The interesting question here is whether there is a more structural explanation for why these people are always — and systemically — wrong. I mean, it’s fun to blame everything on their being idiots. But there’s a more interesting — and more accurate — explanation here.

In my opinion, their wrongness is a function of their ideological approach to the world. And I mean that in a philosophical sense. Like other nationalists throughout history, they interpret the world through the lens of their own idees fixe. Ideologues like them approach the world not as empiricists but as advocates. They don’t survey the phenomena around them and derive fact-based conclusions. They survey the external world for data points that reaffirm their pre-existing views.

Pajamas Media doesn’t have a monopoly on this problem. Indeed, it’s unclear whether our brains are even capable of perceiving things outside of an ideological lens of some sort. But not all lenses are created equal. And the thing that comes through in reading the Pajamas crowd is an extreme Manichean nationalism coupled with a persecution complex. As nationalists, the Malkin crowd embraces America with an almost-infantile devotion (my daddy can do no wrong). The world around them is also very easily divided into good and evil, American or not American, Muslim or not Muslim, and so on. On top of all this (and intertwined with it) is the persecution complex that is so central to the conservative evangelical political movement. To the Pajamas nationalists, the paranoia manifests itself as media bias — everywhere, at all times — in the same way that James Dobson sees a constant, unending assault on Christianity.

There’s a lot of interesting psychology here.

Indeed, I've said all along that once we get out of this particular patch of history, and the various wingnut factions are pushed back into the obscurity of the fringe world where they came from, there are going to be some fascinating books out looking at their rather bizarre psychology. I'm hopeful that I'll have the intestinal fortitude necessary to read them some time before I leave this mortal coil.

I often come back to the idea of my friend Roger Keeling that liberalism is the result of the scientific method turned to the social and political world, guided by the precepts of humanism. In this formulation empiricism is more important than ideology, and the liberal or progressive advocate must act as the scientific advocate does and back up his or her advocacy with results. If the facts don't support the case, then even the fiercest advocate has an obligation to let go of their operational theory and find something else that works. This, clearly, is a modus operandi that the wingers just cannot accept, and do not follow.