The right's two-pronged religion of rage and self-pity

(updated below)

The Right in this country -- meaning the faction that followed George Bush for the last eight years -- long ago ceased being a movement of political ideas and is driven by two, and only two, extreme emotions: (1) intense, aggressive rage towards their revolving door of enemies, and (2) bottomless self-pity over how unfairly they're being treated. As their imminent defeat looks increasingly likely (potentially on a humiliating scale), these two impulses are in maximum overdrive, feeding off one another in endless self-perpetuation (the more they lose, the more victimized they feel, the more they rage against their enemies who oppress them, etc.).

The Right's rejection by the public can't possibly be due to anything they have done. It can only be due to some extremely vicious enemy that oppresses them uniquely and so very unfairly. For the moment, they're only losing because The Leftist Mainstream Media hates them and is deeply biased against them. Blue Texan points out just some of the painfully obvious idiocy at the heart of this specific strain of woe-is-me-ism:

It's pretty clear that [Instapundit] and the drooling Malkinites in wingnutland are getting ready to blame the corporate media when Obama wins.

The problem with this narrative is that:

a) the GOP has dominated national electoral politics for a decade, in spite of said "liberal media" conspiring to elect Democrats, and;

b) the wingnut bloggers themselves spend lots of time and energy obsessing over the idea that the mainstream media has an ever-diminishing influence/relevance (how many posts has [Instapundit] done this year of the New York Times stock price/circulation figures?)

I'm not sure how they square all of this in their little brains exactly, but it makes my head hurt.

Needless to say, whether the excuse-making is coherent or consistent matters not in the slightest. The objective, as always, is to believe that they are weak and hapless victims being stomped on by some Evil, Unfair Force, and that self-pitying worldview can then explain away every last one of their failings. That is the mentality that lies at the heart of today's right-wing ideologue; more or less, it's all there is (for a long time, it was also the media and the Left's fault -- but not theirs -- that things were going so poorly in Iraq, even though they controlled all the branches of the Government).

As Blue Texan suggests, there are literally countless facts one could cite to negate the Right's incessant, tired complaint about The Liberal Media. As but just one example, the single most influential figure dictating what is reported by The Liberal Media -- Matt Drudge -- is a supreme right-wing hack. Just as Mark Halperin and John Harris proclaimed: He's the Walter Cronkite of our era, he rules the Media World, and is the nation's assignment editor. Every story he promotes -- Gwen Ifill has a Pro-Obama Conflict of Interest!!!! -- ends up immediately infecting the narrative of The Liberal Mainstream Media. How does one explain that?

Using only undisputed facts, one could write volumes -- and many have -- destroying the self-evidently moronic claim that the media outlets owned by the nation's largest and most powerful corporations are tireless propagandists for a Leftist agenda. But those facts can never and will never penetrate because the two-pronged Right-wing dogma of objective superiority and unique victimhood is a matter of religious faith and deep personal need...MORE:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/10/02/self_absorption/index.html