If you got all of your news from Fox, Breitbart, Drudge, etc., and RW hate radio, you'd be deluded, too.
Don't underestimate the brainwashing effect of decades of RW propaganda, which was started very deliberately half a century ago and funded by RW billionaires.
Some background on this from an old Washington Post article on one of those billionaires, Richard Mellon Scaife:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/scaifemain050299.htm
The events of 1964 were a turning point for Scaife, and for American conservatives. Scaife was an alternate to the Republican Convention that chose Arizona Sen. Barry M. Goldwater as the party's presidential nominee, and he became an active contributor and supporter. He escorted Goldwater on the Scaife family airplane to California in July 1964 to attend the Bohemian Grove retreat, a boozy and confidential gathering of conservative, mostly wealthy men.
Confounded by Goldwater's devastating defeat that November, many conservatives concluded that they could only win an election in the future by matching their enemy's firepower. It was time, as a Scaife associate of that era put it, to wage "the war of ideas." Scaife enthusiastically adopted this view.
"We saw what the Democrats were doing and decided to do the mirror image, but do it better," this Scaife associate said. "In those days [the early 1970s] you had the American Civil Liberties Union, the government-supported legal corporations [neighborhood legal services programs], a strong Democratic Party with strong labor support, the Brookings Institution, the New York Times and Washington Post and all these other people on the left – and nobody on the right." The idea was to correct that imbalance. "And the first idea was to copy what works."
This sort of thinking went far beyond Scaife's office in Pittsburgh. He was riding a wave at the same time he contributed to it. Former congressman Vin Weber, an early and active member of the "movement conservative" Republican faction on Capitol Hill, recalled that "people on the right were absolutely convinced that there was a vast, left-wing conspiracy" that had to be mimicked and countered with new conservative organizations that were "philosophically sound, technologically proficient and movement-oriented." This became a mantra for the new conservative activists.
Sarah Scaife died in 1965, and her son then had a freer hand to reorient the family giving. By 1976, the year Jimmy Carter was elected president, Scaife's conservative interests had come to dominate the foundations' giving. Just more than half of the $18 million in grants that year went to conservative recipients. By 1980, the year Ronald Reagan defeated Carter, conservative groups were awarded $13 million of about $18 million in Scaife grants. Conservative interests have continued to predominate in Scaife's philanthropy ever since.
While Scaife's money supported individual institutions, his office in Pittsburgh encouraged the evolution of a new community of activists on the right. One longtime recipient of Scaife's support recalled a meeting convened in California in 1973 by Richard M. Larry, Scaife's longtime chief aide, where his beneficiaries could meet one another. A person who attended the California meeting said he was delighted to find people there he'd never heard of – a new peer group on the right.
The Heritage Foundation became an important part of the right's community-building efforts. Scaife first contributed to Heritage in 1974. Soon afterward, using money from Scaife, Heritage established its resource bank, a compilation of conservative organizations, which from 1982 was published in the Directory of Public Policy Organizations, a guide to the new right-wing establishment. The current edition lists 300 groups; 111 have received grants from Scaife, 76 of them in 1998.
Heritage, organized by former staff assistants to Republican lawmakers whose goal was to influence both Congress and the news media with a stream of brief, meaty position papers on issues of the day, became Scaife's favorite beneficiary. When it began to make a mark in the mid-1970s, Joseph Coors, the beer magnate, was commonly credited as its chief financial patron. Coors did put up the first $250,000. But within two years, according to Heritage officials, Scaife had given more than twice as much, and he has kept on giving ever since – more than $23 million in all, or about $34 million in inflation-adjusted, current dollars. At Heritage the joke was, "Coors gives six-packs; Scaife gives cases."
And of course Scaife was behind the Arkansas Project attacks on Bill Clinton.
As for the impact of right wing talk radio -- for that oozing gangrenous limb of American media, we can thank Reagan's FCC scrapping the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and Reagan and George HW Bush vetoing Democrats' attempts to restore it.
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My first response was "RESEARCHERS? We gotta have professionals to discern whether or not this administration is off the rails?" 
