Republican Delusions

Over the course of this election cycle I have written several blog posts looking at Right wing delusions about polling data. I focused quite a bit on Dean Chamber of Unskewedpolls.com and his attempts to "fix" polling data that didn't fit his desired outcome for the election. And now reports are coming in that th Romney campaign itself bought into these delusions, believing that the publicly available polling data (data collected and published by trained professionals with years if not decades of experience) was incorrect and was underestimating the Republican vote. From CBS:

As a result, they believed the public/media polls were skewed - they thought those polls oversampled Democrats and didn't reflect Republican enthusiasm. They based their own internal polls on turnout levels more favorable to Romney. That was a grave miscalculation, as they would see on election night.

This report makes it increasingly clear that the Republican party, even at it highest levels is, quite simply, delusional. On a whole host of issues they have taken positions that have little bearing on reality, and in many cases contradict established facts. The classic example of this is Global Warming, but it extends to a whole host of issues ranging from female anatomy to the policies of Barack Obama. In effect, it appears that the entire Republican world-view is based on wishful thinking and the belief that something must be true because one wants it to be true. We saw this as well on election night with Karl Rove's now legendary refusal to believe that Obama had won the state of Ohio, thus winning re-election:

And this raises an important and disturbing question: What are we to do when one of the two major political parties supports policies and platforms and endorses beliefs that are delusional and have no relation to reality? How can a democracy survive when people are picking their own facts to fit their already established ideological views? If we can't even agree on what the problems are, how can we possibly come up with solutions to them? I have no idea what the answers to these questions might be, but it will be interesting to see if the Republican party modifies any of its views to actually correspond to reality. If history is any guide, they will likely just become more extreme and more delusional.