Raines isn’t just a bigot, but is totally unable to assimilate reality. Perhaps the strongest indication of this is his inability to accept the simple fact that Jimmy Carter was beaten because he was a discredited and incompetent President and that no Republican propaganda, or black magic, was needed to turn people’s heads. Anyone alive in 1980 knew how people, even ardent Democrats, thought of him. Come to think of it, the only propaganda successes I can think of in relation to Carter are his achievement in giving most contemporaries the impression that he was at least a decent man, and later in getting people to forget just how incompetent he really was. Could the maunderings of Raines and his sort account for the latter achievement?

“Raines isn’t just a bigot, but is totally unable to assimilate reality.”

But I think that’s what a bigot is, or at least an extreme and consistent bigot. A bigot is someone who must always put the object of his bigotry in the worse possible light. Therefore he cannot take in any reality that doesn’t put the object of his hate in the worst possible light. So, in this case, according to Raines, Reagan didn’t simply thrash the incumbent Carter who was widely seen as a failed leader; Reagan found a tiny flaw of Carter’s and unfairly and viciously exploited that flaw and made Carter seem so much worse than anyone had previously imagined him to be.

The Raines article is remarkable because it so clearly reveals where liberals are always coming from. The conservative view that liberals see all conservatives in every instance as motivated by greed, hate, extremism, cynicism, and hypocrisy is not just a conservative fantasy of liberals. It is, as Raines shows, what the liberals really believe. The insane anti-Bush hatred of today that has taken over the Democratic party and made them politically incompetent is only the uninhibited expression of the anti-conservative hatred that they’ve been feeling the whole time.

Another way of understanding this irrational bigotry (to go back to ground we’ve plowed before) is that liberalism is like Islam. Each has cosmic, universal claims; each defines goodness, not as something it aspires to that lies outside itself, but as identical with itself; and therefore each is inherently incapable of recognizing any moral or human legitimacy in anything that is not itself.

“Liberalism is like Islam”? In some ways, yes, but the Mussulmans have the decency to cover up their hags. We need veils.