That's the title of an article in the Sunday Washington Post by Gerard Alexander. With a title and reasoning worthy of a post on the Redstate blog, Alexander reels off a litany of the insults to the proud legacy of conservative thought imposed by liberals on all sides.
It takes Alexander 18 paragraphs to get to what precipitated this tirade.
In a nutshell, Alexander's argument comes down to 4 points:
-- Liberals believe that the right has a coordinated "vast right wing conspiracy" that allows conservatives to triumph in elections despite their lack (in the liberals' view) of facts or legitimate arguments;
-- Liberals believe that the "conservative masses are in the grip of false consciousness," having been duped by conservative leaders;
-- Liberals seek to falsely portray conservative leaders as using race as a wedge issue, and using symbolic issues as a proxy for race to appeal to remaining racist tendencies in conservative voters;
-- Finally, liberals portray conservatives as driven purely by emotion and anxiety, including fear of change, while liberals have the burden of supporting their arguments with evidence and logic.
Now, it would be easy to rebut this article point by point. There is good, unrebutted evidence of a coordinated campaign, including statements by people who created and work within it. There is strong evidence that conservatives knowingly mislead the public and that a significant part of the public believe these misleading statements, with the most obvious example being the repeated linking of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq with the 9/11 attacks against the US -- a link still being perpetrated by former Vice President Cheney even in recent months. Appeals to race for political purposes? Tom Tancredo's called for civics and literacy testing to exercise the right to vote TODAY.
But the final point seems to really be the factor that released this poorly-reasoned and argued conservative manifesto -- and in the 18th paragraph, it comes back here to the Daily Kos. The Kos poll of Republican voters that showed that they are well outside the mainstream on many issues -- and out of touch with reality and science as well -- is the single recent event that is cited in the article -- most of the rest are cites to statements made in the most recent presidential campaign (the famous Obama remark during the Pennsylvania Democratic primary about clinging to guns and religion) or even farther back.
Alexander doubts it would "take long" to develop a survey questionnaire that "revealed strange, ill-informed and paranoid beliefs among average Democrats." So why not? It isn't like the Republicans lack the money to do such polling. I'd be delighted to relate all the wacky ideas I have (for instance, that corporations are not people, and that the overwhelming scientific support for evolution demonstrates that the theory of evolution is about as well grounded as the theory of gravity.)
My favorite quote from the article, however, is this:
Of course, plenty of conservatives are hardly above feeling superior. But the closest they come to portraying liberals as systematically mistaken in their worldview is when they try to identify ideological dogmatism in a narrow slice of the left (say, among Ivy League faculty members), in a particular moment (during the health-care debate, for instance) or in specific individuals (such as Obama or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom some conservatives accuse of being stealth ideologues). A few conservative voices may say that all liberals are always wrong, but these tend to be relatively marginal figures or media gadflies such as Glenn Beck.
But the evidence is that Republicans in the United States Congress overwhelmingly believe that everything that the Democrats are doing is wrong -- based on their votes. And Rush Limbaugh is hardly a marginal figure in the Republican party or a media gadfly -- he's as close as the conservative movement comes to a national spokesman, and he opposes essentially everything the Democrats in general and the leadership in particular does.