Sean Hannity ran Fox News's Katrina coverage from an anchor desk. The entire week he pretended to be a "journalist" even while he blasted Mayor Nagin and excused the FEMA failures.

How do basic facts about Fox News like this get ignored by these pundit hacks?

Here's Sean Hannity running Fox "News" spin as a live anchor during Katrina. Watch Hannity spin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPswpqB73SA

But Glenn, the one factor you forget is that since the republican base believes that the Cause is the thing, and that blind dedication to the Cause is the greatest sign of loyalty and thus support, is when the Cause switches.

The strategy for the republicans to salvage 2008 will be to flip the switch, just as Orwell used to describe it.

They will pick some arbitrary moment, as useless as any of their other fictional moments (soverignty, the purple fingers, the toppling statue, etc.), and they will suddenly give orders to the cultists that the war is now OVER.

At this point the entire Cause will flip 180 degrees in the blink of an eye. The republicans will all then coalesce around their "VICTORY" and their willingness to "END THE WAR" presumably the "right way" instead of the liberals "wrong way."

In short, to answer your post, you and Huffington are both wrong. because you're still focusing on issue support or lack of support instead of cult fervor. It's not support for the war that's popular or unpopular. It's support for the Cause.

When the Cause switches, republicans will hate the war with the same passion they now love it.

McCain simply thought for himself.

But Glenn, you keep making the same mistaken assumption every single day.

You're assuming the right wing mindset is seeking to rectify contradiction. In other words, you assume a rational impulse is driving the car.

It is not. In fact, the exact opposite isn't just an ancillary component of the right wing mind, it is ESSENTIAL.

To demonstrate true believer fealty to the "cause" one must not only actively be able to espouse blatantly contradictory thoughts in a single sentence, one must be willing to FLAUNT such intellectual dissonance.

The subtextual message is this: I am so dedicated to right wing supremacy that I am willing to trick my own mind to demonstrate how dedicated I really am.

It's a variant on Orwellian double-think in action.

Wingnuts like Sowell not only contradict themselves constantly with intellectual inconsistency, but doing so is an active part of their demonstrations via subtextual encoded meaning structures that they are fully on-board team players.

An intellectual fraud like Sowell or Hewitt see this as simply the necessary step in the "larger good." If only we can all think like they think, dismissing fact and critical method and embracing 2+2=5, only then will we be able to unite and defeat the "evil doers" (whomever Big Brother tells us that is today: Mexicans, Iranians, Iraqis, homosexuals, Jews, etc., it doesn't matter specifically).

What Sowell is saying is not a factual argument. You have to comprehend what he is saying subtextually.

He is proudly proclaiming his willingness to lie, distort, trick his own mind, and embrace contradiction as part of his dedication to the Elephant, and thus, his "patriotism."

It isn't accidental or lazy intellectual fraud.

It is intentional demonstration of intellectual dedication to authoritarian fealty.