We've seen it before, either in real life or in entertainment. The deranged person thinks everyone else of living in a fantasy world of their own creation...
...so this makes a lot more sense...
...because if you're slowly going mad, you WOULD lash out first.
More on the mental disorder of the conservatives, including a disgnosis, below the fold...
Before the diagnosis (that will be the second part of the diary), the first thing I want to address is something called DUCKSPEAK.
Duckspeak, as Orwell explains it in the book "1984", exists because...
Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak.
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Like various words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.
You may have noticed that the whole conservative media and blogosphere is all over the place at the moment. That's because they were so conditioned to repeat (to 'duck', if you like) the official talking points, they become frantic when there ARE no official talking points because everything they were told was 100% concrete turned out to be sand. Washed away by a single wave.
One good example of that is in this video, with the top man that was supposed to supply the duckspeak: Karl Rove.
ROVE: Let's make it clear: He ran a center-right campaign. He said -
COLMES: Center-right? He was accused of being a radical socialist.
ROVE: Well, if you dug in...
Unfortunately, Hannity interrupts so we never get to learn precisely how many licks of the lollipop it takes to go from the hard radical socialist agenda shell to the chewy center-right nation inside. It's not even a coherent talking point. But it was better than nothing. "Center Right Nation" was all the pundits had to go on before the election, so they went with it.
News articles (translation: obvious Op-Ed pieces) duckspoke the line that Rove tried to keep alive after the election. This one is courtesy of Charles Krauthammer. I should point out that this was written just before the election. He calls America...
the quintessential center-right country
...and to show how different Obama is from that Center Right Nation®, Krauthammer said this...
Obama, on the other hand, talks less and less about bipartisanship, his calling card during his earlier messianic stage. He does not need to. If he wins, he will have large Democratic majorities in both houses. And unlike Clinton in 1992, Obama is no centrist.
What will you get?
(1) Card check, meaning the abolition of the secret ballot in the certification of unions in the workplace. Large men will come to your house at night and ask you to sign a card supporting a union. You will sign.
(2) The so-called Fairness Doctrine -- a project of Nancy Pelosi and leading Democratic senators -- a Hugo Chávez-style travesty designed to abolish conservative talk radio.
(3) Judges who go beyond even the constitutional creativity we expect from Democratic appointees. Judges chosen according to Obama's publicly declared criterion: "empathy" for the "poor or African American or gay or disabled or old" -- in a legal system historically predicated on the idea of justice entirely blind to one's station in life.
(4) An unprecedented expansion of government power. Yes, I know. It has already happened. A conservative government has already partially nationalized the mortgage industry, the insurance industry and nine of the largest U.S. banks.
So now we come to the second part of the diary. Before the election, Obama wasn't even a centrist. He wants to force people to join unions, instigate Chavez-style doctrines, help the poor and black, and expand government. Yet this is still "the quintessential center-right country", and Karl Rove says Obama won because he really "ran a center-right campaign"?!?
MADNESS.
Just in case you thought this madness was confined to Rove and Krauthammer, here's a video of more people insisting we're in a Center Right Nation®...
Sure. We're "center right". And The Bradley Effect still exists outside the early 1980s.
You see, all these people are selling themselves a line of bullshit. And now they're buying it off everyone else that is selling it too. It's a Ponzi Scheme of emotion.
They all BELIEVE it's a "Center Right Nation", even with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
We know that the majority of Americans want healthcare for all. The majority of Americans WANT the Government to negotiate better drug deals in what FDR said was "the idea that the resources of the nation can be made to produce a far higher standard of living for the masses of the people if only government is intelligent and energetic in giving the right direction to economic life". Only 17% of people interviewed wanted to keep Medicare Part 'D' as it is, or cut it back!
The conservatives cannot stop themselves from saying world is like Y when it's clearly like X. There are clinical definitions for people that continually say the world is like Y when it's clearly like X. There are medications available for people that can't see that X = X. The layman's word is madness. The medical term is monothematic delusion.
Monothematic delusion is a delusional state that only concerns one particular topic. This is different from multi-thematic (also called polythematic) delusions where the person has a range of delusions (typically the case of schizophrenia). These disorders can occur within the context of schizophrenia or dementia, or they can occur without any other signs of mental illness. Usually when these disorders are found outside the context of mental illness, they are often caused by organic disfunction (a legitimate medical definition, not to be confused with the more common word 'dysfunction') as a result of traumatic brain injury, stroke, or neurological illness.
In the case of Republicans, I'd say they are suffering from a form of Delusional Misidentification Syndrome. This umbrella covers such illnesses as The Capgras delusion (the belief that (usually) a close relative or spouse has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor... think Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers), or Intermetamorphosis (the belief that people in the environment swap identities with each other whilst maintaining the same appearance). In the specific case affecting Republicans: they truly see America as being a Center Right Nation, trapped in November 1984, and 58.8% of people are just waiting to vote for Reagan again.
People who suffer from such delusions often do not suffer from any obvious intellectual deficiency nor do they have any other symptoms. A few of these people even have some awareness that their beliefs are bizarre, yet they cannot be persuaded that their beliefs are false. A man labeled as a terrorist's friend could get more votes than any other President in a single election, in a self-described Center-Right Nation, yet these two mutually exclusive tidbits don't seem to cancel out or contest in the person's mind.
Research shows that delusional people are more prone to jumping to conclusions and thus they would be more likely to take their anomalous experience as veridical and make snap judgments based on these experiences. They are also more prone to making errors due to matching bias... indicative of a tendency to try and confirm the rule. These two judgment biases help explain how delusion prone people could grasp onto extreme delusions and be very resistant to change. More importantly, there is even the suggestion that deluded subjects have the capacity to support the content of their delusions with reasons, that is, they can author their own delusional states. Even if the details should battle each other to the hypothetical death.
If only it were immediately obvious who thought like this. I'd know who to avoid at social functions.