The Far Right Cocoon II

Dreher responds to Ross:

...conversations I've had over the past couple of weeks with grassroots conservatives around here are kind of breathtaking in their denial of reality. I have heard conservatives talk about how all the polls are wrong, that the "silent majority" will be heard from, that Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric are evil for making Sarah Palin look bad, etc. And that anyone who claims to be a conservative who disputes any of this is a traitor to the cause.

I still get that talking to some conservatives about the Iraq War. When Sarah Palin was interviewed at Ground Zero a few weeks back and said, "We have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here," I would have laughed that people are still using that worn-out cliche ... except I still do hear it from time to time among diehard Bush backers.

We have seen this sort of thing before, among liberals who could not grasp that ordinary people actually liked Ronald Reagan and the Reaganite Republican Party. I know; I used to be one of those liberals. I had so much emotionally and psychologically invested in my politics being true that I could not imagine why people disagreed -- except that they had been bamboozled, or were wicked.