I Deny Your Reality and Substitute My Own

Glenn Greenwald on a phenomenon I've noticed since college: the ability of certain groups (primarily on the Right, but also some on the Left) to completely deny any fact that doesn't fit their preconceived reality or to assume the existence of any fact that does support it. For example, the apparently sincere belief in some Neo-Conservative circles that Iraq is really a success story, if only the perfidious liberal media would tell the "good news." Or the cottage industry of Clinton Conspiracy Theories that flourished in the 1990's, with all sorts of half-baked claims of drug-running and serial murder accepted as gospel despite the lack of any supporting evidence at all. Greenwald discuss the prevailing "conventional wisdom" (which is neither conventional, nor wise) that the "mainstream" is conservative and that Democrats are always out of it.