The Tea Party/GOP noise machine

Watching Bill Maher last week, he confronted his guest, St. Louis Tea Party radio host Dana Loesch guest with the following indisputable facts, all of which she denied were true or claimed were in dispute:

1) the stimulus cost less than the war in Iraq. Her response: "those numbers are in dispute"

2) the stimulus contained almost $300 million in tax cuts that were demanded by Republicans who then opposed it. Her response: "no it didn't"

3) the stimulus saved 3 million jobs. Her idiotic response was "then why is unemployment still at 10%?" to which John Legend responded (barely concealing his disgust) that without the stimulus, unemployment would be at 13%. Loesch responded that that was in dispute.

4) the bailouts worked, it saved GM and millions of jobs, and we got our money back plus some, making a profit. Her response: 'why does the government get to decide who survives?'. She sidestepped the truth that didn't support her assertions and asked her question in a manner that suggested that saving a million jobs is somehow worthy of derision.

Interestingly enough, she got upset when Maher used the term "teabagger" (even though the teabaggers are the ones who called themselves teabaggers first), yet she had no problem, and Maher raised no objections, when she used the backhanded-slur "Democrat party".

This illustrates the fundamental problem with debating the functions of government in this Tea Party era: they have no sense of truth or fact. It's all subjective reality. Present them with numbers from the CBO and they'll scream that those are "government numbers" and therefore ought not to be trusted. Present them with fact and they'll sidestep, or cry conspiracy, or deflect ('remember 30 years ago when...'), or just scream "lamestream media... AIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!!".

There is no reality with them, other than the shifting constructs of the day-to-day. Yesterday they were supporting Juan Williams and complaining (erroneously) that his First Amendment rights were violated. Yet when real First Amendment rights are being violated by Joe Miller's hired goons illegally detaining a reporter for asking questions of the candidate, they claim that the reporter deserved it.

How does one debate a group of chronically lying hypocrites?