Glenn,

When you say things like this:

As you say, most of the journalists who covered that story are still journalists. Even if they are super slothful and don't do research, you would think at least one of them would remember what they reported on, make the connection in their brains, and then mention it. Yet they don't. It's like they can only see what is immediately in front of their faces and nothing else.

you are still operating from the naive perspective of expecting them to do their jobs according to their purported ethics, professional codes, public declarations of purpose, etc., etc., etc., as if these all were statements to be taken at face value. While, of course, it's commendable to take the strategy of holding them to such pronouncements, it's analytically naive to be surprised when they do not.

It is not their purpose to inform the public--whatever they may say, or even consciously believe. (Many people cannot consciously acknowledge what it is they really do.) It is their purpose to help legitimate the workings of power. Those who do this most naturally are the ones who get promoted. Those who don't do not. And thus, it is almost never necessary to force reporters to write something they don't want to.

That's nothing new. But, in recent decades, as the right wing has vastly intensified its pressure on the media, the media's logic has increasingly come to conform to the logic of the right wing. And the right wing's logic is that of projection and denial. It's precisely because Gingrich acted as he did that they have to accuse Pelosi of what Gingrich actually did--act like a loose cannon, and weaken our diplomatic position in the world.

The more general example is how the Democrats' restraint in not going after Reagan and Bush over Iran/Contra was repaid by the Republicans pouring tens of millions of dollars into finding something, anything that they could use to impeach Clinton and bring him down. It doesn't matter which order things unfold in. If the Democrats' restraint and good behavior preceeds or follows the Republican's unhinged behvior, the logic is still the same--whatever the Republicans do is attributed to the Democrats with mountaneous servings of slander and blame.

In the Iran/Contra/Whitewater pairing the temporal order may have been reversed, but there's no great mystery in that, because the Republicans knew as Iran/Contra unfolded how savagely, and limitelessly they would have attacked if there roles had been reversed. It's precisely this awarenss (carefully repressed, of course) of how unlimited and thoroughly partisan their own response would have been that made the Republicans defending Reagan over-react to everything that unfolded in the process--all the way down to calling the special prosecutor's investigation a partisan witch-hunt because one of the deputy prosecutors was a Democrat, even though the lead prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, was a life-long Republican.

And so, you see, there is a fundamental psychic necessity for rightwingers to take every dark impulse they feel, and attibute it to their perceived enemies. This logic absolutely, rigidly prevents any possible awareness of when they are doing something that they accuse others of doing. The are fundamentally incapable of recognizing their own inconsistencies--as Altemeyer demonstrates quite clearly.

Once you have this mentality fully harnessed, and devoted to making the mainstream media bend to its will, then it is totally expectable that the media itself will show the same inability to make straightforward comparisons for consistency's sake. They will simply not be able to do it, because it does not relfect how they think anymore. In the new logic, double standards are the new fairness, and the double standards always favor the right.

This is not an accident. It is not a failure of their thinking. It is precisely how their thinking was designed to be.

In short, their "inability" to remember and compare similar situations when the sides were reversed is not a bug in the system. It's an essential aspect of how the system works.

It's a feature, not a bug.

Paul Dirks:

My question - which is cause and which is effect? Is projecting their own faults upon their purported enemies a tendency among RWA's or is it the projecting of faults that causes them to become RWA's in the first place?

Everybody projects their demons. But RWAs are particularly lacking in insight, among other things. So the projections have a much stronger grip on them. And the ability to see themselves as others see them is particularly weak. That's the raw material that makes them ripe for political manipulation, and it's that vulnerabiltiy to manipulation that's a large part of the foundation for movement conservatism.

That the American people never supported this extremist fringe. That's why they had to lie our way into the invasion of Iraq.

Which, of course, violated one of the chief tennets of the erstwhile "Powell Doctrine." Now they're apopleptic because the Powell Doctrine was right--it's not a good idea to go to war unless the American people are really behind the idea (and you have enough troops to do the job, and you have an exit, etc.)

This is how BushCo has operated from the very beginning. Take the most lunatic positions, and then, when anyone shows signs of uttering (or, in this case, doing) something sane, attack, attack, attack as if they were the lunatic. This is how they avoid discussion of the actual policies, which cannot possibly stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny.

They absolutely have to have us discussing Nancy Pelosi, because even if they eventually lose this one, we will not have been spending all this time analyzing how totally disasterous their own Mideast policy is, how it cannot possibly succeed any more than 2+2 can equal 3.