I think one of the most useful terms coined in the past few years has been Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness.”
[T]ruthiness is a “truth” that a person claims to know intuitively “from the gut” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
McClatchy Newspapers – the folks who got the Iraq WMD story right before the war – has an article about “conservative” attempts at a rewrite of history, facts be damned, apparently. (I put “conservative” in quotes, because this is a subset of people on the right wing, politically, which tends to tarnish the group as a whole but does not speak for the group because the “Right” and “Conservatives” aren’t monolithic.)
Among other things, Alexander Hamilton who was darn near a monarchist, is described as a small government conservative by Dick Armey. Armey also describes Jamestown as a socialist, doomed to failure, never mind that it was a capitalist venture financed by the Virginia Company of London — a joint stock corporation — to make a profit.
To the reliably insane snake-oil salesman, Glenn Beck, Teddy Roosevelt is evidence of a socialist cancer in America which must be eradicated and not tolerated. Beck finds deeply offensive Roosevelt’s notion that fortunes ought to be honorably obtained and well used. Beck, predictably, doesn’t care that Roosevelt explicitly rejected Marx and did not advocate government ownership of the means of production.
Minnesota wingnut, Michelle Bachmann charges FDR with responsibility for the 90% loss in stocks that took place before he took office and with tariff legislation passed by a Republican Congress and signed by Herbert Hoover before FDR took office.
Facts are irrelevant. They have “deeper truths” on their side.
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