Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Lars Larson, Bill O'Reilly, and many other radio personalities are criticized for creating a product that is designed to promote and reinforce a certain viewpoint. To many listeners, these programs are a form of "ideological comfort food" in that the listener goes to the program with a certain set of expectations that the program is supposed to meet. Ideas that fall in line with the listener's views will be celebrated, and talking points in support of these ideas will be shared. Ideas that don't agree with the listener's views will be debunked and jeered. Likewise, the "good guys" will be cheered and the "bad guys" will be exposed and booed.

What might make some uncomfortable is that there are various different flavors of ideological comfort food out there, and there are many people who selectively use stuff that was not specifically intended as comfort food to reinforce their biases (some fans of Noam Chomsky or Ayn Rand fall into this category).

I didn't fully appreciate the variety and power of this "comfort food" phenomenon until I became involved with the Libertarian Party. My motivations for getting involved with them were simple and vague:

1) I think that people should be free to innovate, and I think that the creation of government monopolies gets in the way of this
2) I would like to see solutions to social problems that, as much as possible, don't take people's freedoms away
3) I want to support people who clearly understand that it is not the government's job to promote religious organizations or to casually use religious references in a ceremonial manner

There are many people in the party who share these views and who want to seize opportunities to help craft policy in this direction. The reason I'm still there is that I want to support the work that these people are doing.

There is another group of people within the party who utopian anarcho-capitalists. These are the people who want the party's platform to be a detailed instruction manual on how to create such a utopian society. They don't like "reformers" compromising "their" party. They want the party to serve up heaping spoonfuls of ideological comfort food for them by saying, "taxation=theft," "free markets are always the answer," "deregulation is always the answer," "the Internet, because of its decentralized nature, is guaranteed to change society and politics for the better," etc.

I am frustrated. It is hard to think with all this food being served up and eaten all around. Many times, I wonder whether I might be snacking on some of it.

Snack all you want - it's healthy to sample from different ideological cuisines - just don't drink *anybody's* Kool Aid.

Phbbbbbbbbbttttt! I thought that drink tasted funny!

Sticky grape kool-aid is out!