…I’ll go ahead and mix in a prediction.
Across the blogosphere, the wingers are sticking to their story: Liberal media bias, de facto voter suppression, dishonest pollsters, fraudulent registration by ACORN and other groups, and general liberal dishonesty and ribald campaign tactics are the reason their candidate is getting shellacked today. He certainly could not lose in a fair fight, they believe, even after selecting a mentally challenged, broadly beaming rube for a running mate.
This not the only example of how these folks are up to their beetle brows in denial. Many of them, with an almost heroic disregard for the evidence pouring in from every possible news source, are actually predicting (not hoping; predicting) that McCain will win. They may even believe it; they have apparently assured themselves that if they shout about Obama’s scurrilous campaigning and the smoke-and-mirrors tactics of the exclusively liberal media, their hoarse and impassioned cries will resonate with voters who make sure to check blogs run by people who communicate at about an eighth-grade level before making a final decision and heading to the polls.

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As the election gets underway with momentum clearly favoring Barack Obama and Joe Biden, I could not help but reflect on the small but noisy group of conservative bloggers I, by dint of happenstance, wound up crossing verbal swords with when I was actively posting as a member of the Refuge. After all, I wondered even two years ago what sort of aggrieved fictions these people would produce if the 2008 election favored the Democratic candidate. So I checked out some of these blogs, and wasn’t disappointed by the glowing incoherence I discovered there.
I’d say this attempt at an essay, which I found cross-posted on the reliably insane and toxic Gribbit Online, meets the criteria for an archetypal outburst of dolorous, noisy nonsense, with bitterness and wishful thinking running roughshod over whatever marginal reasoning powers someone like “Big Dog” might potentially possess. He writes:

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An article from the Buffalo News offers some fuel for the “elitism fire”. From Ohio, we learn of voter George Pounder:

Pounder looks at Obama and sees a Harvard-educated lawyer who talks in fancy words that don’t necessarily resonate with the guys on the factory floor.
“We’re basically blue-collar Democrats, here, and it doesn’t seem like he’s for us” Pounder said. “He doesn’t relate to the working man, to the union man. He never got his hands dirty once in his life.”

Wait a minute. Obama doesn’t relate to the working man but McCain does? What? Have you ever read about their backgrounds? And since when is an Ivy League education a bad thing or having a decent vocabulary something to denigrate? Am I on Bizzaro World?
Damn that Obama! He’s too edjumacated! We measure the worth of a man by the amount of dirt under his fingernails, not by the strength of his ideas and efforts!
Mr. Pounder voted early, and for the record, he left the “For president” slot blank.

I picked up the newspaper the other day and found a short article declaring that the news media have been biased toward Obama and against McCain. The article claims that reporting was favorable to the Democrats about 2/3rds of the time and that the only relatively “equal” outlet was Fox News. Hmmm.
The article referred to a report produced by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a self-proclaimed non-partisan watchdog group. A quick look at SourceWatch and even Wikipedia shows that this is no non-partisan group. The group was founded with seed money from notable conservatives such as Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan, and receives the majority of its funding through conservative foundations.
It appears that this organization exists as an obfuscator, that is, something whose purpose is to muddy the waters and cast doubt. Unfortunately, when newspapers simply repeat reports that they receive without further examination of the source, the deed is done and the average reader will likely not look further.
Of course, this is not to say that a conservative-funded organization can’t be impartial, but this organization is certainly not open about its funding sources so that makes me suspicious. Further, it is not true that unbiased reporting would lead to a 50/50 split in positive comments on any particular topic. That might be “balanced” in a perverse sense of the word, but certainly not objective. If, after all, a network was to have Neil Armstrong on as a guest to discuss the moon landings, having a moon-landing conspiracy theorist on next to him does not necessarily create “balance”, and it is certainly not true that the objective truth of the matter must lie somewhere between those two expressions.