YOU SAY "LIVING IN AN ALTERNATE REALITY" LIKE IT'S A BAD THING

A lot of lefty bloggers are chuckling at the news that Hugh Hewitt can't find a publisher for a book titled How Sarah Palin Won the Election ... and Saved America, and especially at Atrios's comment:

They should publish it, and Fox News should just provide a complete alternate reality for its viewers, one in which McCain is president, Obama has been arrested and sent to Gitmo for terrorist activites, Joe Wilson gets indicted, American Carol made a GAZILLION dollars at the box office, etc.

The thing is, with regard to the election, that actually is the world a lot of wingnuts (and possibly Fox News) will be living in if Obama is elected.

No matter what the vote totals look like, many wingnuts simply aren't going to believe Obama's win was legitimate. For years they've been primed to believe that there's massive voter fraud out there, all of it benefiting the Democrats. (Hewitt himself, of course, wrote a book about this four years ago with the rather overheated title If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It.) They think ACORN is the principal source of massive nationwide voter fraud and they think Obama is the founder and president and Lord High Poo-Bah of ACORN. Never mind the fact that, even if this conspiracy-so-vast were true (and if it were true, why couldn't Obama keep Hillary Clnton from winning 18 million votes?), what's been alleged about ACORN doesn't actually seem to lead to any electoral fraud whatsoever. As Politico's Ben Smith pointed out today, what ACORN is accused of

is putting the names of fake voters on the rolls, something that happens primarily when organizations, like Acorn, pay contractors for new voter registrations. That can be a crime, and it messes up the voter files, but there's virtually no evidence these imaginary people then vote in November. The current stories about Acorn don't even allege a plan to affect the November vote.

But no matter. In the wingnuts' alternate universe, McCain will win no matter what, and Palin will undoubtedly be the reason. Of course, in the alternate reality wingnuts want to believe in, she'd be the real president, not McCain.