Nutsos!

Speaking of the Birthers, a remarkable line from POLITICO’s piece today on how Republican members of Congress are looking with trepidation to Birther encounters on the recess:

Sen. Jim Inhofe has also tried to find the elusive middle ground.

“They have a point,” he said of the birthers. “I don’t discourage it. ... But I’m going to pursue defeating [Obama] on things that I think are very destructive to America.”

Amazing. These guys are a hoot!

And, again, don't expect any Oklahoma media to report on any of this at all—or, if they do, to treat the birther narrative as potentially valid. Josh Marshall posted last night on why, even if you assume the birther narrative is true, it still wouldn't matter.

None of this is going to change unless a powerful, vigilant media watchdog moves into the state and starts calling the press on their obsequiousness to Republicans and hostility to Democrats. Media Matters opened a dedicated Colorado office in 2004:

Using our website colorado.mediamatters.org to disseminate research and information, Colorado Media Matters posts rapid-response items as well as longer-term research and analytic reports documenting conservative misinformation throughout the media. Additionally, Colorado Media Matters works daily to notify activists, journalists, pundits, and the general public about instances of misinformation, providing them with the resources to rebut false claims and the tools to take direct action against offending media institutions.

Go look at the Daily Kos Electoral Map for Colorado in the last few elections and notice how a state that was about 5% red has now switched to about 5% blue. In 2002, Colorado had two blue House districts and five red ones. In 2004, it was three blue ones. In 2006, it tilted to four blue districts and three red, and in 2008, it's up to five blue districts and two red—a complete reversal.

Of course there was lots else going on in the country at the time, but countering misinformation and calling bullshit for what it is makes a huge difference. You can be sure that if Media Matters did open an Oklahoma office, every TV station and the two largest newspapers would continually try to discredit them as a partisan outlet. But the funny thing is that since MMFA only publishes the actual words and recordings of conservative misinformation, people who are curious about it can check the site and read it for themselves. When you read or hear a bad sentence surrounded by two paragraphs or two minutes of equally bad context, it becomes clear that the person speaking meant exactly what he or she said.

That, more than anything else, has been a conservative movement killer—exposing what they're actually saying and doing. That's what Oklahoma needs. We had nothing even remotely like it last year, and because of it, Inhofe's fear-mongering ads got him a big victory over a worthy challenger who would have done much better for this state on every single level. When no one with a megaphone speaks the truth, the lies carry the day.