I remember 1980 and the empty rhetoric that a ridiculous, insipid B-movie actor had been given to recite for months, and I remember desperately hoping that people wouldn’t be stupid enough to project their fears onto the image of a simplistic fool who knew nothing about policy, but who’d been effectively coached in how to say very little with a great deal of emphasis.
It wasn’t long before this empty suit was elected. And it wasn’t long afterwards that I heard news reports about terrible things which this man was ignoring, and about innocuous things this man would waste no time criticizing, and about wonderfully hopeful things this man would loudly condemn.
That’s when the gut-churning nightmare began, and that’s when I knew that the children of Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy were taking their royal revenge for Cronkite, Viet Nam, Woodward/Bernstein, and Watergate. This would now become our time to be punished, for having dared to depose a man who’d violated our trust and sent our kids overseas to die for nothing.
I just didn’t know how effectively they’d planned this retribution until I realized how many newspapers, radio stations, and tv affiliates their supporters had acquired.
We’re still being punished.
Moeskido 
I think you give them too much credit for organizing and orchestrating all this. You have to give some credit to people who refuse to learn history, even recent history.
All in all, an excellent post.
Very kind, Mr. Barouc.
There have always been people who ignore history, but the left wing pretty much put its feet up in 1975 and stopped paying attention for a couple of decades. Neoconservatives filled in the vacuum like a bunch of opportunistic infections, most strongly in how they figured out how to make their message more persuasive to the people least likely to benefit from their policies.