"And behold, a plague of boy-like men descended upon the Earth, and spake only in bad metaphor"
Over at the Mahablog, there's an admirably researched, well-written and entertaining piece entitled "The Power of (Right Wing) Myth", named, of course, after the Joseph Campbell book of similar name. The essential premise is that the purveyors of right-wing ideology such as Bill Kristol, Brit Hume, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, etc. are constantly reaching back into history to come up with justifications for their ideas (as we all should, I suppose), but instead of consulting actual history, the history they turn to is some cartoonized, fantastical soup of emotionally-charged-yet-fact-free metaphors only loosely based on the original events.
Those of us few high-minded masochists who take the time to parse-out their dubious assertions find that they most often work from sort of a copy of a copy of a Photoshopped copy of real events, which unfortunately ends up sounding just true enough to fool a) the media, and b) most other people who aren't paying very close attention into believing that they're experts -- and not absolutely loony, which by all rational definitions they actually are.
... but I digress again. Back to the essay at the Mahablog: Read it, it's good for you! Plus it's peppered with lots of juicy historical tidbits that are ideal ammunition for that next time your right-wing friend uses a bad, tired old analogy such as, for example, how much G. W. Bush is like Winston Churchill. (Go ahead, groan all you want -- but grown men in suits actually argue that one on live television with alarming frequency.)
