The right's own worst nightmare

David Weigel's penetrating assessment of Tucker Carlson and the Daily Caller's unappeased frenzy:

The Caller's one of many conservative media organizations dedicated to the principle that the media ... did not "vet" [Obama four or five years ago]. It doesn't matter if the press covered an Obama story. They didn't cover it enough. Last week's Caller blockbuster told readers that the young Eric Holder had participated in a black student association's occupation of a vacated ROTC center, and it didn't matter that many profiles of Holder had covered this--they didn't cover it enough. We know this, because voters did not get worried about it.

In this there's something of a slo-motion breakdown, I think--an emotional collapse on the right, which, though chronic in the making, is now acutely symptomatic.

For years the right reveled in its ability to whip up national hysteria almost at will: hysteria about Bill and Hillary's healthcare proposal, hysteria about a presidential blowjob, hysteria about an impotent Iraqi dictator and hysteria about John Kerry's unpardonable crimes of latte-sipping and wind-surfing. Most recently--and as a kind of ego-booster and ability-reassurer--the right scored another hysteria victory about another (conservative) healthcare plan.

Still, Obama's '08 triumph was, obviously, a bitter shellacking for the right and all its very best, most skilled hysteria-manufacturing, which 2010 seemed to overcome, but here we are, again--another inexorable center-left triumph. In toto, the last five years have seemed to vaporize the right's most self-comforting m.o.: that it could always just press a propagandistic button and the country would unravel in hysterical horror.

Welcome, dear right wingers, to your own nightmare.

Comments

[AnneJ]

I like to think that after all of the death and destruction caused by their whipping up hysteria over WMD's and Saddam Hussein, the American public started to become more wary of the right wing hysteria m.o. Maybe they started to see the immense damage, the lives needlessly lost, the billions or trillions of dollars lost to the national treasury, people started to wake up to the fact that it is the right wingers we need to fear.