I think Politico's Jonathan Martin is reaching a little with this analogy. Although I admit that's about as interested as I've been in a Politico home page in many a day, when I looked down there and saw a woman who looked a lot like Pauline Kael and...turned out to be Pauline Kael!
Actually, it was suggested to him by a Republican source. The idea is that there's this famous quote from Kael describing the liberal coccoon she lived in in New York in the 70s, and that now it's conservatives who live in a coccoon:
In this reassuring conservative pocket universe, Rasmussen polls are gospel, the Benghazi controversy is worse than Watergate, “Fair and Balanced” isn’t just marketing and Dick Morris is a political seer.
Even this past weekend, days after a convincing Obama win, it wasn’t hard to find fringes of the right who are convinced he did so only because of mass voter fraud and mysteriously missing military ballots. Like a political version of “Thelma and Louise,” some far-right conservatives are in such denial that they’d just as soon keep on driving off the cliff than face up to a reality they’d rather not confront.
I must say this is great fun. And for more fun read this awesome comment thread from Red State the other day. There's lots of Romney bashing, but then every once in a while there is something like this:
I don't want to hear that this is all Romney's fault, or all the campaign's fault. The simple fact is that in the run-up to this election, we were fed a steady diet of lies, from all our "loyal" sources. We need to hold not only the Romney campaign accountable, but also the conservative press (specifically the Murdoch press - Fox was the worst of the bunch), and the establishment talking heads like Karl Rove and Peggy Noonan. We need to get clear about something: these people are selling us a product. They have been taking our money and telling us bedtime stories. We complain about the MSM, but can we honestly say that the conservative press has been more honest?
This sounds trenchant, but the conservative fantasy land press couldn't exist without these people, and I'll believe all this when they stop watching Fox and clicking on Drudge, either of which I don't think is going to happen anytime soon.
