Well, really, what it comes down to is the realization that FoxNews is a lie. This is how I personally see the "devastation." For years, they've been putting up some pretty fact averse things, often (as Jon Stewart likes to point out) being put in the "pants on fire" category in politifact's independent fact checking, but generally no one had to look at the truth of the situations and so could keep on buying the lie. Paint the rest of the media with the liberal bias brush so you could ignore them and move on.
And then...most media outlets and even mathematicians who are known for building these sorts of models come out and say that it's going to be an Obama victory. Liberal bias, Fox knows that it's really going to be Romney winning. Romney bought into the lie of liberal bias so hard that he didn't even prepare a concession speech. Shit, I'm liberal and I bought into that damn lie...maybe we were overconfident. Maybe this will be a Romney win.
And so, a culture that praises feeling over fact...wait...wasn't it Krellin who was always blaming liberals of that? But you can watch it happen, they would always, ALWAYS ask Karl Rove or Newt what their "feelings" were because the mathematic facts were inconvenient to their larger narrative.
You could watch the kingdom come crashing down if you watched Fox for election coverage. When it was clear that Obama was going to win Ohio, none of them knew what to do. They had a slight fit. They looked like their dogs got run over. They sent the token woman to go talk to the math guys to try to talk them out of declaring Ohio, and their reaction was "LOL NO."
And so then you have Bill O'Reilly lost and confused blathering on about "stuff and things." Because he bought into his own group's lie.
You had Trump and various other people triumphantly say "But Obama didn't win the popular vote!" before results of the popular vote in the most heavily populated democratic states in the nation were posted, and they wanted it to be true because that gave them a glimmer of truth from the lie they bought into. But sadly, it was still a lie.
People who for years have felt they could yell over facts and convince them to go away were shown pretty definitively that such a policy doesn't actually work. And so, in the early hours of the morning, every one of their illusions was forced to dissipate in the hard light of reality.
I hope it leads to new cooperation, because the mentality that provokes this kind of thinking is the worst part of the GOP right now. I hope that they wake up and realize nothing will be solved by just making shit up regardless of what the facts are, because conservatives do have some good ideas and I'd really like to see two groups of people who are willing to work with facts see what they can hammer out. That's the hope.
Sorry for the obipost.
Sorry, draug, I can't let this one go
) 10:13 AM
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