For those of you not already familiar with it, the Daou Report at Salon collects excerpts from left-leaning and right-leaning weblogs in parallel columns. Today I was struck by the sloppy thinking I see in the righthand column. There are two artifices in evidence; these ought to be no surprise but are worth noting.

First, if your unshakeable convictions are challenged by a piece of evidence, just shoot the messenger, call him a liar. That’s how the right is grappling with the Downing Street Memo, ‘proving’ it is a fake despite the fact that its authenticity is not challenged by anyone in the British government, who it strikes me ought to know.

Second is the more insidious notion that people can’t change and that evidence of change must be suspect. This is apparent in the rightwing webloggers’ reminders to us (after the recent piece to which I blinked below) that no matter how often Robert Byrd is called the conscience of the Senate, ha ha, he is only a Klansman in sheep’s clothing, remember to throw that up in the lefties’ faces at every opportunity. Not only that, what right does Bill Clinton have to castigate the Bush administration for the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo when he was the one who began the practice of illegal detainment (and besides, while we’re at it, he’s a fornicator)?

In comments on my Byrd post, readers here have already taken note of this deeply faithless, unforgiving notion of human nature, which may be one of the most profound legacies of the rightwing domination of public discourse. And this from the supposed people of faith, the arbiters of faith! Others have equated the Right’s support for draconian measures in both foreign policy and on domestic security issues with the same notion — that people are stuck in who they are and there is no reasoning with them, and that leaves no option but for a morally superior elite to exercise unilateral control despite what the heathens, the terrrrrists, the criminals think. What do you think?