Why Is The Right Being Ignored? Why Does It Keep Losing Elections?

In the intelligence community, it's called "blowback." Getting snagged by one's own propaganda is an element of it. All that talk we've had from the right for years about the U.S. being a "conservative nation" can make for great propaganda, but it's nonsense. It's all good and fine to go on the talk shows and pretend as though "the American public" hates the public option in the health care bill, as conservatives have been doing for weeks, but the polling--the real polling, not the Rasmussen nonsense or the phone-in "polls"--shows that the public not only supports the public option, but supports it overwhelmingly.

The righties have a particular problem with blowback at this time, because the most "activist" element of the conservative movement at the moment is the manufactured teabagger "movement," which is nothing more than a well-financed astroturf project. The goal of astroturf is to create the impression of a real movement, and to make people think it's large, and representative of an even larger sentiment. When the teabaggers had their big march on D.C., the president of FreedomWorks declared it a crowd of 1.5 million, and Michelle Malkin and the right-wing Twits soon elevated this to 2 million. The actual number? Somewhere between sixty- and seventy-thousand.

That happens every time the astroturfers call a rally. At Thursday's rally on the capitol steps, the lies about the numbers appeared again, and Michelle Bachmann went on nationwide television to proclaim it was a spontaneous, organic protest, delightedly telling Sean Hannity it "was totally word of mouth. This was nothing that we organized, nothing that we planned. We didn't order one bus, one carload. Nothing. Complete word of mouth." This is how astroturf works. In the real world, the astroturfers had been promoting the event for a week, as had their mouthpieces in right-wing talk radio and Fox News, and the "spontaneous" and "organic" crowd was, like so many of the townhall rent-a-mobs in the summer, trucked in on buses paid for by Americans For Prosperity, one of the principal astroturf orgs working with Bachmann to orchestrate the rally.

In the much-heralded (until they lost) NY23 race, the astroturfers figured if they could invent a "movement," why couldn't they invent a candidate? Doug Hoffman didn't live in the district he was trying to represent, knew nothing of that district's issues, was almost entirely marketed on national right-wing press outlets, and, unable to raise money in "his" district--or even his state--relied on his personal wealth and huge injections of cash from corporate-backed right-wing orgs from outside the state. He was astroturf, fabricated like a dummy corporation set up in the Bahamas and sent out to read his lines in the hopes that he could delude enough fools to make him the new congressman. He failed, but he won't be the last.

The teabagger "movement" will burn out, make no mistake about it--it has no program, no goals, and no organizing principles beyond nonsense like stopping the commie/Nazi secret Muslim non-citizen in the White House from killing Granny, and when the corporate interests behind it feel their goals are accomplished and stop writing checks, the "movement" will disappear overnight. They can still cause a great deal of mischief before then, though. Blowback will continue to be a problem for the right as long as they're around.

"Loosing"?  Oh, dear.