On his Real Time program, Bill Maher loves to revisit the concept of “The Bubble”, that bizarre and removed part of mental space that conservatives occupy. What started as a simple skit about the resilience of Tea Party voters to facts (if I remember right, portrayed by Maher and Keith Olbermann shouting things like “Bush Tax Cuts are the biggest contributor to the deficit!” at a bald, white, unlistening actor sitting within a clear plastic bubble) became a centerpiece of his New Rules monologues, to criticize how GOP candidates were campaigning against a radical version of President Obama that simply didn’t exist. But soon, the token right-wing guest on each week’s panel would make an easily disproved claim (“Obama is reducing the size of the military,” “Obamacare is completely unpopular with the American people”) prompting Maher to once again trot out the trope to explain how wrong each person was.

On the campaign trail, diehard Republican voters pour out to support their favorite candidates. Fans of Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House during the Clinton years, seem to be the most energetic. But hardly any know the facts of public record with the contemptible Gingrich, which even he has admitted - that he cheated on his first wife with his second, with his second on his third, in a complete parody of the family values he espouses. Even fewer are aware of the disgusting details that go with those events, and trust the slithering Newt when he assures them they’re lies. Things like the financial destitution the rich then-Senator left his struggling wife with, or the cancer ward divorce of the first paired with the Multiple Sclerosis-stricken infidelity of the second, have been well researched and fully corroborated by many journalists - though that is, of course, the “librul media”.

During last month’s CNN debate, the beacon of centrism John King brought up a story that was making the rounds, and which would obviously be discussed: that the second wife, whom Gingrich had been cheating on for many years already, admitted in an interview that Gingrich demanded of her an “open marriage”. Gingrich was waiting, and swung for the fences:

“I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.

None of which in any way approached the substance of the claim. But the crowd went wild, applauding with gusto, and Gingrich easily won that Southern Carolina primary. John King meekly pointing out that it was not CNN but ABC News and the Washington Post who broke the story only gave the candidate another opening to say “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” earning him another standing ovation.

But CNN learned their lesson - their March 1st debate was cancelled by the Gingrich campaign, less fearful of John King as a moderator and more letting the network know who’s in charge. They took their business elsewhere, and CNN won’t soon repeat the mistake.

I assume that even fewer Gingrich voters know the actual record of his term as Speaker of the House - mired with an unprecedented amount of ethics charges, including a hefty third of a million dollar fine. Or his gleeful crusade against Clinton for the exact same improprieties he was indulging in at the same time. Or, of course, his petty and vindictive streak coming out (reportedly at the injustice of getting a poor seating arrangement on Air Force One) when he entirely shut down the government, costing the nation untold sums of money and grinding the nation to a halt. Most voters don’t know these easy to prove facts about their favorite candidate.

America itself exists in another type of bubble. A physical one, where our Recession-borne slackening in quality of life is viewed as backbreaking poverty while we continue to buy artificially cheap goods from Indian and Chinese sweatshops, and where our citizens are protected from the havoc we unleash on other populations. But also a mental one, where our magazines and shows never bother letting us know about the world beyond our shores - and we’re too solipsistic to really give it much thought.

And as shocking as it is that Conservative voters don’t know the history of a candidates moral failings, isn’t it worse that we don’t know the simple history of our own nation’s foreign policy? Since World War Two the United States has suppressed national movements, overthrown or assassinated democratic leaders, disrupted elections, or straight-up bombed civilian populations of at least 69 countries. We napalmed villages of Indochinese children, we sprinkled the Middle East with cluster bombs, we refused to stop the devastating practice of minefields.

We feel (or at least briefly felt) pity for Haitians in the wake of their ruined shantytowns, without admitting that our own economic policies, brought there at gunpoint, placed them there. And no one seems to discuss George W Bush’s direct hand in exiling their first democratically elected President.

Liberals, who are sometimes aware of this discrepancy, distract themselves with entirely the wrong subjects. Extravagant conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination, or the World Trade Center being rigged with unsubstantiated demolitions, are used to soothe their sense of powerlessness by blaming a smoke-filled room. But they’re still afraid to point out the very true maxim about chickens coming home to roost - that terrorism and the WTC attacks, while being of indefensible morality, are part and parcel what an Imperial Power should expect when we exert military control over every single Arab standing on top of our sandy oil.

By Osama Bin Laden’s own frank admission, the attacks were because of our aggressive foreign policy, our troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, and our complete underwriting of Israel’s killings of innocent civilians. But instead the facile idea that Al Qaeda is angry because we have “freedoms” was left unchallenged through most of the Bush years. Even now, with Bin Laden rotting in the sea somewhere, no one really bothers to discuss his open motivations.

Americans love to joke about the weird things other countries believe: the French, so sure that 9/11 was an inside job; the Middle Easterners, so focused on our Satanlike depravity; the Central Americans, who think the CIA is behind every bump in the night; the Turkish people, who somehow believe in Creationism more than we do.

But we don’t examine our own strange beliefs: that Iraq had something to do 9/11; that America can do no wrong even when it does; that clear cut footage of war crimes and atrocities must be lying; that we are still the best, even as we stand the most violent, incarcerated population in the world with living standards quickly plummeting into Third World status.

Americans need to wake up, though I doubt we ever will. Put another way: we need to check ourselves before we wreck ourselves.