Is Faux News now a liability for the repugicans?

Since its launch in 1996, Faux News has provided the repugican party with an unrivaled propaganda machine. Faux News was the principal engine of the repugican echo chamber giving endless coverage to repugican smears and wing-nut conspiracy theories which the establishment media would then report as if they were credible. Without Faux News there would have been no Tea Party, no Swiftboat liars and no shrub AKA the pretender George W. Bush.
Faux News is now the dominant force within the repugican party. When Murdoch says jump, repugican politicians are forced to ask 'how high'. Practically the entire repugican base relies on Faux as their principal source for 'news'. When David Frum observed that "Repugicans originally thought that Faux worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Faux,” he was fired from his position at the AEI two days later.

But even as Faux consolidates its grip on power within the repugican party the Faux News echo chamber of old is broken. The establishment media no longer consider a story news because the Murdoch press is giving it saturation coverage. It now takes a Congressional committee investigation and a spurious contempt vote to gain the fleeting attention of the mainstream media.

The Faux News of old served as a conduit for repugican misinformation to the public at large. It is still a conduit for misinformation but now the repugican party is on the receiving end. It is not just Romney who is out of touch with the real world, his entire campaign team has spent the past decade in the alternative universe of Faux News.

How else could Team Romney have built their campaign strategy on the assumption that Barack Obama does not know how to respond to smears and derisive insults? Romney has spent over a year and a hundred million dollars fighting against the Obama that only exists in the mind of Faux News viewers: The weak guy who would apologize and offer Romney a hug, not the real Obama who responded with the 'Firms' ad in less than 24 hours.

What people have been explaining as the 'bitch slap' theory of politics has turned out to be no more than intelligent people acting on false information.  They assumed that the smears and lies that work so well on Faux would work in a campaign. If Romney had really been following the bitch-slap theory he would have thought that demanding an apology gives the appearance of weakness. Instead Romney blinked and after months of attack ads that were transparently unfair, demanded an apology for an attack nobody else thought unfair.

There is no question that Faux News was a powerful asset for the repugican party for its first ten years, it is hard to see it as any sort of benefit to the party today.