Overheard at the Values Voter Summit

Tod Kelly sat through the Values Voter Summit so the rest of us didn’t have to, and came up with a handy top-10 list of things he heard there that stuck out in his mind. All worth the read, but number 6 in particular caught my attention:

6. President Obama sided with the terrorists in Libya, cheering them on.  (Basically, everybody that got up to talk except Rand Paul)

This is, no doubt, part and parcel of the total embrace by hardcore Republicans of Romney’s lying about the timeline and content of the administration’s messages regarding the attacks on the embassies and consulates and the film clip seized upon as a proximate cause thereof.

It never ceases to amaze me how the hard-core partisans can take something that, when the Mittbot actually made the attack last week, even most Republicans were understandably outraged about, and within a couple of days, do a complete 180 and totally buy into this line of attack and embrace it as the gospel truth.

This little narrative about Obama siding with the attackers against American citizens will join the larger “Obama apologizes for America” narrative that exists solely within the right-wing mindset and occasionally surfaces in attack ads and speaking points, though at least sometimes they become self-reinforcing enough to become part of the conventional “wisdom” of the punditocracy.

It will, in short, join into that weird and unrecognizable worldview where people want government to stay out of their Medicare, worry about “death panels”, think Obama actually said businesspeople don’t build their own businesses, rather than talking about the public services those businesses rely on and exploit to become successful, believe Obama is incapable of speaking without a teleprompter, that he’s in favour of eliminating the work rules on welfare, and so on and so forth. All of it based on lies, and mainly purposeful lies by people who are all too well aware of the lies they are telling, at least initially. At some point, you begin to wonder if they’ve repeated the lie often enough that they themselves start believing it to be true.

The whole thing is rather scary, since when two sides can’t even agree on the facts, there is little to no hope of understanding or compromise, which leads to further polarization and reinforces the bubble mentality of those living within it.

Something will have to give at some point, since you can’t ignore reality indefinitely, and I’m thinking it won’t be pretty when it finally does give way.