The self-deluders would be well advised to read a post-election column by the Daily Telegraph's Dan Hodges. Of course Church - and many Kiwi leftists - wouldn't be seen dead wrapped in a copy of the Torygraph, but Hodges is hardly a Tory cheerleader. The son of Oscar-winning actor and former Labour MP Glenda Jackson, he was a Labour Party member for 27 years before resigning over its stance on the Syrian conflict.
"Politics is governed by rules," he wrote. "Rules written not by the politicians, but by the voters. These rules may be inconvenient. They may not neatly fit a particular party's ideological preference. But they are inviolable."
The rules according to Hodges are:
• You cannot select a leader who can't communicate with the country.
• Any party that cannot at least match its opponent in fiscal responsibility and economic competence will lose.
• Politics is won from the centre.
A terse summation of our recent politics would be that National adhered to these rules while Labour ignored them.
The wilful refusal to face reality that characterises failed election campaigns and their post-mortems has much in common with conspiracy theories, notably the tendency to leap to a conclusion and work backwards from there, seizing upon anything and everything, no matter how tenuous, that might support your thesis and disregarding all evidence to the contrary.
We saw it this week with American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh's claim that the official version of Osama Bin Laden's death is straight out of Alice in Wonderland.
Hersh has a towering reputation befitting the journalist who revealed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War and gross abuses at Abu Ghraib prison during the second Iraq War. Breaking stories of that significance cuts you a lot of slack and Hersh has used up all of it.
Many of his other exposes turned out to be non-events, literally and figuratively. Latterly he's been prone to sheer battiness, for instance, claiming that virtually everyone in the US military's Joint Special Operations Command belongs to the secretive Catholic organisation Opus Dei (see The Da Vinci Code).
Hersh posits a gigantic conspiracy involving the White House, Congress, the CIA, the Pentagon, their Pakistani counterparts and the Saudi royal family, all with no discernible motivation beyond making Obama look good. The notion that Republicans and gung ho elements embedded in the US military and security apparatus would go to such extraordinary lengths to shore up Obama's credentials as a strong commander-in-chief is just one of many absurd takeaways from Hersh's story.
It's all rather reminiscent of Jean Baudrillard's 1991 book The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, in which the celebrated cultural theorist argued that Desert Storm was a vast smoke-and-mirrors trick perpetrated by the US, Saddam Hussein and the international media.
You can get away with this sort of stuff if you're (a) French and (b) a post-structuralist intellectual provocateur whose working premise is that there's no such thing as reality. But journalists, like political parties, have to abide by rules.
