Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas thinks conservatives live in a hermetically sealed bubble of Fox News and Breitbart commenters. On Thursday he mocked "reality-bending" Michael Walsh of National Review for suggesting the country would tilt away from Republican Tea Party-bashers like John McCain.
“Conservatives love to quote the 'public', the 'country', the 'American people' without ever pointing to a single poll because, as we all know, they're on the wrong side of virtually every issue,” Kos proclaimed, ignoring how polls have showed the approval of Obamacare has been underwater for years.
So they say that Cruz will lead a new American renaissance, with no evidence of any such thing, because "the country has been spoiling for a real fight", without any evidence of that either. The only way that makes any sense is if the definition of "the country" is Fox News and the Breitbart comments. In other words, deep in their bubble. Reality looks much different.
For “reality,” Kos linked to a Karl Rove poll showing people don’t want a government shutdown. Rove is suddenly a sage in the eyes of the Kosmonauts. Of course, the public hears “shutdown” and thinks it’s like shutting down a factory and firing people. But people brandishing these polls are trying to deny any leverage to people threatening a shutdown to strike a deal.
This mockery of the Tea Party being out of step is a little strange coming from the Left, which has failed to get gun control, “climate control,” and “immigration reform.” Their attempts to win through intimidation on those issues isn’t presently effective. How Moulitsas might like to relive 2006 and 2007, when the left-wing nutroots were seen as ascendant.
The really curious part of the Kos rant was how he dissed Senators Charles Schumer and Dick Durbin. When Walsh suggested the Democrats would suffer if Schumer and Durbin were the public faces of the Democrats, Kos argued they were almost unknowns:
\What happened to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama? Are they no longer effective boogeymen? And who actually thinks that anyone knows or cares about Schumer and Durbin, much less be scared by them? It'd be like me saying, "Make John Barrasso and Johnny Isakson the face of the Republican Party and watch the votes peel away from the right." People would be like, uh, who?
The problem with the GOP isn't "the faces of the Democratic Party", it's the fact that they're grossly out of step with public opinion.
