RSI Visits RedState.com

One of the popular right-wing blogs, the existence of RedState has always been a problem here at RSI. If I had known that RedState existed when I set up my blog, I wouldn't have named my blog "Red State Impressions." However, I refuse to change my blog name (at least so far). The honor of the Red States is at stake. The Red States may still vote Republican and the red states of the former Confederacy are still shamed by their association with slavery, segregation, lynching, and "whites only" signs. But RedState is so adolescent, so focused on gestures, and so content-free that it may be even more of an embarrassment to the Red States than the Confederacy.

Still, there is a lot to be learned from RedState.

1. The Right is in Trouble. That's trouble with a capital "T." Today's featured blog was an extended fantasy from "Academic Elephant" (AE) on the idea of a Donald Rumsfeld/ John Bolton Republican ticket for President. Admitting that conservatives are in a state of "malaise" and that the choice between McCain, Giuliani, and Mitt Romney would leave the right "squabbling over who is the least flawed," AE takes up Rumsfeld/Bolton as a dream ticket. So what's the dream? Although AE runs down reasons why a conservative would like Rumsfeld/Bolton, the underlying thrust is that a Rumsfeld/Bolton ticket would be enormously irritating to the left. AE quotes Jed Babbin on "how much Prozac the New York Times editors would consume if that dream came true R-B in '08." Then AE seals the deal by running down all the conservative icons like Ronald Reagan who like Rumsfeld and Bolton vs all the liberals who "hate" them. Things are so bad for conservatives that people on Red State have given up on appealing to the American electorate, winning the election, or governing. Instead, they've made flipping the bird at the left into their top priority. Even then, RedState is wrong. In fact, everybody on the left would be doing front hand-springs (my daughter went to gymnastics open-house tonight) at the idea of a Rumsfeld-Bolton ticket. Of course, Hillary would be salivating at the prospect of running against Rumsfeld as the only man in American history to lose two wars (Vietnam and Iraq). But so would Joe Biden--finally someone Biden could beat.

Why Pseudo-scandals Are In. Part of the problem for the right these days is that their positions on the Iraq War, health care, the environment, social security, and budget deficits are extremely unpopular. Worst of all, a conservative effort to ban abortion was defeated in a popular referendum in the extremely conservative state of South Dakota. As a result, the right is focusing its energies on promoting pseudo-scandals like the dispute over Nancy Pelosi's plane rides to California and whether or not John Edwards' bloggers are "anti-Catholic." This way, they can try to ensnare the Democrats in "controversy" while distracting attention from their own views. On RedState, three feature blogs focus on Pelosi while a fourth dishes on "blogger-gate." Unlike liberal bloggers like Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, I don't think this strategy has much chance of working, mostly because the right played and lost all their pseudo-scandal chips during the Lewinsky scandal.

The Politics of Truth. Relating to "bloggergate," RedState links through to a particular nasty web site called "The Secret Diary of Hillary Clinton" where a fictional Hillary disses the manhood of Edwards. From the right-wing perspective, this brutal, vindictive image of Hillary is the "truth" of Hillary Clinton and the right is determined to promote this image even if they have no evidence to support it. The same was true with the idea that Saddam Hussein was allied with al-Qaeda, that the Iraqis had mobile bio-weapons labs, that the Iraqis were seeking yellow-cake uranium from Niger, and now that the Iranians are seeking to "dominate" the Middle East. Where the American right gets themselves and the rest of our country into trouble is when they feel compelled to act on uncorrobarated accusations or fabricate evidence to give their fantasies an aura of realism. This is one of the reasons why the Bush administration has been continually at war with science and why Newt Gingrich has launched his own war against the First Amendment. The right wants to create it's own truth without reference to evidence.