It is easy to close oneself off inside a conservative echo chamber. And right-leaning outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh’s show are far more intellectually closed than CNN or public radio. If you’re a rank-and-file conservative, you’re probably ready to acknowledge that ideologically friendly media didn’t accurately inform you about Election 2012. Some pundits engaged in wishful thing; others feigned confidence in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy; still others decided it was smart to keep telling right-leaning audiences what they wanted to hear. But guess what? You haven’t just been misinformed about the horse race. Since the very beginning of the election cycle, conservative media has been failing you. With a few exceptions, they haven’t tried to rigorously tell you the truth, or even to bring you intellectually honest opinion. What they’ve done instead helps to explain why the right failed to triumph in a very winnable election. Why do you keep putting up with it?

Ohio really did go for President Obama last night, and he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is, legitimately, President of the United State - again.

And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Center really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy.

And the polls were not skewed to oversample democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake poll numbers about the election to try to make conservatives feel bad; Nate Silver was doing MATH.

And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy, sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal BY us.

And nobody’s taking away anyone’s guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.

And the moon landing? Was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And UN election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms on the regulations on the financial industries and the insurance industries in this country are not the same as communism.

Listen. Last night was a good night for liberals and for democrats, for very obvious reasons. But it was also possibly a good night for this country as a whole.

…But if the conservative movement and the conservative media and the republican party is stuck in a vacuum-sealed, door-locked, spin cycle of telling what makes them feel good, and denying the actual lived truth of the world, we are all deprived, as a nation, of the very debate between competing, feasible ideas about real problems.

Last night the republicans got shellacked, and they had NO idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time - in real, humiliating time - not believe it even as it was happening to them. And unless they want to secede, they will need to pop the fictional bubble they have been so happily living inside, if they do not want to get shellacked again.