Monday, May 16, 2005

The essential truth of right wingers.

James E. Powell provided the following comment on Kevin Drums' Washington Monthly.

[About rightwingers] They are not thin-skinned, Kevin. It's just that inflamed outrage is the normal way for them to talk about any subject.

This is one reason why they can be, and at times must be, so divorced from the facts. This puzzles and frustrates the left bloggers who respond to the right wing with facts and explanations. This has no effect because what the right-wing bloggers are selling is a feeling or a set of feelings, not a story, not facts.

The Iraq War is a good example of this. The left bloggers have been pouring the facts into the blogosphere since before the invasion with the apparent belief that these facts should matter to everyone. But to the right wingers, the facts are secondary, maybe even superfluous, to the way having the American military invade another country, blow stuff up and kill bad guys makes them feel about themselves. Throwing contradictory facts in their face is like saying, but honey, that dress makes you look fat.

Posted by: James E. Powell on May 16, 2005 at 2:53 PM

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This is really the key to the difference between right-wingers and left-wing bloggers. Right-wingers come from feelings and left-wingers come from facts.

The political key is the nature of the audiences.

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