This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public

Ever thought about this?  It’s impossible to reason with someone whose views have been hijacked by disinformation.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank made that point yesterday, so I owe him proper credit, as well as for some of the evidence that appears below.

“Once you’ve taken leave from the reality-based community, every day is fantastic! Milbank wrote.

“It has been particularly so over the past week.  As the rest of the country mourned the latest young victims of gun violence, the Q-Anon crowd and their enablers in the Republican Party have constructed a walled fortress of alternative facts.

“Beginning in the hours after the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, right-wing social media churned out every manner of conspiracy theory:  The shooter was an illegal immigrant!  No, he was transgender!  Or, maybe the massacre was a false-flag operation perpetrated by the anti-gun left!  And the grieving families are paid crisis actors!”

Incredible!

Not surprisingly, the disinformation found its way into the words of members of Congress, mostly Republicans.

More from Milbank:

“Arizona Representative Paul Gosar, who has repeatedly tied himself to white nationalists, tweeted that the gunman was ‘a transsexual leftist illegal alien’ — and let that multi-headed falsehood stand for two hours before deleting it.

“On Fox Business, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican and prominent advocate of Ivermectin de-wormer as a covid-19 therapy, blamed the shooting on critical race theory.  We stopped teaching values in so many of our schools; now we’re teaching wokeness.

“We’re indoctrinating our children with things like CRT, telling  some children they’re not equal to others and they’re the cause of other people’s problems.”

Then came the ubiquitous Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, fresh from a GOP primary victory, repeated in a live Facebook broadcast the false narrative that the perpetrator was trans (“wearing eyeliner, cross-dressing”).  She also nodded to the conspiracy belief that the shooter couldn’t have afforded the weapons and therefore anti-gun forces must have given him the guns to create a pretext for gun confiscation.

Then, of course, the duplicitous Texas Senator Ted Cruz got into the act because, like Donald Trump, he works hard to find what he thinks is the limelight and then tries to bask in the glow.

“Their real goal is disarming America,” Cruz said in a speech stocked with falsehoods. 

Then, Trump falsely told the NRA annual meeting that the Biden Administration reportedly “is considering putting U.N. bureaucrats in charge of your Second Amendment rights.”

All of this is why it is not possible to have a rational discussion about guns – or anything else for that matter – with these sorts of irrational individuals.  Of course, they don’t care.  Facts and honesty don’t matter.

Republicans automatically turn to disinformation, which as Milbank puts it, “shows that one side, Republicans, have been hijacked by disinformation.”

Now, I add that Democrats are on the far left are not always much better, though they seldom journey to the depths of the Republicans.  I say this to respond to one of my good friends who argues, with accuracy, that “to equate Republicans and Democrat these days is to engage in ‘false equivalence.’”

To illustrate.

Milbank points to a new study that shows how distorting disinformation has become a force on the political right in the Trump era.

“Yhe Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others set out to learn why, as previous studies of social media patterns have found, Republicans share between 200 per cent and 500 per cent more fake news (fabrications published by sites masquerading as news outlets) than Democrats.

“Were they less able to distinguish fact from fiction?  More psychologically predisposed to political bias?

“In part, yes.  But the researchers found that the issue primarily seems to be a supply issue.  There’s just way more fake news on the right than the left.”

Milbank summarizes this way: 

“In lay terms:  Garbage in, garbage out. Republican voters hear lies by the thousand from Trump and imitators such as Johnson and Cruz.  They hear new conspiracy theories daily from Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and other Trump-inspired elites.  It’s hardly surprising that, thus exposed, they become more toxic in their language, more extreme in their ideology and more outraged.”

All of this, to me, summarizes why Congress is stuck when it comes to dealing with important issues facing this country, including the logical issue of gun safety in the aftermath of school shootings, plus the new one at a hospital. 

Republicans block the way and reasonable Democrats – yes, there are some – can’t find a way through or around the blockade.

Who should be blamed for this? 

First, Republicans deserve the rap.  But, so do Americans who continue to elect persons of bad faith and dishonest ambitions, including such irrational figures as Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Marjorie Taylor Greene…and the list goes on.