Why can't we have rational discourse?

[uselesslegs]

Why?  I present exhibit A thru freak'in Z...



This isn't just disconnect. This is existing in an entirely different universe.  Fox started the modern media ages descent into extreme partisanship.  I know Rush wants the credit. Oh he created a base, an audience for them..but ultimately it was Fox.  They provided the sound bytes and *news clips* that finally gave Rushs' bullshit seemingly solid bite.  "See there folks, that clip I played right there, from a *news* organization, confirms what I said!"  Now the news is about demo's...instead of the fuck'in news.  MSNBC owes it's real birth to Fox. (Hell Ailes was the President of America's Talking from 94 to 96, though it failed and went on to become, wait for it...MSNBC)  Sha-bang!

Looking back on this and doing some heavy reading...you only need go back to Walter Cronkite, Woodward and Bernstein, and Edward R. Murrow.  How dare these fuck'in pricks tell the truth...that hurts agenda's!  It was a long time coming, but on October 7th, 1996 the far rights love of all things corporate and ideological was finally realized.  Rushs' bullshit got validated by Fox and Rush validated Fox's bullshit.  A perfect circle jerk.  Bill's been there since the beginning...and we've been paying for it ever since.

[Howey]

I know I've said this before, but this is the problem. Read the words next to O'Reilly.

What we have here is an institutionalized version of this classic psychological phenom:

   projection - (psychiatry) a defense mechanism by which your own traits and emotions are attributed to someone else

We've been seeing it increasingly as the right drifts further and further into what can best be called institutionalized insanity. They cannot accept the fact that they lie, so they say the other guy lies. They cannot accept the fact that they're racist, so they say the other guy's racist. They cannot accept the fact that their financial plan is a failure, so they say the other guy's financial plan is a failure. They can't say their president is a failure, so they say the other guy's president is a failure.

Think of Hitler or Jim Jones. Each convinced masses of people that what they were saying was the truth and these masses of people threw aside rational thinking and stepped on the side of irrational thinking.

It's a condition that cannot be "cured". It's a condition that, one day, will implode within it's own delusion.