Fox News cost Mitt the debate [conservatives trapped in closed information feedback loop]

Romney stumbled on Libya because the GOP is reliant on a right-wing media machine that has no ideas, just scandals

Why did Mitt Romney embarrass himself on Libya in this week’s debate? One possibility: Because he, and the Republican Party in general, have opened up an alarming policy deficit between themselves and Barack Obama and the Democrats.

What I mean by that is that Romney, Republicans and conservatives have, in case after case, simply given up on crafting viable public policy. That wasn’t always the case. When Ronald Reagan took office, conservative think tanks were ready with a host of ideas for transforming what government did and the way it did it. As recently as the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush campaigned on, for example, No Child Left Behind and a faith-based initiative. Does Romney have anything similar he’s talking about during this campaign? Not that I’ve heard.

What he’s substituted for policy is scandal, on the one hand, and symbolism, on the other.

Republicans’ reliance on a scandal framework is most obvious in their attacks on Barack Obama. The stimulus is reduced in this point of view to “Solyndra.” Energy? One pipeline to Canada.

Most of the time, there’s almost no real attempt to construct an argument against actual policies, to treat government programs proposed by the president as policies that one might agree or disagree with. That’s not always true – a lot of the arguments against the Affordable Care Act, and some of the case against the stimulus, really were policy-based. But more often Republicans have tried to frame their attacks around scandal.

The other frame they’ve used, especially on foreign policy and national security, is pure symbolism. Often, as Paul Waldman pointed out this week, that’s reduced down to the level of individual words. It’s bad to apologize. It’s important to speak up for Iranian protesters.

It’s imperative to never, ever disagree with Israel. And Waldman missed the big one: It’s absolutely critical that the president always, always, no matter what, and in every possible way, refer to the United States as “exceptional.” Don’t forget: Many of the present generation of Republicans were trained by Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz to believe in the power of certain words. They may sincerely believe that public policy really does only consist of finding the words that will “force” opponents to fear them and allies to be comforted.

And so, scandal and symbolism became a trap that turned the disaster in Benghazi from an opportunity to score points for Mitt Romney into a fiasco.

How? First, because instead of questioning the policies – including the initial intervention – that brought the Obama administration to the death of an ambassador, the immediate instinct of the Romney Republicans was to turn it into scandal. A coverup! Barack Obama and the State Department said one thing in the immediate aftermath, but some of those things turned out to be wrong. Now, a less scandal-obsessed party might have either moved quickly past that seemingly unimportant discrepancy and focused on how the problem happened in the first place, or investigated whether initial chaos was a sign of mismanagement. But neither of those fits the scandal frame as well.

Meanwhile, the focus on symbolic words in lieu of policy played right into the scandal frame in this case. The administration was denying terrorism! Because, er, they didn’t use the word “terrorist.” Sure, they said “act of terror,” which to most of us sounds about the same, but that’s because most of us aren’t obsessively focused on the symbolic importance of using the correct words all the time as the main responsibility of the president with regard to foreign policy and national security.

Most of us, that is, who are not trapped within the conservative closed information feedback loop, where Solyndra and Fast and Furious were major Obama administration scandals, and where, as Paul Ryan put it in his debate with Joe Biden, it’s obvious that Obama’s foreign policy is unraveling “before our eyes” and “as we turn on our television screens these days.”

Of course, figuring out what any of that really means would take, well, some serious policy analysis. But that’s exactly what Mitt Romney and the Republicans just don’t have these days.

The lie is all they have.

June 2000 - David Horowitz: "Hillary Clinton and the Third Way" Progressive Narcissism

"...........It is Primary Colors’ insight into the minds of these missionaries that is striking. They see Clinton quite clearly as a flawed and often repellent human being. They see him as a lecher, a liar and a man who would destroy an innocent human being in order to advance his own career (this is, in fact, the climactic drama of the text). Yet through all the sordidness and lying, the personal ruthlessness and disorder, the idealistic missionaries faithfully follow and serve their leader.

They do it not because they are themselves corrupted and bought off through material rewards. The prospect of material return or fame is not what drives them. Think only of Ickes, personally betrayed and brutally cast aside by Clinton, who nonetheless refused to turn on him, even after the betrayal. Instead, Ickes kept his own counsel and protected Clinton, biding his time and waiting for Hillary to make her move, then joined her staff to manage her Senate campaign.

The idealistic missionaries in this true tale bite their tongues and betray their principles, rather than betray him. They do so because in Bill Clinton they see a necessary vehicle of their noble ambition and their chiliastic dreams. He, too, cares about social justice, about poor people and blacks (or so he makes them believe). They will serve him and lie for him and destroy for him, because he is the vessel of their salvationist hopes. Because Bill Clinton can gain the keys to the state, he is in their eyes the only prospect for advancing the progressive cause. Therefore, they will sacrifice anything and everything to make him succeed.

But Bill Clinton is not like those who worship him, corrupting himself and others for a higher cause. Unlike them, he betrays principles because he has none. He will even betray his country, but without the slightest need to betray it for something else – for an idea, a party, a cause. He is a narcissist who sacrifices principle for power because his vision is so filled up with himself that he cannot tell the difference.

But the idealists who serve him -- the Stephanopoulos’s, the Ickes’s, the feminists, the progressives and Hillary -- can tell the difference. Their cyncism flows from the very perception they have of right and wrong. They do it for noble ends. They do it for the progressive faith. They do it because they see themselves as gods, as having the power -- through correct politics -- to redeem the world. It is that terrifyingly exalted ambition that fuels their spiritual arrogance and justifies their means.

And that is why they hate conservatives. They hate you because you are killers of their dream. You are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your “reactionary” commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and stocking political war chests, but as both means and end.

Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will always be blind-sided by the sheer malice of the left -- by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on their principles; by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity; by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal; and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the poor on the part of those who preen themselves as their champions.

Conservatives are surprised because they see progressives as merely misguided, when they are, in fact, morally – and ontologically -- misdirected. They are the messianists of a false religious faith. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them."

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