The wingnutosphere is still so busy patting itself on the back for shouting over the MSM, it couldn't notice that the broader right-wing noise machine is backfiring on Barack Obama.
The right's media contraption has worked like this: talkradio, and now blogs, floats rumors, conspiracy-theories, race-baiting and sundry scurrilous allegations. Most of it falls to the ground unnoticed outside the fevered confines of the noise machine itself. But some of it careens around the blog-talkradio-right-wing-press-think-tank echo chamber long enough to gain critical mass through repitition. The goal is to let the garbage break through to the mainstream media, usually in the form of forcing a liberal to respond to a scurillous allegation.
This is how American learned that John Kerry is a Frenchmen who faked his war injuries, Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster, Bill Clinton raped dozens of women and Vietnam protestors spit on veterans (actually the latter's a Golden Oldie that predates blogs/talkradio, but same idea.)
Obama, either by luck or design, is impervious. If the subsidized complex of right-wing blogs, talkradio, think tanks and "mainstream" media like the Wall Street Journal and Fox is Superman, able to crush presidential candidates with a single lie, Obama has a pocketful of kryptonite.
How did he get it? George W. Bush summoned a perfect storm. Bush has long since given up trying to make a fool out of Abe Lincoln and so confines himself strictly to fooling some of the people all of the time. That ``some people'' is the tiny knot of bloggers and talkradio parrots who have spent the past three years grimly echoing each other's interpretations of RNC talking points to each other.
They shout that we're winning the Iraq war, yet it remains unwon. The economy is great, they keep screaming, even as growth over the Bush years sags to the slowest since the Great Depression. And they readers, of course, are right there to remind them that anyone who doesn't believe them is a brainwashed moonbat who wants to sing Kumbaya to bin Laden while giving away the Treasury to homeless people.
The noise machine is backfiring because a generation of moderate Republicans are turning against their party's right wing and their massive media machine hasn't been able to turn with them. It's self-fulfilling, self-referencing and, now, self-defeating -- a closed loop where neither fact nor logic can enter or escape.
So now, the proliferation of wingnut blogs confine themselves to militating the party's base, i.e. fooling some of the people all of the time, rather than moderating the militants' message, i.e. trying to fool all of the people some of the time.
Obama's mixed race, non-identity identity politics and quasi-outsider status within the Democratic party make him the ideal presidential candidate to silence the buzz of the right's tawdry propaganda beehive.
Many right-wing blogs are now virtually all-Obama, all-the time. But they are not eviscerating his policies or his record or, certainly not, his performance as a candidate. Instead, they are burying themselves in increasingly desperate ad hominem, race-baiting and conspiracy theories. Obama is a Muslim. Obama is an elitist. Obama is a moron. Obama is a Black Panther. Obama is a communist. Obama. Obama. Obama.
And these same bloggers always preface the wingnuttery with "The Obama campaign labels any criticism as racist, but...''
The truth is, the Obama campaign has not and does not have to label it that. The wingnut's echo chamber has folded in on itself to the extent that the hatred so naked that swing voters and moderate Republicans -- along with everyone else outside the blogs own fan clubs -- can see, hear, smell and taste the bigotry.
The good news is that the nonstop nonsense from these blogs has cauterized the American swing voter against criticism of Obama, covering even legitimate beefs with the candidate in a thick layer of BS.
Perhaps we should have known the wingnuts would eventually arrive at their destination.
