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• Tuesday, December 27, 2005 03:55 PM

  Wil, I feel your pain

  I've had similar experiences with my dad and stepmother as they moved to the right over the last couple of decades. My father completely buys anything Rush says, even when I refute the phony statistics with actual statistics.

  During the 90s, he moved out of California because he got sick of all the "fags and colored people" and now lives in a gated community in Arizona. He feels "safe" there because the guards keep the "riff-raff" out. Ohhhhhhkay.

  We had a moment at a recent family dinner that was eerily similar to your father's explosion. I had just seen "Good Night and Good Luck," and brought it up as a terrific film that I thought was well-made. My dad interrupted me and started in on how the country was full of Communists in the 50s and that McCarthy was a great patriot.

  Whoa. Silence at the dinner table as my siblings and I looked at each other with stunned looks on our faces. As my sister and I did the dishes after dinner, she whispered to me, "Was dad defending McCarthy?" Ohmigod, we both thought.

  Apparently O'Reilly went off on the movie during his show; when I looked up his comments on his website, I found nearly the exact words my dad used at dinner.

  How -- and why -- did our parents get brainwashed? I have trouble finding anything to talk with my father about any more because he will twist it all into something political.

  —T.W. Carey
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