A few years ago, libertarian Julian Sanchez identified an ever-worsening problem on the right: namely, that with the rise of Fox News, right-wing radio, and right-wing blogs, conservatives have hermetically sealed themselves off from all facts, debate and discussion that don't originate from the conservative echo chamber. He called this phenomenon "epistemic closure."

Naturally, Sanchez was widely mocked by the right, with Erick Erickson dismissing the critique as a product of "vegetarian philosophers." Self-criticism and self-reflection has never been wingnuts' strongsuit.

Now, Newt Gingrich is saying exactly the same thing.

...I think conservatives in general got in the habit of talking to themselves. I think that they in a sense got isolated into their own little world. So our pollsters, many of whom were wrong about turnout. No Republican pollster thought you could get 87 percent turnout in Milwaukee. You just sort of have to say that to some extent the degree to which we believed that the other side was kidding themselves, it turned out in fact in the real world – this is a part of what makes politics so fascinating – it turned out in the real world we were kidding ourselves.

Yes, that was Newt Gingirch admitting right-wingers have lost touch with reality. But please, keep listening to Rush and Glenn and inviting Sarah Palin to CPAC, wingnuts!

Later, Newt says that Republicans like Eric Cantor who insist that the party just needs to improve their message and marketing are kidding themselves.

I’m for a big rethinking. I don’t think a modestly reformed Republican Party has any real chance of competing in the absence of a dramatic disaster. If there was a big disaster, people would be driven away from the Democrats, but in the absence of a really big disaster, if you want to compete in a difficult but not impossible world, we’re going to have to have very large fundamental rethinking.

Translation: we have to stop offering lower taxes for rich people as the answer to every problem and we have to stop trashing government and demonizing the poors, women, immigrants, and the gays.

Good luck with that, Newt.

Yesterday, apparently without a hint of irony, Joe Scarborough said on the air that right-wing media "bullies" were hurting the GOP, and added that Republicans should "punch them in the face" (after 15:00). Hugh Hewitt, one of wingnut radio's hackier propagandists, had Scarborough on his show to explain himself, and this exchange ensued.

HH: Joe, who do you listen to on talk radio, because I don’t even know if you listen anymore, because you’ve got, it must be a six hour production schedule.

JS: Yeah, I mean, I go around the clock. I think like everybody else, I listen to Rush whenever I get a chance. I listen to you when I get a chance. I love Bennett. He’s in the morning, but sometimes I get snippets of Bennett. I’m a big Michael Medved fan, and have been for ages. But I will tell you, ironically enough, ideologically, even though he drives me crazy and I criticize him all the time because of the crazy, nutty things he says, I think ideologically, and please don’t tell anybody, I may be closest to Glenn Beck. I’m sort of, I’ve got a libertarian bent. I’m a 10th Amendment guy, and…

Uh, Joe? It's never a good sign when you see ideological kinship with a crazy person.

We've been saying for a long time that the right-wing media machine, led particularly by Fox News, has become an echo chamber for hate speech from the far right. At places like Fox, the virulent language found on the racist and extremist right has been largely toned down, but the underlying sentiments, not to mention the larger meta-narrative about politics remains intact. And this has been acutely the case in recent years regarding Latinos and Muslims.

Well, thanks to a scientific study from UCLA's Chicano Research Center, there's now some specific evidence that substantiates all this:

This study analyzes how social networks that form around the hosts of commercial talk radio shows can propagate messages targeting vulnerable groups. Working with recorded broadcasts from five shows gathered over a six-week period, involving 102 scheduled guests and covering 88 topics, researchers determined hosts’ and guests’ ideological alignment on the topics discussed most frequently—including immigration and terrorism—through a content analysis of on-air statements and website content. The findings reveal that the hosts promoted an insular discourse that focused on, for example, anti-immigration, anti-Islam, and pro-Tea Party positions and that this discourse found repetition and amplification through social media. Of the 21 guests who appeared more than once, media personalities (57 percent) and political figures (19 percent) accounted for 76 percent. Fox News accounted for nearly one-fourth (24 percent) of appearances by guests representing an organization. Political figures accounted for 27 percent of all guests, and the Republican Party and the Tea Party accounted for 93 percent and 89 percent, respectively, of all political figures appearing on the shows. Eighty-nine percent of the scheduled guests were white, and 81 percent were male.

The study's conclusions make the key point:

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If you've been reading Nooners over the years, you've certainly noticed that one of her favorite moves is to make up a quote by an unnamed "friend" -- usually a "Democrat" -- that happens to hit exactly the partisan point she wants to make.

I was home surfing the Net and a friend instant-messaged me: “Are you watching Oprah? Gore is winning the election.”

And,

...I prefer the observation of a friend who is not a Republican that Mr. Lieberman looks like Henry Gibson, of “Laugh-In” and “Nashville” fame, and like Harpo Marx without the horn.

And,

A friend of mine who is liberal and a Democrat sighs that Mr. Gore now seems like someone whose innards have been taken over by pod people; he is a robot, or something worse, something—Damien-like!

And,

One summer day in the late 1990s I had a long talk with an elected official who was a friend and longtime political supporter of President Clinton. I asked him why, if Bill Clinton cared so much about his legacy, he didn’t take steps to make America safer from terrorism.

And,

Mr. Obama hails from Chicago, but no one would confuse him with Chicagoans like Richard Daley or Dan Rostenkowski, or Harold Washington. “There is something colorless and odorless about him,” says a friend.

And there's plenty more where that came from.

Well, in Friday's WSJ, she trots out Her Insightful Friend Who Hates Democrats, yet again.

From a friend watching the Olympics: "How about that Michael Phelps? But let's remember he didn't win all those medals, someone else did. After all, he and I swam in public pools, built by state employees using tax dollars. He got training from the USOC, and ate food grown by the Department of Agriculture. He should play fair and share his medals with people like me, who can barely keep my head above water, let alone swim."

The note was merry and ironic. And as the games progress, we'll be hearing a lot more of this kind of thing, because President Obama's comment—"You didn't build that"—is the political gift that keeps on giving.

Yeah, wouldn't it be just HILARIOUS if Obama told an Olympian he didn't get there on his own? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

ROMNEY: You Olympians, however, know you didn’t get here solely on your own power. For most of you, loving parents, sisters or brothers, encouraged your hopes, coaches guided, communities built venues in order to organize competitions. All Olympians stand on the shoulders of those who lifted them.We’ve already cheered the Olympians, let’s also cheer the parents, coaches, and communities.

Oops.

Nooners might want to get a new "friend" who follows politics a little more closely, or at least, can use Teh Googles.

Today, Nooners takes a close look at Team USA's Olympic uniforms and concludes there's Something Wrong With America.

In the controversy surrounding the uniforms of the 2012 U.S. Olympic team, the problem isn't China. That the uniforms were made there is merely a deep embarrassment and a missed opportunity. Our textile and manufacturing companies deserved that work. You wonder how it could be that no one in the American Olympic Committee or in Ralph Lauren's company asked, "By the way, we're making the outfits in America, right?"

Sure, they could've. But Nooners didn't seem to notice or care that in 2008, when a Republican was president, the Ralph Lauren designed uniforms were also made in China. Sure that was an oversight.

But that isn't the biggest problem. That would be the uniforms themselves. They don't really look all that American. Have you seen them? Do they say "America" to you? Berets with little stripes? Double breasted tuxedo-like jackets with white pants? Funny rounded collars on the shirts? Huge Polo logos? They look like some European bureaucrat's idea of a secret militia, like Brussels's idea of a chic new army. [...]

Americans wear baseball caps, trucker hats, cowboy hats, watch caps, Stetsons, golf caps, even Panama hats and fedoras.

I'm not sure Americans have ever worn "trucker hats" as part of an Olympic uniform, but during the 2002 Winter Olympics they wore -- wait for it -- berets with little stripes. But then again, a Republican was in the White House, so no biggie.

Then Nooners shifts gears and wrinkles her nose at the President.

I am certain the president has no idea how patronizing he sounds. His job is to tell us a story? And then get our blankie and put us to sleep?

When he says "a story" he means "the narrative," but he can't use that term because every hack in politics and every journalist they spin uses it and believes in it.

We've written of this before but it needs repeating. The American people will not listen to a narrative, they will not sit still for a story. They do not listen passively as seemingly eloquent people in Washington spin tales of their own derring-do.

The American people tell you the narrative. They look at the facts produced by your leadership, make a judgment and sum it up. The summation is spoken—the story told—at a million barbecues in a million back yards.

Ah, yes -- what kind of out-of-touch hack thinks Americans will listen to some contrived narrative that's been cooked up in Washington instead of on their own grills?

Maybe Mr. Bush should begin to think in terms of his own narrative. Maybe the real question is whether he and his people will write it, or whether it will be imposed on him by the media.

One thing is sure. The media abhor a vacuum. If they find one, they’ll fill it. Which suggests the Republicans, who have despised the sleek savvy of the Clinton years, may have to emulate it to some degree. Mr. Bush has not only got the White House. He’s got a great, grand stage. Mr. Clinton strutted there. Mr. Gore would have too. And Mr. Bush? Will he develop a sharper stagecraft to go with his statecraft? Now that he’s on stage—a large, grand stage—he needs a greater narrative, and a bolder sense of drama.

Nooners' columns would be more effective propaganda if she could lay off the Tanqueray martinis long enough to check her own archives.

Never mind that the Right Network failed and shut down last year. Never mind that Glenn Beck gets a ton of money so people can ask "Glenn who?"

This should prove beyond all doubt that tax rates must go up on billionaires because truly, there's really nowhere for them to spend all of that money they have, which is why they've unleashed Herman Cain on the Internet in the form of "Herman Cain TV." iPhone, iPad and Android apps coming to an app store near you, I'm sure.

Let me tell you, Tea Party Nation and Judson Phillips are just about beside themselves with joy over this insane waste of bandwidth. You can watch Herman Cain lie while looking straight into the camera, claiming that the Obama administration is working to restrict gun rights while letting them fall into the hands of foreign drug dealers.

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We've remarked from the get-go that the most remarkable thing about the Tea Partying Republican Right is that they represent a political bloc predicated on people believing things that are provably untrue. This has, of course, ranged from the Birth Certificate nonsense to the belief that Obama is going to take everyone's guns away, and everything in between.

But these are in many ways secondary add-ons to Tea Partyism, whose core mantra really revolves around the federal deficit and spending: We're on the verge of bankruptcy, they claim, and it's being caused by "out-of-control" federal spending.

In the video above, Van Jones -- who knows all about right-wing lies -- deconstructs the Really Big Lie that is a cornerstone of Tea Party beliefs, not to mention right-wing media talking points, namely: We're going broke.

We're not.

Meanwhile, Brian Beutler at TPMDC deconstructs the claim that "federal spending is out of control":

But a close look at the numbers reveals a few important, and frequently overlooked facts. Domestic discretionary spending is a small sliver of the budget. Our deficit and debts can be traced to the fact that spending on entitlement programs and defense has shot up, and tax revenues have plummeted to their lowest level in decades. But spending on domestic discretionary programs has grown much more slowly. And, if you correct for inflation, and for growing population, it turns out we're spending exactly the same amount on these programs as we were a full decade ago.

These numbers come from Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee, who are doing their best to guard this turf.

"Although non-defense discretionary spending in nominal dollars has increased, when taking inflation and population growth into account the amount contained in the [2011 budget] represents no increase over what we spent in 2001, a year in which we generated a surplus of $128 billion," said chairman Daniel Inouye (D-HI) in a prepared statement. "So the right question to ask is: Are we really spending too much on non-defense programs? The answer is clearly no."

Beutler provides some graphic illustrations of the reality behind the numbers that make it clear, as he suggests, just who the chief culprit in this matter really is: right-wing governance and its mania for cutting taxes.

In the wake of the Bush tax cuts, and the Great Recession, tax revenue has fallen through the floor to near-historic lows. As a percentage of GDP, it's fallen 24 percent since 2001, and if you correct for inflation, the government is collecting nearly 20 percent less per person than it was a decade ago. At the same time, the population-adjusted costs of mandatory spending programs -- driven by Medicare, including its new prescription drug benefit, and Medicaid -- have increased by over 30 percent. And, of course, defense spending has skyrocketed. But if you isolate domestic discretionary programs, a decade later we're spending no more on a per-person basis than we were back then.

Meanwhile, Robert Reich explains all this in detail:

Yes, it's true: Right-wing ideology is increasingly built on a foundation of lies.

The Fox freakout over the White House's new rapid-response media team headed by Jesse Lee picked up a head of steam last night on Sean Hannity's show, when Andrew Breitbart came on and sounded like his nemesis, Glenn Beck, for a bit, as he debated the token liberal, Democratis strategist Steve Murphy. All that was missing was the chalkboard:

BREITBART: Jesse Lee was at the forefront of the antiwar blogging movement, a point in time in which the same media that is out there saying that you can't criticize the president, Barack Obama, were out there saying 'dissent is patriotic' and so Jesse was protected by the media. Now he wants to go after Fox News, AM talk radio, Andrew Breitbart, and what he's doing is adding an extra protective layer to George Soros -- all the media that he's buying, and now Media Matters, which is a --

MURPHY: This is the Hannity show, not Beck.

BREITBART: This is a $15 million a year operation to try and shut up dissent. This is exactly what they do in totalitarian leftist nations like Venezuela. They try to shut people up.

At this point, Murphy thankfully jumped in and pointed out that Breitbart was being absurd -- this was a standard political media operation, only with more sophisticated media technology to work with. But Breitbart was intent mainly on smearing Jesse Lee:

BREITBART: He's a hit artist.

MURPHY: So are you!

Bretibart didn't really have much of a response to that one. He knew it was true.

One of the significant achievements of the Wisconsin protests is that this gathering of teachers and firefighters and public workers has been simultaneously forceful but peaceful.

This really is a surprise only for people who believe right-wing propaganda about the unions being populated by violent thugs. So that means it especially throws off the talkers at Fox News, who have been leading the right-wing media parade attempting to smear the protesters as violent thugs.

Notice how, in her interview on Thursday, the morning after the Republicans in the Senate rammed their union-bashing legislation through, Megyn Kelly tries to get Jesse Jackson to somehow hint at violence in the Wisconsin protests?

And Jackson simply wouldn't bite.

Let's hope it stays this way. Fuses are getting short in Madison, but it isn't the protesters who are losing their cools.

[H/t commenter Mugsy]

It was pretty hard this weekend to find anything but warm, gushing encomiums to Ronald Reagan on his 100th birthday anywhere on the teevee -- particularly at Fox, where the fawning coverage doubled as an opportunity to bash President Obama. The one exception was this brief report from ABC News' Jake Tapper.

While far from complete, it at least covers some of the more significant differences between the real president that Ronald Reagan was and the fake myths about him that have become enmeshed in right-wing conventional wisdom since -- and thus embedded as truth for mainstream media.

But really, this only points to the larger truth about this whole weekend's worth of praise for Reagan, which included a special halftime program at the Super Bowl, fergawdsake. As Charles Pierce adroitly observes:

By way of historical comparison, the centennial of Franklin D. Roosevelt's birth took place in 1982. The halftime entertainment at that year's Super Bowl -- the telecast not yet having been blown up to 96.5 hours -- consisted of Up With People singing a medley of Motown hits. Somewhere between those two events is something that says a great deal about this nation, not much of it encouraging. Maybe the NFLPA should change its acronym to PATCO and eliminate all confusion.

Much as Reagan himself was during his presidency, his image is now functionally just a stand-in for conservative-movement ideology. Whatever conservatives need him to be now, that's what the Reagan Myth stands for -- even though, as Jon Perr points out, today's Tea Partiers would call Reagan a RINO.

And that's why, as Will Bunch explores at length in his great book, Tear Down This Myth, there has evolved in fact a cottage industry around the mythologization of Ronald Reagan -- naming airports and boulevards and buildings after him, constantly burnishing his achievements, constantly celebrating various Reagan anniversaries, including slightly odd ones like his 100th birthday. This industry exists not to much to celebrate Reagan the actual president, but to embed conservative mythology in the nation's political landscape -- even after its disastrous consequences are made manifest:

There has always been a place for mythology in American democracy – the hulking granite edifices of the Capitol Mall in Washington are a powerful testament to that – but this nation has arguably never seen the kind of bold, crudely calculated and ideologically driven legend-manufacturing as has taken place with Ronald Reagan. It is a myth machine that has been spectacularly successful, launched in the mid-1990s when the conservative brand was at low ebb.The docudrama version of the Gipper’s life story, successfully sold to the American public, helped to keep united and refuel a right-wing movement that consolidated power while citing Reaganism – as separate and apart from the flesh-and-blood Reagan – for misguided policies from lowering taxes in the time of war in Iraq to maintaining that unpopular conflict in a time of increasing bloodshed and questionable gains.

As Bunch recently observed, in recalling the way the so-called liberal media attended to Reagan's funeral on bended knee:

The death of Reagan some six-and-a-half years ago, and the remarkable tenor – not to mention the depth -- of the news coverage, especially on cable TV news channels, marked something of a turning point. It showed the extent to which a vast content-hungry media world – much more extensive than when Reagan was president in the 1980s, when their main concern was the half-hour evening network newscast -- was eager to swallow the manufactured myths about Ronald Reagan, and thus honor what the unnamed TV executive told Hoagland, that “today history is what we say it is.” Any chance for an honest portrayal of Reagan and his presidency – the dangerous overreach of the Iran-contra scandal, the growing embrace of deficit spending (both in Washington and for credit-card-laden consumers), or even the positive idea that his greatest contribution to history was a heartfelt desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons (an idea out of step with modern conservative thinking) – has been tossed down the memory hole for the last decade.

What the American people have been news-fed instead has been an ideology loosely based on Reagan, called Reaganism – a notion that has led to the Tea Party’s hatred of anything involving government and the bogus ideas that taxes can only be cut or that diplomacy with America’s rivals is for wimps. With each passing election, more and more of the electorate is too young to have remembered or experienced the real Ronald Reagan, yet are searching for an idealized president based on these right-wing perpetrated fallacies. Many of the worst aspects of the George W. Bush presidency – more tax cuts for the rich, soaring deficits, and “axis of evil” bluster – were rooted in this legend of a man who wasn’t there.

My own recollection of Reagan was that he destroyed the Republican Party for moderate Republicans such as I was at the time, especially by empowering the Religious Right. It drove people like me out of the GOP, and we've never looked back.