"Wake up," Rachel Maddow says to right-wingers whose reality bubble has been punctured. "It will be a painful process, but it will be good for the whole country"

APOLOGIES FOR THE LACK OF PARAGRAPHING IN THIS POST, but the new software forced on us by our host, Blogger, is the worst software in the history of the universe. I've been struggling with it for a couple of months now, and I'm very near the end. I have tried putting the paragraph breaks back in every way I know how about ten times. Nobody at either Blogspot or its current owner, Google, seems to give the slightest damn about the screeching incompetence of their godforsaken pile-of-crap product. I can't begin to tell how much I hate them, and what horrible things I wish for them. I had a choice of not putting this post up or allowing it to post in this form. I'm still not sure I made the right choice. [UPDATE: I just noticed that I left a whole word out of the post title. This is because with this software there is literally no way to see the entire title until the post goes up. It's what you get when software is designed by people who are too dumb to qualify as idiots.] -- Ken

Eye-popping moments in TV history: OMG, the Great Socialist Conspiracy has found its way into the heart of Fox Noise! Noiseman Bret Baier ushers Election Night co-anchor Megyn Kelly off on the long march to the far, far-away Decision Room in an attempt to "figure out what the deal is" with the clearly socialist decision-makers' call of Ohio for President Obama. You can see it all in the Rachel Maddow Show clip below.

BRET: Here's what we're going to do. Karl Rove said that we should figure out what the deal is with this Decision Desk, and the Decision Desk is in a different place. Megan, I will escort you down the steps here so you can go and interview them.
MEGYN: All right.
BRET: Watch your step.
MEGYN: Thank you, thank you, I don't want to fall, in front of all these millions of people.
BRET: Okay. Megyn is going to go to the Decision Desk and interview them.
MEGYN: They're way down the hall. We'll do a little interrogation and see if they stand by their call.

"We have a two-party system in government, and the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country.

"There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let's accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. . . . If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation."

-- Rachel Maddow, on her show last night

by Ken

I had to be importuned by colleagues that even those of us who hate watching clips need to watch the one we're about to see, from last night's Rachel Maddow Show. Those colleagues turned out to be right. You'll have to endure a commercial first, but then a whole bunch of remarkable things happen, starting with extended consideration of the good things that happened in Tuesday night's election results, including due consideration of the relative small list of bad things that happened. Watch it; you'll enjoy every second.

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We're going to be concerned here with the last few minutes, in which Rachel tackles the crucial issue of the damage done to the country as a whole by the movement-wide right-wing abandonment of any connection to "the factual lived truth of the world," as Rachel puts it later. By the time Rachel shows us the dramatic Decision Room bunker scene we saw above, she has shown us a collage of Far Right crackpundits -- life forms like Karl Rove, Sean Hannity, George F. Will, "Chucky" Krauthammer, Dick Morris, and Larry "Krazyman" Kudlow -- assuring viewers in real time that the scenario about to unfold was a Republican triumph, and possibly one of landslide proportions.   (For the record, Chucky the Hammer was actually within visual contact of reality, forecasting a Romney victory of a mere 1 percent in the popular vote and a narrow margin in the electoral vote. Considering how far removed Chucky is from reality, we can measure t he distance from which the others are viewing events on the planet Earth.) LET'S GET BACK TO MEGYN KELLY'S LONG MARCH TO THE FOX NOISE DECISION ROOM This amazing scne we've seen was instigated by Fox Noise "political contributor" Karl Rove, who fomented on on-air uprising against the Decision Desk's call of Ohio for the president. No doubt Fox viewers expected to see the decision-making terrorists groveling in shame, admitting to their act of sabotage and preparing for transfer to Guantánamo. It's not clear whether Megyn was authorized to use deadly force if necessary against the terrorist infiltrators holed up in the Decision Room. Luckily, she didn't have to machine-gun her way in, and promptly challenged the terrorist infiltrators to defend their propaganda bombshell. One of the rebel leaders declared his unit "actually quite comfortable" with their shocking Ohio call. "There just aren't enough Republican votes left," says another. Pressed by Megyn to express their degree of certainty, Turncoat No. 2 pronounces it "99.95 percent certainty." Let's pick up here with Rachel's commentary.

Ohio really did go to President Obama last night, and he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately president of the United States -- again. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to oversample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us; it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone's guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And U.N. election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial-services industry in this country are not the same thing as Communism. Listen, last night was a good night for liberals and for Democrats, for very obvious reasons. But it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole. Because in this country, we have a two-party system in government, and the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems, and we debate between those possible solutions, and by the process of debate we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas from both sides, about real problems in the real country, should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff. And if the Republican party and the conservative movement and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum-sealed, door-locked spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good, and denying the factual lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate between competing feasible ideas about real problems. Last night the Republicans got shellacked. And they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time, in real, humiliating time, not believe it even as it was happening to them. And unless they are going to secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside -- if they do not want to get shellacked again. And that will be a painful process for them, I'm sure, but it will be good for the whole country, left, right, and center. You guys, we're counting on you. Wake up. There's real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let's accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let's move on from there. If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations, everybody. Big night!

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