GAVIN HAS A GOOD POINT

Gavin McNett, who also writes for Sadly, No!, has an interesting column in Alternet, "In the Fever Swamp of the Radical Wingnuts." In it, he argues that we can find out what the true wingnut agenda is by reading the 3rd-tier people because they aren't clever enough to disguise the intended meaning.

And as you move down the scale from the best-connected and highest-paid ones, through the medium players like the Charles Krauthammers and Peggy Noonans, past the Thomas Sowells and Cal Thomases, ever downward toward the pickle-barrel solons at the National Review Online and the Weekly Standard -- indeed, down through the bottom of the barrel and into the pickle-soaked dirt beneath -- the intelligence and cunning falls away in stages, and you're able to see the same conservative arguments-of-the-week made ineptly, by bozos who know very well what they're supposed to be for or against but don't have a clue how to make it seem reasonable to sane Americans.

Gavin also notes something I have an emotionally difficult time grasping: The best wingnuts KNOW they're lying and they don't care.

Such performances, of course, demand a certain indifference to the notion of truth (i.e., high-level conservative columnists often don't believe what they're saying), and a cavalier attitude toward looking like an idiot (i.e., they never expect to fool all the people, all the time).

I can offer one example of indifference to looking like an idiot. In an attempt to disprove global warming, last winter Slots Bennett asked his callers to tell him their local temperature, as if a dozen or so temperatures would prove anything. Even then, as I recall, they couldn't quite come up with the average!