What Matters to Wingnuts

It is helpful, when confronting repug viciousness and insanity, to remember that their thought processes do not follow Enlightenment principles. They never follow a chain of evidence through logical analysis and reach a rational conclusion. They choose an outcome and twist the facts to make it come out their way.

This is why accusations of hypocrisy don't resonate with repugs, especially of the freakazoid variety: because everyone sins, the real issue is not how you behave but what you say about it. The homophobe caught fucking a prostitute of the same sex is to liberals a massive hypocrite; to freakazoids, he's proof that homophobia is correct. As long as he confesses his sin, begs for forgiveness, and doubles down on the hatred, he's not just forgiven but celebrated.

The most clear-eyed insight on this phenomenon comes from Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog:

I say this all the time, but I'll say it again: Fox/talk radio/tea party right-wingers don't hate lobbying. They don't hate lobbyists. They don't hate the way money has corrupted politics. As I noted at the time of the decision, teabaggers absolutely loved the Citizens United decision -- it had them dancing in the aisles. When wingnuts see government consorting with business, they don't see two corrupt parties, they see one: government. Government is the House of the Rising Sun. It's been the ruin of many a poor, innocent corporation.

The evil goes one way. Lobbyists aren't bad -- government is bad because it gets lobbied. And yet wingnuts are sensitive to a widespread disgust with lobbying in the broader public.
So Gingrich is treating lobbying the way the Bush administration treated torture -- he's not making any real effort to conceal the fact that he's done it, he's just denying that the word applies.

And that should be enough for right-wing voters, because, Randians that they are, they love big business and support the right to lobby, just as they supported torture under Bush. Just don't call either of these things by its proper name.

In another post he adds:

The core narrative that unites the modern right is this: true right-wingers are always right about everything, and are agents of God as a result, while everyone else is evil and satanic, and everything in politics is a battle between pure good and the Apocalypse. Gingrich embodies that worldview. That worldview isn't based on actual principles -- Ronald Reagan could be a non-churchgoing, divorced, tax-raising, Iran-coddling Russki-befriender, but he proclaimed fealty to conservatism at the top of his lungs, so he was the conservative's conservative.

Appearance over substance, every time. It explains Palin, anyway.