NP: John Cage, 4'33"

I'm not sure if there's any other way to read this interview transcript between Nate Silver and John Ziegler and not be astonished at what a gigantic douchebag Ziegler is.

Of course, Silver followed this up with his own analysis, which makes a couple of important points about talk radio:

It is not that conservatism generally permits less nuance than liberalism (in terms of political messaging, that is probably one of conservatism's strengths). Rather...there are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.

I've been saying something like this for a while, in that the most irritating thing about political "debate," for me, is that neither side allows for the slightest possibility that they might be wrong. With homogeneous audiences, they don't have to.

This bit nailed if for me, though:

The distinguishing feature of radio is that it exists in a sort of perpetual amnesiac state. In a book, you can go back and read the previous page; on the internet, you can press the 'back' button on the browser. In radio, there is no rewind: everything exists in that moment and that moment only. This is, theoretically, a problem with teleivsion too, but in televison you at least have context clues -- graphics and what not, and what falls under the heading of "non-verbal communication". In radio you do not. Just a sine wave in the ether.

How many times has someone said something to the effect of "don't these guys realize that this is being recorded?" This may be how the blogosphere ultimately counterbalances talk radio, because before blogs, nobody really kept track of what these guys said from day to day, in this "perpetual amnesic state" Nate mentions. Now it's bubbled up to Olbermann's "Worst Persons in the World" segment.

Except that the right has gotten so used to this amnesic state that it's permeated all levels of the Republican Party. It's Karl Rove's base strategy in a nutshell. Assert over and over, and assume no one will remember the details later, certainly not to the point of challenging them. And that's what Obama was able to deflate, by leveraging the potential of the Internet as crowd-sourcing fact-checkers, in a sense.