NY Times guest columnist Kurt Andersen is troubled:
[T]he most troubling thing about Perry (and Michele Bachmann and so many more), what’s new and strange and epidemic in mainstream politics, is the degree to which people inhabit their own Manichaean make-believe worlds. They totally believe their vivid fictions.
True enough, and troubling enough. When the governor isn't reinventing Texas history or refining the science of climatology in ways that only an ignorant racketeer could, the Minnesota congresswoman is shuffling and redealing decades of U.S. history and altering its Revolutionary geography.
All of that, however, is not what I find most troubling in mainstream politics. That superlative I reserve for what passes for professional analysis these days -- for those who are paid some pretty good dough to help us navigate the complexities of the national political scene.
For example a few days ago I watched Charlie Cook, of The Cook Political Report, dismiss on MSNBC one of Bachmann's whoppers (I forget which one) as merely popcorn for her base -- he wasn't the least bit interested in correcting what she had grossly misrepresented; and last night, on Hardball, "MSNBC analyst" Michael Steele delivered an encore Cook performance with respect to Rick Perry -- Oh, come on, Chris, said Steele, he's just playing to the base, his fictional facts are of no significance whatsoever.
Both "analysts" accepted, with an astounding cavalierness, the GOP norm of transcendent unreality. Both implicitly argued that abject fantasies are not only the defining platform of modern Republicanism -- as Landonian anti-New Dealism or Taftian isolationism once was -- but that they're so entirely central to contemporary conservatism, they're not even worthy of comment or correction.
In short, it is redundant -- if not rather "uncool" of hip professionals -- to bother noting that contemporary conservatism is delusional. Its self-aware lies, its insidious distortions, its amateur science, its counterfactual economics, its faith-based history -- most or all of it simply made up for the benefit of an ideologically coddled, otherworldly base. And utterly unremarkable.
Yeah ... so what? That, it seems -- what's really newest and strangest and most epidemic in mainstream politics -- is the political media's profoundly unserious attitude, as frivolous hacks and jaded gurus swamp all semblances of journalistic rigor.