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Moving The Center
ByMatt Steinglass parses CNN's hiring of extreme partisan and RedState.com headliner Erick Erickson:
The Overton window represents a strategy of pushing the political centre in a desired ideological direction by introducing wildly extremist, unacceptable policy positions and hammering away at them until other ideas that once seemed extremist come to seem reasonable by comparison. The commenting policies at RedState worked the same way: by allowing conservative extremism while tightly restricting liberal discourse, the site tried to redefine the right as the centre.
And again, this is where the post-modern left and the Rovian left overlap: it's about creating reality out of ideology. Because there is no reality that isn't created.
But there is. And the insistence on reality, on assessing problems empirically, and in proposing solutions is what we all need to get better at. In this, Obama really is leading. But the MSM chases its own tail - or, in the words of that ultimate post-modernist, Roger Ailes, it's only about ratings. There is no reality but ratings.
