WHAT I GOT WRONG

When I speculated that the Susan G. Komen people, under the influence of newly hired wingnut VP Karen Handel, might have concluded that there was money to be made rebranding the group a right-wing cause celebre, I wasn't thinking too much like a crazy right-winger -- I was failing to think enough like a crazy right-winger. I was imagining that these people knew that there was likely to be fallout from ditching Planned Parenthood, and that they thought there might be some advantage -- that ongoing sense of team loyalty and solidarity and grievance -- in aligning themselves with the right.

In fact, what they really seem to have been thinking -- not just Handel but (as we now learn) Ari Fleischer, who was brought in as Komen adviser -- was that ditching Planned Parenthood really wouldn't come with much of a cost. Clearly Handel, Fleischer, and whoever else shared their worldview live in an epistemically closed wingnut world and believe that everyone feels about Planned Parenthood the way they do, with the exception of a tiny liberal sliver of the population. That was a tremendous misjudgment, and it comes because the right increasingly believes its own deceitful talking points about how extreme and out of touch liberals are. Well, don't stop believin', folks. Do us a favor and keep making bad judgments like this.