I’m not quite sure why this is turning into Winger Tuesday, and I certainly wish it weren’t. Nonetheless…

A colleague sitting across from me received a phone call from a right-wing reader today. Actually, it was a ranting, two-minute-plus right message left on her voice mail (”plus” because the rant exceeded the amount of time available for the message) in which said right-winger took her to task for daring to publish a pro-Barack Obama “In My Opinion” written by someone who happens to be the Obama Meet-Up volunteer organizer for Lancaster.

One might expect the Obama Meet-Up organizer to have a pro-Obama opinion, but nevermind. Being the courteous, customer-minded individual my colleague is, she returned his call. And, I admit right up front, I only caught half the conversation. But it certainly seemed to be the sane half.

At one point my colleague - who is not as well-versed in the Way of the Winger as I am - said something to the effect of: “Sir, just because someone has a liberal opinion doesn’t mean they’re anti-American.”

Guess what he said.

But the best part of the exchange came when the right-wing reader accused us, the Sunday News, of never publishing anything “good” about the war in Iraq.

But, why, it just so happened that, this past Sunday, we did indeed publish something “good” about the war in Iraq. Specifically this story, about Army Reserve Maj. Marcus Snow, home after a year in Iraq. His perspective isn’t all bright and shiny, as our caller might have preferred, but Snow did indeed say he believes Iraqis have benefitted from the American presence, and that the violence, “though unfortunate, is not indicative that all has gone to hell.”

So here is a right-wing reader proclaiming bitterly that we never run any good news about Iraq. Yet such a story was right in front of his face, featured prominently on a section front of the very newspaper which had so angered him.

But isn’t this just like a right-winger - proclaiming that he knows exactly what’s in the newspaper, or what’s missing from it, without, you know, actually reading the newspaper?

It really is a sort of mental tic common amongst right-wingers - Glenn Greenwald has a fairly definitive account regarding the right-wing blogosphere’s recent “revelation” that a memo showing food wasn’t getting through to the troops was false. It was false!

Except, it was true. Quoth Greenwald:

Time and again, they are revealed to be people completely unmoored from reality or without the slightest regard for basic precepts of responsible commentary. Facts which are unpleasant to them are deemed to be “fake” for that reason alone, and the most serious accusations come spewing forth from their mouths without any regard to whether they are actually true.

And that is indeed the hallmark of right-wing “thought,” such that it is: What they wish to be true suddenly is true, what they wish to be false is suddenly a nefarious lie. Right-wingers know that the “MSM” never runs any “good news” from Iraq, even when such a story is likely sitting right in their lap as they make the proclaimation. But it doesn’t matter. What matters in their narrative; the facts that disprove the narrative are inconvenient, and being inconvenient, they must be false. Even when they aren’t.

Don’t kid yourself - this is why Iraq has turned into such a nightmare. This is and has been our approach to the war - as well as so much of what has befallen our country in recent years. And right-wingers, as always, would have all of this be the fault of the dreaded liberals who, in the fevered right-wing mind, actively seek to undermine the country.

The reality is that liberals could never, in our vilest dreams, do the kind of damage the right-wingers themselves have wrought.