Five delusional right-wingers who have Mitt in a landslide
Most national polls have the two candidates in a dead heat, but try telling that to these would-be prophets
Republicans have decided that all the available evidence must be wrong and that Mitt Romney is headed for a certain victory next Tuesday. Many expect a landslide win that will rival Reagan’s ten-point victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980. It’s hard to recall another example of an entire political party deluding itself to such a degree that it has lost any connection to objective reality.
Romney can certainly win this election. There is no doubt about that. But he is just as certainly the underdog. Talking-Point Memo’s Poll Tracker currently projects Obama to win 285 Electoral College votes to Romney’s 191 (270 wins the White House); without toss-up states, Real Clear Politics has Obama with 290 Electoral College votes; Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight model gives the incumbent an 80.9 percent likelihood of victory; Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium is even more bullish, projecting 318 Electoral College votes for the president and giving him a 97 percent chance of winning re-election.
Many conservatives simply refuse to accept this state of affairs. There are two reasons. The party hacks – including those in the Romney campaign – worry about turning out their base. People like to vote for winners, and if they believe their candidate is likely to go down in defeat, they may decide to stay home and do some laundry next Tuesday. They fear that if their candidate looks like he will be beat it can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Projecting an image of a strong candidate with good momentum keeps their voters engaged and enthusiastic.
For the rank-and-file, there’s something else going on. Research suggests that political conservatives tend to have a greater need to avoid cognitive dissonance than liberals. The right has spent 4 years painting Obama as not only a failure and an incompetent, but a dangerous radical; a crypto-Muslim with dictatorial tendencies who may not even be an American citizen. The idea that such a horrible monster could be re-elected causes painful cognitive dissonance, which they’re trying to manage by grasping at any straw they see.
This can lead to some truly comical efforts to twist reality into something that conforms with their world-view.
-- JOSHUA HOLLAND [emphasis mine] ALTERNET, NOV 3, 2012
Ahh, the delusional and their effect on the world. One of my most often referred topics.
Is Oprah a way of life?
Really, I'm on them so often - if you click the tag, below, marked "delusional thinking" -
the blog will probably just reprint itself.
And then, right alongside self-delusion, there's fraud, fraud, fraud, wonderful fraud
Where would we be?
A funny thing about fraud - no matter how many times the marks get taken - they keep coming back for more, rarely going to the authorities, and usually keeping quiet to others
(so nobody will know how stupid they were)
which is stupid, because then they leave others ignorant to what's going on and open to fleecing.
The GOP seems willfully clueless. There’s a reason there are so few minorities in the party. There’s a reason women scrambled to the other side. There’s a reason Hispanics, including even Cuban Americans this time, went for Obama.
How can Seven-Up be sued, over making alleged false claims,
but Dick Morris and the rest of these know-nothings aren't?
I think the unspoken rule is, in America, nobody can speak about the obvious.
You've got to fight for that.
So we are a nation of nutjobs, viciously led to feeding on one another,
and hardly anyone dares say a true word.
At this point, many might not even be capable of it.
For them, the real is fake and the fake is real.
Althouse: About David Petraeus: "The man falls in love with... himself!"
I've got to give that one scammer credit, though:
More than anything else, money, iPads - you name it - right now,
what this culture most desperately needs is a mirror,....
