RIGHT-WING MESSAGING: BLAME OBAMA WHEN THE PERFECTLY HARMLESS SEQUESTER WREAKS UNTOLD DEVASTATION

Really, that's the conservative message right now: The sequester's impact will be trivial, but you should blame the horrors that ensue from that trivial impact on the White House. Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS squeezes that message into a fifty-second ad:





In the blogosphere, right-wingers are flogging Bob Woodward's Washington Post story ascribing the sequester's paternity to the White House (while glossing over the economic hostage crisis that led to the proposal), but the wingers are also flogging ABC and Forbes pieces that say the sequester's negative impact will be insignificant at worst.

I'd call this incoherent and self-contradictory, but it probably works at the reptile-brain level, at least as far as the base is concerned. Recall that the day-to-day right-wing message is that Obama is both an incompetent affirmative-action hire who does nothing but golf all the time and can't talk without a Teleprompter ... and, simultaneously, an all-powerful totalitarian who, one day soon, will have everyone's guns confiscated, in a brutally efficient overnight coast-to-coast house-to-house sweep, after which he'll impose sharia law and ban Christianity and capitalism. I don't know why the brain processes messages like this as complementary rather than contradictory, but it seems to, or at least the right-wing brain does. Maybe our side felt the same way about Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, but I'm not sure we could feel it both ways in less than a minute.