IT'S OBVIOUS WHY REPRESENTATIVE FLEMING BELIEVED THAT ONION ARTICLE WAS REAL

You know about this, of course:

Congressman Falls for The Onion's Planned Parenthood 'Abortionplex' Story

Meet John Fleming, the unfortunate Republican U.S. Representative from Louisiana who made that wonderful and all-too-common mistake of thinking that an Onion article was real and telling his Facebook followers to read it....

The Onion article depicts a preposterously massive complex where abortions are gleefully done in thousands of rooms at once and further abortions are excitedly encouraged. Why would a right-wingers believe we'd build such a thing and goad women on to more and more abortions?

Well, a lot of these folks have started to believe their own talking points, the key one in this case being the one that posits the existence of a "liberal culture of death." It's not clear what the hell wingers mean when they say this -- start Googling it and you find that it manifests itself in, say, Hollywood movies about gay people, or (according to Glenn Beck a while back) a campaign to push a death-oriented sci-fi anthology to the top of the Amazon bestseller list. But primarily the wingers mean a support for abortion rights, sometimes accompanied by belief in a right to euthanasia, or support for stem cell research, or, God help us, opposition to Sarah Palin, which all wingers ascribe to our alleged disgust at the fact that she didn't abort Trig.

The statistic that frequently accompanies discussions of the "liberal culture of death" is that 92% of Down syndrome pregnancies end in abortion -- though how this can be blamed on liberalism I'm not sure, unless America suddenly went 92% liberal and I just missed it.

But the notion is that liberals relish death, savor death, embrace death for its own sake -- we feel about death, according to these folks, the way they feel about God, or Sarah Palin, or Trig, or puppies, or something equally wonderful.

They actually believe this about us. So, sure, they'd think Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood would say, as she does in The Onion's fake story,

"Although we've traditionally dedicated 97 percent of our resources to other important services such as contraception distribution, cancer screening, and STD testing, this new complex allows us to devote our full attention to what has always been our true passion: abortion," said Richards, standing under a banner emblazoned with Planned Parenthood's new slogan, "No Life Is Sacred." "And since Congress voted to retain our federal funding, it's going to be that much easier for us to maximize the number of tiny, beating hearts we stop every day."

It's gone beyond a belief that we're all sluts and slut-lovers with no morals or sense of responsibility (which is Atrios's theory). Now, in their eyes, we're Freddie. We're Jason. We're Hitler. We're nihilists who kill for sport.