Last night I was com­pelled to research the def­i­n­i­tion of “delu­sional”. According to Wikipedia:

Delu­sional dis­order is a psy­chi­atric diag­nosis denoting a psy­chotic mental dis­order that is char­ac­ter­ized by holding one or more non-bizarre delusions[1] in the absence of any other sig­nif­i­cant psy­chopathology. Non-bizarre delu­sions are fixed beliefs that are cer­tainly and def­i­nitely false, but that could pos­sibly be plau­sible, for example, someone who thinks he or she is under police surveillance

WebMD also pro­vides this definition:

Delu­sional dis­order, pre­vi­ously called para­noid dis­order, is a type of serious mental ill­ness called a “psy­chosis” in which a person cannot tell what is real from what is imag­ined. The main fea­ture of this dis­order is the pres­ence of delu­sions, which are unshak­able beliefs in some­thing untrue. People with delu­sional dis­order expe­ri­ence non-bizarre delu­sions, which involve sit­u­a­tions that could occur in real life, such as being fol­lowed, poi­soned, deceived, con­spired against, or loved from a dis­tance. These delu­sions usu­ally involve the mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of per­cep­tions or expe­ri­ences. In reality, how­ever, the sit­u­a­tions are either not true at all or highly exaggerated.

I point out this infor­ma­tion not to make light of mental ill­ness, but to illus­trate the fact that there is a cer­tain per­centage of the nation’s pop­u­la­tion is clearly delu­sional. I site as my evi­dence the con­tinued per­sis­tent belief that (a) our pres­i­dent is a socialist or Nazi and (b) that he is not a United States cit­izen. I could add addi­tional exam­ples but these two are suf­fi­cient. These delu­sions are unfor­tu­nately sup­ported and encour­aged by pop­ular, “con­ser­v­a­tive” (read: “hate”) media that con­tinue to rein­force the delu­sional archi­tec­ture. I put the word ‘con­ser­v­a­tive’ in quotes because these media sources have only a min­imal attach­ment to con­ser­v­a­tive pol­i­tics. They are, in reality, sources of hate speech and incite­ments to fear, anger, and violence.

The rad­ical right set out to create a media system for spreading their point of view. In the case of Faux (FOX) News and Rush Lim­baugh, they have suc­ceeded. How­ever, they have also suc­ceeded in cre­ating a pop­u­la­tion of clin­i­cally psy­chotic individuals.

None of this is going to end well.

In lighter news, foot­ball season begins today. That means it’s time to demon­strate my igno­rance about the sport by pub­lishing my picks for Week 1. Here we go!

• Steelers over Titans: as much as I worry about the Super­bowl hang­over, I’m not going to go against my favored team.
• Ben­gals over Broncos: Denver is a disaster.
• Texans over Jets: I’ll go with the good odds and say the rookie QB is not going to win his first game.
• Vikings over Browns: Seri­ously? The Browns? Even Farve can’t mess this up.
• Saints over Lions: I think the losing streak will go at least one more game.
• Colts over Jaguars: This is a tough call, and I go with my heart on this one.
• Ravens over Chiefs: I think the dirty birds will be really good this year.
• Cow­boys over Bucs
• Patriots over Bills: Unless Brady goes down again.
• Pan­thers over Eagles: wel­come back to the NFL, Mr. Vick.
• Giants over Red­skins: another close one.
• Sea­hawks over Rams
• Bears over Packers: I actu­ally really want to watch this game. Could be interesting.
• Fal­cons over Dolphins
• Chargers over Raiders

In the words of Jack Napier’s plastic sur­geon, “let’s see how we did!”