Will the right's fever break?

Rachel Maddow hopes so, and it may well happen eventually, though I wouldn't hold my breath.  (A few reasons for my skepticism on this score—though far from the only ones—are explained here & here.)

Nevertheless, this post-election wrap-up by Rachel Maddow (which I encountered via Andrew Sullivan, my nephew Aron Chilewich, and several other sources) offers a good argument for how and why re-election of Barack Obama should serve as a reality check, or even a reality shock, to the hermetically self-reinforcing "common sense" of the Republican hard right ... which currently controls the national Republican Party.  How they will react to this reality shock remains to be seen.  Meanwhile, Maddow's discussion (below) is worth listening to, even if you voted for the Romney/Ryan ticket.

(And, by the way, we need to remind ourselves that almost half of the US electorate did vote for the Romney/Ryan ticket, and many of them were presumably convinced, to some degree, by its shamelessly "post-truth" campaign. That's a sobering thought.)

—Jeff Weintraub