better in order to be a RW loon. However, but at least right-wing loons in those two groups have a legitimate excuse. I think it might be a good idea to encourage those claiming the insanity exemption to provide an affidavit from some sort of accredited mental-health professional, but this is really a formality. Do we really require backup from those claiming insanity as a defense for their political blithering?

How about if we simply have people who belong to these two parts of the wingnut coalition to self-identify in all their political speaking and writing? What possible objection could anyone have to insane or imbecilic argumentation from people who have declared themselves insane or imbeciles?

At the same time, people from other blocs within the coaltion -- the corporate predators, for example, or the ideological hooligans or the "too lazy to learn" or the compulsive liars or the "just wanna be told what to do by somebody in charge" and so on -- would also be invited to self-identify. They could begin their screeches or screeds with something like: "Speaking as a member of the Corporate Predators' Wing of the Wingnut Loons, I say . . ." And this way we would have the benefit of knowing where they're coming from. If they choose not to announce their subgroup affiliation, though, we could assume that they're not members of either "free pass" group, and treat them accordingly.

Does it really matter which of the other groups they belong to? I confess that it would be entertaining as well as helpful to know which of the wingnut factions Mr. Welch, for example, caucuses with. But at least no one would feel any need, or indeed any impulse, to pay any attention to what he blithers.

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