The commments to a fairly pedestrian blog post at the Chronicle of Higher Education quickly drifted away from the topic of the post itself, as comment threads tend to do. I got completely derailed by this one:

What strikes me about all this, which is just ratcheted up a notch from the Clinton era and flip-flopped from the Bush era, is the shameless irresponsibility of the “discussion.” When vacuous buffoons like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly have free rein to spread their paranoid fantasies….

Ah, yes, the discourse today is totally flip-flopped from that of the Bush era, when the top pundits were…Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O’Reilly.

God damn, are people so committed to the narrative playing out in their head that they can’t recognize how separated the story is from the reality? “Opposing factions swap roles when the power balance shifts” is not a fucking law of nature, and there’s no mystical sociopolitical pendulum that swings back and forth.

Blah.