Kevin Drum does a nice job of breaking down how the right-wing echo chamber took an unknown professor from the midwest and elavated him to evil entity. This was then picked up by the right blogsphere and used as “evidence” that all Liberals are evil. A snip:
It’s fascinating how a trivial story like this managed to spread so far, isn’t it? The right wing machine pushed, the New York Times responded, and then the rest of the press followed. Within days, the previously insignificant Ward Churchill had become a household name and a virtual poster boy for lefty nihilism based on something that no one on either the left or right had cared a whit about in the three years since he wrote it. Truly an object lesson for us all.
At The Gadflyer, Paul Wadman states:
The moral of the story isn’t just the Times’ unrivalled agenda-setting power. Obviously, there are conservo-drones in the basement of Heritage or AEI or FOX whose job it is to scour the wires and every little news outlet searching for cases where somebody – preferably a professor or someone associated with the entertainment industry – says something unpatriotic, freedom-hating, or just plain stupid. This item can then be fed to all the nodes of the Noise Machine, enabling them to vibrate with outrage for days on end.This has been the Republican strategy dating back to Richard Nixon: nurture resentments, feed anger, particularly that of white working-class men. Keep them pissed-off enough at the “elites” (not the elite of money and power, of course) and they won’t notice that you haven’t actually done anything for them. Tell them not to pay attention to the man in the White House, or the party controlling Congress, or to those who rule the business world. It’s these nobodies you should be angry at!
You have to hand it to the likes of Limbaugh and O’Reilly, though. One might have thought that with absolute Republican control, they wouldn’t have anybody to be mad at anymore. What can you bitch about when your guys are running the show? Well, it turns out there’s plenty to bitch about, if you look hard enough.
It will at some point backfire horribly on them. Keep your eyes peeled. Watch your back.
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