re: #388 ShanghaiEd

Oh, yeah. The triumph of the Rage Machine. A marvel to behold. Much easier to focus hate on a person, rather than an idea.

It’s definitely been effective, politically. One oddity to me is that for all the Rage Machine’s power and sophistication, it’s usually at least 5 to 10 years behind current events. The smear moves fast, but the updating leaves a lot to be desired. Such as the recent discussion of Maureen Dowd, and the assumption by many that she was a left-winter rather than a perpetual opportunist.

And “debunking” of certain myths rarely catches up to the myths, but I guess it’s human nature to cleave to the familiar.

Completely agree. Highlighted the above sentence because that’s a point which hadn’t explicitly occurred to me, but I think you’re completely right. Why is it that the echochamber recycles the old hates from ten years ago?

One reason would be that it’s because they’re effective and work, so long as you never leave the echochamber.
This might relate back to the discussion we were having earlier about the seeming total collapse of the Rep Message Machine. It’s not just that the infrastructure collapsed, but things have changed so much that the 5/10 year old smears just aren’t working any more— except for those firmly in the echochamber, that hardcore 28% or so.

This is also probably why it’s seemed like the right-o-sphere has increasingly been interested only in talking to itself this last week, and not about Iran. They’re running posts on ice cream and Obama instead. It’s not just that the playbook is 5 or 10 years old now; they’re entering a place where the rest of the country literally has no idea what the hell they’re talking about. (nirthers are a great example of this). Maybe they believed that canard about “When we act, we create our own reality” for too long; they’ve created a parallel (and paranoid) reality that bears no relation to the world the rest of us are in.

In re: Dowd, I think most of the individuals here who assumed she was a lefty did so because they haven’t been reading her— (no shame in that, no one can read everyone, and its not like MoDo is worth reading anyway) — so they were working on a chain of association that said “OpEd columnist for the NYT” and concluded that she had to be left. The NYT would still bill her as one of its liberal voices, and a prized one, for that matter.