Little-known facts about America

"You know, we're the only people on Earth who put our hand over our heart during the playing of the national anthem." Heh, heh. Maybe Romney means that we're the only people on Earth who put our hand over our heart during the playing of the American national anthem.

Actually, I think that Republicans have become so used to just making up their own facts that they do it automatically these days. Remember, they're all faith-based, so they just believe whatever they want to believe. To Republicans, facts are whatever you want them to be.

Republicans were not always this way, but their notorious "Southern strategy" filled the party not just with racists, but with religious fundamentalists, conspiracy enthusiasts, white supremacists, and other kooks. They took all of the Democrat's kooks - mostly, those old "Dixiecrats" who opposed racial integration - and combined them with the John Birchers and other kooks already in the GOP.

So now, the Republican base is full of people who think reality is whatever they want it to be. These people have their own "facts." That makes it difficult to work with them, because we don't even live in the same reality. If they don't like what evidence shows us about the real world, they just believe something different.

This is obvious when it comes to science, but it's increasingly obvious in politics, too. Romney isn't the only candidate who just makes up facts. All of the Republicans do that. And it doesn't hurt them in the primary campaign - just the reverse, in fact. The Republican base wants to hear what it wants to believe.

And in the rare instance where the news media (not Fox, of course) call them on this, that's just evidence to the faithful of the "lamestream" media's liberal bias. Of course, journalists rarely do call them on such things. That's left to comedy shows like this.