Brain Fertilizer

Mickey Kaus, a Democrat and Kerry supporter with the guts to still report actual facts (unlike most of the other Kerry-supporting Old Media) absolutely destroys an Old Media attempt to smear Republicans. (sorry about forgetting to close the tag)

Patterico shoots down a promising pro-Kerry Web conspiracy theory--namely that the potential forgery of the CBS Bush guard documents was spotted so quickly on the Web that the person who spotted it ("Buckhead," poster #47 at Free Republic) must have been tipped off in advance. That would suggest that any forgery was planted, presumably by pro-Bush forces. But it seems this whole theory, promoted in this morning's ABC News Note, was based on a misreading of time stamps by ABC. In reality, Buckhead had a couple of hours to come up with his post--something he confirms in an email to Patterico. ... ABC has corrected its mistake (without withdrawing the now seemingly groundless insinuation). NPR hasn't corrected the error, according to Patterico, and David Brock's Media Matters still posts it. ... P.S.: Media Matters might want to decide if a) the documents are authentic, as argued at the top of their Web page or b) the documents are forgeries planted by Republicans, as argued at the bottom of their Web page. Lawyers are allowed to plead in the alternative, but a) and b) can't both be true, and the evidence for each of those propositions is also evidence against the other one. 1:10 A.M. Pacific Time (that's 4:10 to you, Ambinder)

(You'll have to go the actual site to be able to follow the links I'm too lazy to include)

The Democrats really want to believe that Rpublicans have developed a web of conspiracies to prevent their ascendency into power. It started with Hillary Clinton, who couldn't seem to believe that there were people who were not blinded by her husband's charisma and actually disapproved of the character displayed by his philandering and disturbed by the easy willingness to lie it demonstrated. She couldn't believe that people might not want to live in a socialist state with a Clinton/Democrat aristocracy. Hence, it must be a vast conspiracy by those evil Right-Wingers. The couldn't understand that the appeal of talk radio is its interactivity, that people can express their opinions, because they are used to a top-down dissemination of ideas through a hierarchy based on liberal college education (i.e., only the intellectuals are allowed to have ideas).

As people have grown more dissatisfied with Democrat glittering generalities, empty promises, untenable ideas, and dishonest tactics, Republicans have grown in political power. Democrats cannot understand this, apparently lacking the ability to understand differences of perspective and the concept of principled opposition. They seem to think that if they state a goal of "everyone having the same minimu level of financial resources", that anyone who opposes that goal must be evil, corrupt, and desirous of keeping others poor in order to stay rich...they cannot conceive that someone could have the ability to independently analyze the goal and methods and determined, on their own with native intelligence, that attempting that goal invariably results in greater injustice and widespread crime and poverty. Rather than investigate their own platitudes, rather than refine their own ideas, rather than actually investigating and evaluating their own proposals for efficacy, they prefer to merely label any opponent "evil".
Thus, as Republican political power has grown, liberals/Democrats have seen this as a growth of Evil. And stopping the spread and growth of evil is a worthy cause that requires extraordinary tactics, right?
Unable to understand the attraction of interactive discussion of news and politics, liberals/Democrats have responded by ratcheting up their methods of fighting conservatives/Republicans. In the 2000 Presidential election, the media, in collusion with the Democrat party, supported and aided Gore in trying to reinvent himself until he could find a pretend character that might resonate with voters. It was never an attempt to show voters the true character of the man they wanted to make the most important decisions regarding the country, it was an attempt to conceal anything negative. The Old Media did everything they could during the election, as well, even declaring Gore the victor in a "battleground" state 45 minutes before the polling stations were closed in the conservative-leaning panhandle. When the outcome was disputed, all the Old Media supported Al Gore's challenge, invariably accepting his team's arguments at face value, but dissecting all of Bush's assertions and casting his spokespeople in unfavorable light. We heard all sorts of stories about authorities attempting to prevent Democrat votes, but very little mention (and no follow up) on Democrat voting shenanigans.
Even now, some Old Media attempt to say Gore should have won in Florida, even though all recounts show that Bush did win the state. Even now, some Old Media still attempt to paint the Supreme Court as helping Bush get elected, even though, in light of the recounts, all the Supreme Court did was put an end to nonsense that would never have changed the outcome.

Now, none of this is a Left-Wing conspiracy. It is just disparate liberal/Democrat-supporting institutions that individually do what they can to shore up weaknesses in the liberal/Democrat machine...

The last four years of liberal/Democrat perfidy are well-documented throughout the web. But there are few points I'd like to make.

1) In any discussion, the lefty commenters usually accuse the conservatives of "following marching orders", and usually claim those are sent by the "RNC fax". I was puzzled by that for a while, until I realized it was projection. I'm as conservative as they come, and have never received an RNC fax. Our conservative ideas are introduced at the grassroots level, and we fight and hash them out. I have never seen conservative bloggers "thinking in lockstep" (or other variations of that theme), because we nearly always disagree on all sorts of different ideas. For instance, Stumpjumper and ZombyBoy of Resurrection Song don't even agree with each other, much less with me. Dean Esmay leans Republican (although he seems to still wish he could vote Democrat, but his integrity won't allow him to). Dodd Harris (Ipse Dixit) and Kevin McGehee (blogoSFERICS) are both as conservative as they come, but aren't in complete agreement and I disagree with them about any number of things. I'm probably closest in socio-political viewpoint to Rae (A Likely Story) and Tony (Sand in the Gears), and we don't agree with most of the above individuals regarding things like abortion... And I'm sure our various reactions to the Patriot Act are as varied as our blognames. Then throw in Kim du Toit, whose connection with the rest of the conservative bloggers I've named is probably limited to just 2nd Amendment rights, and probably not even complete agreement on that. But I'm not sure, because, you see, we don't coordinate! At all. I know this is hard for the liberals, Democrats, and Old Media to understand, but we all think for ourselves. We link what we like from each other, we disagree but remain friends on some issues, we decide for ourselves.

Liberals/Democrats cannot seem to understand that, and can't seem to handle the implications. That's why the accusations of a conspiracy grow ever more prevalent.

Terry McAuliffe has totally internalized that idea. He cannot understand that he might not be the most effective party chairman, so he blames every failure of the Kerry campaign on the manipulation of Karl Rove. He doesn't realize how petulant and ridiculous he sounds these days, I guess.

Dan Rather couldn't handle being fact-checked regarding the forged memos, and so blamed it on a right-wing campaign to discredit his version of the truth. Unfortunately, his take complete mischaracterizes the fact that it wasn't a campaign to discredit, it was a campaign for the truth. If there is a connection between "right-wing" and "truth", it is merely that the left wing no longer cares about the truth.

Remember, from the beginning of the Howard Dean candidacy nearly two years ago, it was decided that "Bush lied". (Okay, the opposition to Bush actuall started in November 2000, but the current campaign of "Anybody But Bush" started with the first declared candidacy). That theme was decided two years ago, before all the evidence was in...nearly before any evidence was in. The decision being made, no evidence or proof could shake the Anybody But Bush crowd.

...do you get that? The Truth behind Bush's decision didn't matter at all to Democrats. They would use any appearance of impropriety, any perceived mis-step, any apparent contradiction to attack Bush. It didn't matter what the truth was. It didn't matter if the apparent contradictions were there own fabrications or the result of faulty analysis or incomplete reporting.

And so we end up with Dan Rather and 60 Minutes discarding any semblence of healthy skepticism regarding the authenticity of magically-appearing (my term) memos. And we end up with a group of individual bloggers using their own areas of expertise and intelligence to debunk the forgery in less than 24 hours.

Over the last 20-30 years, Democrats have been growing new Democrats by indoctrination through the education system. To perfect the indoctrination, they establish rules like "speech codes" and "politically-correct speech/programs" to ensure that information contradictory to the accepted liberal ideology is not presented. Over the same time period, Republicans have been growing new Republicans by thinking, analyzing, arguing, disputing, researching. Talk radio helped increase the speed of that growth. The internet has only allowed greater interaction and more connection, and greater access to be able to communicate individual ideas. And look around at the blogs: You have true debate on the conservative blogs, and all but the most negative and hateful trolls are tolerated (although probably ridiculed). If you have debate at all on the liberal blogs, you are banned for expressing conservative viewpoints. You are accused of hate-speech for debunking inaccuracies.

Granted, this little summation is fragmentary and incomplete. There are probably some inaccuracies as well. That's what you get when someone types impressions off the top of their head.

I've been wondering what's going to happen to the Democrat party. Kerry's campaign is imploding, and the Democrat party and all its supporting structures (like Old Media) may well implode with it. Since the irrational hatred of conservative ideas and personages won't disappear with the loss of structure, what happens? If you can't run a party on the basis of hate, you certainly can't form one. If your party lacks cogent, coherent ideas, you can't use that same nonsense to form a new party. But these ideas, fully discredited by thoughtful and thinking individuals, are still embraced and cherished by liberals. Can any good come of that?

Yeah, that was a set up for this conclusion, even as hap-hazardly as I wound my way down to it:

Whatever replaces the Democrat party, the advances in technology we take as commonplace now (global interconnectivity and easy access into the instantaneous marketplace of ideas) will be fully involved. I offer to you the idea that the Democrat party as we know it, and the liberal ideology as it exists today cannot exist in the face of intelligent challenge. Liberal ideology is bankrupt and the Democrat party a lame duck. The goals will remain, but the methods will (hopefully) be replaced with something besides the class envy and soft bigotry of the Democrat Party.