Bagged, Tagged

Any moment now, I expect an answer to the question I posed to a frequent visitor: what do teabaggers believe, and why? While she composes her answer and we await the result, here are some data that might be helpful, both to her and to those of us anxious to learn. It's a survey done by some researchers just around the corner, at U Dub:

Are Tea Party Conservatives different from other Conservatives?

We sought to investigate this question in response to critiques leveled by conservatives such as David Brooks, David Frum, and most recently George Will and Michael Medved. Each, it seems, question the strategies, if not always the philosophy, of groups affiliated with the Right, including the Tea Party. More to the point, these commentators suggest that the Tea Party, as a whole, holds opinions at variance with more mainstream conservatives, opinions that may hurt the Republican party in the next election cycle. Others on the Right, such as Peggy Noonan and Juan Williams, view the Tea Party as a net positive. Noonan sees the movement is a “critique” of the Republican party; Williams sees it as a reflection of mainstream concerns of Americans. Which view is closer to the truth? The data suggest that differences abound....

....6% of non-Tea Party conservatives believe the president is destroying the country versus the 71% of Tea Party conservatives who believe this to be true.(click here for full results.)...

...When asked about President Obama’s religious orientation, 27% of Tea Party conservatives believe that Obama is a practicing Muslim compared to 16% of non- Tea Party conservatives, both relatively low; nevertheless, an 11-point difference. More conservative type believe the president a practicing Christian, 27% of Tea Party conservatives versus 46% of non-Tea Party conservatives, but the gap here is even larger: 19%. When it comes to President Obama’s national origin, 40% of Tea Party conservatives believe that Obama was born in the U.S. compared to 55% of non-Tea Party conservatives. Additionally, 26% of Tea Party conservatives believe that President Obama does not have a birth certificate, while 17% of non-Tea Party conservatives believe this to be the case. (click here for full results.) ...

... We also found that conservatives were more likely to view President Obama as alien if they believed themselves to be interviewed by someone white than a non-white interviewer. (click here for the results.)

All of the above support the claims made by Brooks, Frum, Will, and Medved that Tea Party conservatives are out of step with more mainstream conservatives. Moreover, these findings at the mass level validate what we’ve found at the elite level in an ongoing content analysis of the Tea Party. In short, the data suggest that there is an emerging split among conservatives. If this is true, how will this affect Republicans come 2012?

To think teabaggers are not typical of the true Republican party would be reassuring, were it the case that they didn't have the influence they have on who gets nominated and elected, and what legislation moves forward in the current disaster known as the House of Representatives. What the survey doesn't seem to address is the numbers and influence of teabaggers, numbers be damned, among self-described Republicans who vote. Because whatever they choose to say to pollsters, the fact is that the Republican party, as evidenced by its representation in Congress, is composed of the extreme, and the extremely stupid, the vindictive, the hidebound, the fact-averse, the destructive.

So, in case the unthinkable happens -- namely, that my commenter fails to address the question I asked her -- we have data that tells us who the teabaggers are and what they believe. (The why isn't addressed: maybe academics simply couldn't stomach the horror of finding out.)

It's not anything even the most casual observer wouldn't have already known; and it's depressing as hell.

Too Little, Too Late

Besides, the people who don't remember (and, god, there are so many of them...) will not be moved by being reminded.

To have forgotten so soon after the fall, you really have to work at it. It's not forgetting (or so one would think, in a rational world -- because, how could you?) so much as it's ignoring. And if you ignore such obvious truth, the fact is you don't care. The fact is your prejudices and beliefs and fears and selfishness trump everything else. The fact is, you're a teabagger.

Islamophilia

The more the crazies demonize all Muslims, the more they hurt America. The more that Muslims hear from teabaggers and the RWS™ and Fox "news" that they are not welcome, not American, not respected, the less this will happen:

September 2002: Members of the “Lackawanna 6” are arrested. FBI first becomes aware of their activities in June 2001 when a local Muslim community member tips off the FBI.

March 2002: FBI become aware of a possible terror plot by Imran Mandhai (and later Shueyb Jokhan) after they are notified by an American Muslim named “Saif Allah” who attended Mandhai and Jokhan’s same mosque provides a tip.

June 2003: FBI receive two tips from community members notifying them “military-style training” was being conducted suspect by Ali Al-Tamimi. The tip set in motion an investigation later leading to the arrest of the so-called “Paintball 11” in Northern Virginia.

August 2004: James Elshafay and Shahwar Matin Siraj are arrested largely based on the controversial use of an informant in the investigation. However, NYPD were first notified of Siraj after a Muslim community member anonymously notifies New York police about consistently troubling rhetoric coming from the suspect.

February 2006: Muslim community members in Ohio provide information helping to arrest and eventually convict 3 suspects planning attacks in Iraq.

July 2009: Mosque leaders in Raleigh, North Carolina, contact law enforcement to notify them of “violent, threatening action … considered to be dangerous” leading to the arrest of Daniel Boydand 6 other individuals.

November 2009: Five Virginia Muslim youth are arrested in Pakistan, allegedly seeking to join a terror group, after family members told American federal authorities they went
missing.

April 2010: Senegalese Muslim Alioune Niass first spots the suspicious vehicle used as a bomb to attack Times Square in New York City. Clues from the vehicle and defused explosive immediately led to the suspect, Faisal Shahzad’s, arrest.

June 2010: Suspects Mohammed Mahmoud Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almonte are arrested, after the FBI first receives an anonymous report in 2006 from one of the suspects’ family members. News reports indicate one of Alessa’s family members provided the tip.

And, just yesterday, we learned that the bombs found on those planes headed for the US were discovered based on evidence given to Saudi officials by "al-Queda insiders."

Every day, in every way, the haters are hurting the country they claim to love, whose actual values they reject, whose laws they fail to understand.

Here they come. Stand back.

Obvious

If one party continually tries to get people to vote, and the other regularly tries to suppress it, which is the more consistent with democracy?

Let's just admit it: these are terrible people.

"You liberial scumbags should be hung by the neck in public ! We are on to your voter fraud. Keep it up you MOTHER FUCKERS and you will soon be put down for a long dirt nap! Your nothing but a bunch of white guilt ridden assholes, NIGGERS and greasy mexican spics! The WAR is comming and we are going to dispose of each and every one of you while we take OUR (White) nation back."

Juiced up after their take-down of ACORN over non-existent fraud (except for that committed against ACORN by its own workers and reported to election monitors by ACORN), they're back to form, making accusations of fraud toward anyone trying to register voters.

As is regularly the case, the casting of actual fraudulent votes remains a vanishingly small problem; yet the suggestion thereof can be counted on to rally the most desperate among us.

Meanwhile, Rs are no longer even trying to hide their formerly covert efforts to trick minorities into not voting.

It's consistent, though. What's really going on in all this "take our country back" weeping and wailing is the fact, as I've said before, that teabaggers and other right-wingers don't actually believe in democracy. What they believe in is their supremacy. They're okay with voting as long as it's those that share their beliefs. (And by beliefs, I mean the things they cling to, no matter the facts. Pretty much everything they stand for, in other words.)

And so it is that, of a piece with the above illiterate efflux, we get stuff like this:

Stephen Broden, a Republican running for Congress in Texas' 30th District, said he would not rule out a violent overthrow of the government if the midterm elections don't cause a change in government, saying that "our nation was founded on violence" so "the option is on the table."

According to the Dallas Morning News, Broden said in a TV interview yesterday: "We have a constitutional remedy here and the Framers says if that don't work, revolution."

"If the government is not producing the results or has become destructive to the ends of our liberties, we have a right to get rid of that government and to get rid of it by any means necessary," he continued.

Happily, the local Rs disavowed the rhetoric. But is it far outside the teabagging mentality?

Meanwhile, Glenn Beck says he doesn't believe the guy said it.

It's on tape.

Glenn Beck doesn't believe he said it.

Okay, fine: he said if the guy said it, he'd denounce it. Kudos.

But it's already on tape. IT'S ON TAPE.

What's not to believe?

Global warming (he exhales, says that's CO2, so what's the problem?), evolution (he says he's never seen a half-man/half-monkey), the stimulus worked: THEY'RE ON TAPE!!!!!

Take bag, dip. Don't like facts? Dip again.

There's No There There

This is absolutely typical of every teabagger and teabagger-supported candidate. Promises to cut taxes, cut spending, balance the federal budget, with absolutely no specifics. Because it's politically, mathematically, and historically impossible.

And yet these people are winning.

Claiming, contra virtually every economist on the planet, that the stimulus didn't work; spreading the falsehood that cutting taxes increases revenue when it never has; blaming the deficits on Obama when it was Bush that turned record surplus into unprecedented red ink, every single one of them says the same things; all of which are demonstrably false.

And yet these people are winning!

In the endless -- and likely unresolvable -- search to find an explanation for the seemingly limitless ability of teabaggers (and, lately, all conservatives) to ignore reality, I came across this article in (warning: anathema approaching) Scientific American:

The critical quality that leads people to treat rookie cards like rosaries is that of the sacred, whereby an object becomes worthy of boundless reverence, commitment, and protection. As diverse as people are in ascribing sacred status to possessions, they are equally varied in which values they consider sacred, a diversity that can breed substantial conflict. The abortion debate, for example, often presents a divide between those who consider woman’s “right to choose” sacred versus those who consider a fetus’ “right to life” sacred.

Referring to a study of feeling among Iranians for their country's nuclear program, the article adds:

...The work is a reminder that sacred values are tremendously influential in disputes both international and interpersonal, but that our negotiating instincts can lead us away from common ground...

....What truly distinguishes sacred values from secular ones is how people behave when asked to compromise them. When people are asked to trade their sacred values for values considered to be secular—what psychologist Philip Tetlock refers to as a “taboo tradeoff”—they exhibit moral outrage, express anger and disgust, become increasingly inflexible in negotiations, and display an insensitivity to a strict cost-benefit analysis of the exchange.

I may be extrapolating too much here, but I think it applies to the current state of affairs in our politics. The mantras of tax cuts and deregulation, held as deeply sacred and absolutely foundational by all conservatives, have never been so threatened by reality. To accept that either idea had anything -- anything at all -- to do with our economic calamity is to allow a disruption in the force of the conservative mind that is simply incompatible with earth-bound equilibrium. Those beliefs which we hold closest are those that allow us to function in an incomprehensible and threatening world. The more the beliefs are shown to be false, the more we hold onto them. Absolutely natural and entirely inevitable, discordance between belief and reality is what so many people seek desperately to avoid. In my view, it pretty much defines the difference between the conservative and the liberal mind: willingness to process fact, to adjust to new circumstances, to evolve one's thinking. (Or to think one's evolved!)

Closed mind, in other words, versus open.

Based on current events, I'd guess another study might confirm the tendency, when all else fails to buttress one's sacred holdings, to find new ones, just as rigidly velcroed to the inside of the skull, but even more lightly attached to the firmament: like Obama's birth as a Kenyan Muslim terrorist. Seek, it is said, and ye shall find.

And whereas it's undoubtedly true that both sides are guilty of similar blindness (after all, where's the evidence that voting rights and education are essential to democracy or that societies which provide for their people are more stable than ones that don't?), based on the past ten years it's the conservative sacraments that appear to be on shakier ground. Thus, the greater tendency among teabagger ilkophiles to cover their eyes, finger their ears, and cleave for guidance unto the RWS™.

An explanation, perhaps. But hardly a comfort, given the actively, proudly, and resolutely fact-averse hordes taking to the polls in a week.

What have we become? And what will we become when they're in charge? Again.

Self Interest

Could it be any clearer? Of the many times I've pointed out how the teabaggers have been deceived and manipulated into acting against their own interests, is there any better proof than this?

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says it received an "outpouring of support" that crashed its servers Thursday morning after conservative host Glenn Beck pledged $10,000 on the air to the organization and urged his listeners to donate what they can afford.

So why say teabaggers are being played? Hardly a tough one:

Prudential Financial sent in a $2 million donation last year as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a national advertising campaign to weaken the historic rewrite of the nation’s financial regulations.

Dow Chemical delivered $1.7 million to the chamber last year as the group took a leading role in aggressively fighting proposed new rules that would impose tighter security requirements on chemical facilities.

And Goldman Sachs, Chevron Texaco, and Aegon, a multinational insurance company based in the Netherlands, donated more than $8 million in recent years to a chamber foundation that has helped wage a national campaign to limit the ability of trial lawyers to sue businesses....

... To support the effort, the chamber has adopted an all-hands-on-deck approach to fund-raising. Mr. Josten said he makes many of the fund-raising calls to corporations nationwide, as does Mr. Donohue. (Both men are well compensated for their work: Mr. Donohue was paid $3.7 million in 2008, and has access to a corporate jet and chauffeur, while Mr. Josten was paid $1.1 million, tax records show.) But those aggressive pitches have turned off some business executives.

“There was an arrogance to it like they were the 800-pound gorilla and I was either with them with this big number or I just did not matter,” said Mr. Tyree, of Chicago.

Another corporate executive, who asked not to be named, said the chamber risks alienating its members.

“Unless you spend $250,000 to $500,000 a year, that is what they want for you to be one of their pooh-bahs, otherwise, they don’t pay any attention to you at all,” the executive said, asking that the company not be identified.

This is the group to which Glenn Beck asks his faith-full followers to send their nickels and dimes! No wonder their site crashed: they have no need of or interest in such piddling proffers from the internetted. And yet, donate the Becked-up did.

To me, it remains absolutely inexplicable. Even the frightened and gullible ought not be so eager to stab themselves. Left alone, people tend to act in their own interest. Don't they? Such self-destructive behavior on the part of so many can only come from careful, well-orchestrated, and deliberate deception. But the media keep buying and selling the myth of a grassroots movement.

For most of the season, I have a pretty nice-looking lawn. Every year, it gets aerated; I fertilize it about three times, spray some moss-killer here and there, pluck weeds when I find them. With my environmentally friendly cordless electric machine, I mow and mulch every five days or so. I water just enough to keep the roots deep. Until the cedar tree's roots start sucking water faster than I can put it in, it looks damn good, clean and green.

Whatever else is true about it, it sure as hell didn't grow itself.

Say It Is So, Joe

Joe and I are pretty much alike. We were at Amherst College at the same time, and his Nobel Prize is, so far, only preceding mine by nine years. And I know as much about our economy as he knows about removing your gallbladder.

It's A Natural Fact

An ant mill tea party rally is a phenomenon where a small group of army ants gullible people separated from the main foraging party reality lose the pheromone track their ability to think for themselves and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. The ants country will eventually die of exhaustion self-inflicted wounds. This has been reproduced in laboratories and the behaviour has also been produced in ant colony simulations.^[1] This phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies continual propagandizing of Fox "news" and other RWS™. Each ant teabagger follows the ant in front of it lead of Glenn Beck, and this will work until something goes wrong and an ant mill forms actual solution is required.^[2] An ant mill was first described by William Beebe who observed a mill 1,200 feet (365 m) in circumference. It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution.^[3] Similar phenomena have been noted in processionary caterpillars and fish.^[4]

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Genius

My aunt, who, among other things, was a gifted musician, told me that when she was a little girl she liked to read classical piano sheet music at bedtime, and when she woke up she could play it all, from memory.

I was talking with my nephew this weekend about the wonders of the human brain. He'd seen a piece about an autistic savant who could hear the most complex jazz music once, and play it back perfectly. I like thinking about that.

The other night, I heard a lecture by Jonathan Franzen, who is, in my opinion, an exceptionally gifted writer. He is also, by some accounts, a bit of an asshole whose social skills don't match those of his wordsmanship. (In fact, he'd obviously devoted a lot of thought to the lecture, and was almost painfully honest and self-revelatory; he took questions, pausing and thinking hard before giving very personal and nuanced answers. Answers that respected the questions. He was entertaining, thought-provoking, and charming. The LA Times recently ran a very snarky opinion column about him. The careful reader of it might find a familiar in the comment thread.)

Is genius a disorder? In the conversation with my nephew, we discussed the fact that in the same piece he'd seen, a mathematical savant was also featured. Studies of his brain in action, while mathturbating, showed he was using parts of it for calculation that other people typically devote to physical dexterity. It's as if genius is some sort of anatomic accident. Maybe individuals with exceptional gifts, whether they be of music, math, writing, painting -- even, perhaps, of legislating wisely -- are like people with Asberger's. Maybe to be really gifted you must have a brain whose wiring devotes more of itself to your gifts than to, say, being nice. It's said of many of the greats that they were hard to live with.

When I read really good writing, view a particularly resonant painting, hear great jazz, it adds enjoyment to know something about the artist; I like having some context. Simply, it's interesting. But it doesn't affect my pleasure in experiencing the art if I discover the artist was a jerk. From observation, in fact, it seems genius has a high correlation with some sort of personal dysfunction. We need genius, so who cares?

Seen another way, it's being "normal" that is a disability. Normal is nice, of course, but we can't get along if all we have is normal people. Being charitable to them, teabaggers are normal. Normal people can draw pictures, play happy birthday on the piano, write sentences that fit on signs (and they're certainly not gifted at spelling). Normal people like Thomas Kinkade. They can start with a world-view and sift data to fit it. They can make their own reality. Genii can't. They see the world, the reality of it, they can't help it. And although that sort of clarity of vision tends to drive them crazy (or maybe it's the other way around), it fuels them. Seeing and knowing, they create, they stimulate, they add to our understanding of the world, even as they rob us of comfort. Without such people, we stagnate, we are blind, we fail to learn new things, to find cures, to recognize each other. The price to the seers, or maybe the entry fee, is to live in pain, to not fit in easily.

There's the reality of Sarah Palin and what's-her-name O'Donnell, in which the earth is six thousand years old, Barack Obama is a terrorist, tax cuts pay for themselves and your next car, we'll have roads and health care and limitless energy in a climate-stable world without changing a thing, same-sex marriage will end it for everyone else, and God will take care of us. In this reality, everything is simple and easy; it contains no self-doubts, no existential angst, it's black and white, there is no discordance, only certainty. All truth is in a single book, all solutions fit on placards. In their reality, there's no place, no need, for genius.

And then there's reality.

Seriously Unserious

The teabagger-endorsed candidate in my congressional district has a real chance of winning, against a pretty mainstream and fairly thoughtful Democrat. In his latest ad, he says he wants to lower taxes and balance the budget. Cool. With a deficit of over a trillion, which would go up with further tax cuts, that's a lot of spending reduction. How would he do it? Doesn't say. Won't say. Can't say.

And so it is with all the darjeeling darlings. To a person, it's tax cuts and balanced budgets (more often than not with anti-gay, anti-Muslim, birther and hyper-religious seasoning tossed in for the hungry), while refusing to answer questions of how or where. This is not serious policy. In a plane of existence in which voters were something other than just mad, where they demanded answers not just anger, none of these Earls of Grey could have won nominations. They'd be laughed off the stage, told to come back when they have a clue. But that would be very, very elsewhere. France, maybe? A dimension far, far away.

Put more colorfully than I might have, but otherwise entirely congruent with my view of the entire"movement," (in the sense of, well, you know..) this says it well:

O'Donnell is a creature of an age in which politics have no meaning beyond performance art. She is the Creature from the Green Room, with no apparent public career beyond being available whenever some teenage booker from the cable shows needed someone to say something reliably stupid. ...

Her résumé is so thin as to be opaque, and a lot of it seems to be a lie. She seems to be something of a deadbeat, and "U.S. Senator" seems to be her idea of an entry-level position. This morning, she stands one step away from the job.

She is what politics produces when you divorce politics from government. She is what you get when you sell to the country that nothing government can do will help, and that the government is an alien thing, and that politics is nothing more than the active public display of impotent grievance.

She is what politics produces when you turn it into a game show and the coverage of it over to a generation of high-technology racetrack touts. She is what you get when political journalism reduces politics to numbers on a scoreboard, divorcing it from the real-world consequences of what are increasingly seen as cute little eccentric decisions.

She is what politics produces when we abandon self-government for self-gratification. And that's the real obvious irony in her victory on Tuesday night, and the only thing about it that truly matters. Christine O'Donnell's campaign is a successful exercise in angry, misfit masturbation, with as little to do with the deadly problems this country faces as some guy wanking in the balcony of a grindhouse has to do with Romeo and Juliet.

We're in the age of politics as aggrievement and accusation, of substituting pouts and provocations for policy. In times that demand seriousness from all parties, one has abandoned it entirely, to the delight of -- at the behest of -- its supporters. (Nor do I have a heck of a lot to say for the weak-kneed congressional dems, afraid, evidently, to do the most obvious -- and, ironically, poll-supported -- of tax hikes. Stupid meets pathetic. Equals screwed.)

When Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are the dominant influences of an entire movement and what's left of a once-serious national party, we're in indescribable trouble. For what they are is vapid and vaporous. They're playing at it for their own jollies, the adulation, the money. They're traveling salesmen, except they have no product. Name a serious proposal either has put forward, policy-based, workable, thoughtful. When has either come up with anything other than rhetoric, appealing to fear, the paranoid? (Turning it over to God doesn't count. He's not a registered voter.) When, for that matter, has any of them submitted to legitimate questioning at all? Simple Sarah recently said it plainly enough, for those who still think Fox is fair (but we know about teabaggers and fact, don't we?): just "speak through Fox "news.""

I don't have a problem that my country produces such people: what kills me (figuratively only, so far) is the degree to which everyone else has taken their bullshit as something meaningful. (And, of course, the degree to which our media, failing, lazy, negligent, keep it frontal and central.) It's nothing but noise. It's fantasy. It's nasty and crazy. It's not helpful. It has nothing to do with lawmaking and problem-solving.

Mad? All right. Don't like health care for more Americans, don't like rescuing the auto industry? Fine. Suggest something else. Don't want to pay taxes? Me, neither (except that I sort of like roads, cops, the occasional aircraft carrier driving by my house, and the FDA.) So come up with an alternative. Tell me what you'll cut, and what you think the consequences will be. Present me with numbers that add up to zero deficit, and show your work.

Naw, forget it. Turns out you don't need to. Say the magic words, and the teabaggers will call you a hero, carry signs for you, and follow you off the cliff. For, to them, it's about pitching forks, not pitching in. To them, it's enough to be angry, to carry signs. To have ideas that fit on signs. That their chosen leaders provide no solutions isn't a failing.

It's a feature.

Study Guide

Couple of interesting data points on the endless and ever more pocked path to truth. I like these studies, naturally, because they confirm what I believe. And what has politics become, if not the reinforcement of one's beliefs? (Mine however, as distinct from those of the RWS™ and the teabaggers who horde what they hawk, have the support of facts, of course. Like these:)

First, from a non-profit organization in Iowa supporting "public affairs journalism." (The weakness of the study is only the short time-frame over which it was carried out.) Guess what? Same-sex marriage hasn't destroyed "opposite marriage." The article is titled, unconfusingly enough, "Gay Marriage Causes No Harm To Traditional Marriage, Study Finds." If anything, you might conclude it strengthens it:

The angst over marriage in Iowa comes after a year in which the state of marriage has made a turn toward statistical bliss: more people got married and fewer split up. Divorces declined to 7,286, to lowest per capita level since 1968, according to 2009 provisional and historical data from the Iowa Department of Public Health.

Also from the article:

The IowaWatch.org study found similarities range from the way men and women often view marriage to the more mundane tasks of married life, such as doing yard work. Like people in traditional marriages, same-sex couples also talk about raising children and shielding them from the verbal slings of peers, the stability and unit-strength of a family and the value of loving relationships among parents and children, as well as legal necessities and financial security.

‘We live pretty boring lives’

The Iowa Supreme Court ruling that effectively legalized gay marriage was unanimous, but the opposition has persisted, because it is fueled by fears that that the family, the bedrock of American society, is at stake.

[...] In sharp contrast, married gays often depict a lifestyle and relationship that seems suburban stable, only now they have a marriage license like other couples.

“Not much has changed,” said Ledon Sweeney of Iowa City, who married his partner of 12 years. “We live pretty boring lives. We go to work; we mow our lawn, we pay our mortgage, and we go on vacation if we can save enough money.”

How could anyone who actually thought with their brains instead of their holy books be surprised?

Now comes the one sure to give paws. If it didn't originate from some sort of online dating service, I'd compare it to stone tablets on Mount Sinai. Ready? Check out this chart:

Okay, it's a little challenging to interpret (not to mention see), with those triangly things and all. But here's the deal: it's about reading and writing skills as compared to various religions. The "opacity" of the triangles indicates "seriousness" of the beliefs. So. The reader may discern for her/himself what it says. To me, there are no surprises.

On the other hand, I don't suppose people filling out personal data for online dating are necessarily a representative cross section, or even honorable in the biblical way (most don't, one assumes, stone disobedient children to death, for one thing.) So, never mind. Try this one:

What this research underlines is that we push back against threats to our world-views by reasserting structures of meaning with which we are comfortable.

Maybe it explains teabaggers and the non-stop conspiracy theories of the right wing. So flummoxed are they over the fact that "their" country would have elected a black guy as president; so discordant is it to see a whole family of them in the White House; so horrible is the concept that to get the things we need from government we have to pay for them; all of these blows to their most central idea, handed to them on tablets by Lord Ronnie, that the less we do for others, the less we pay in taxes, the more rewarded we'll be -- it's all but emptied their minds. With what to fill it? Comfort: There's nothing wrong with what we've believed. It's them guys that are wrong. There's a plot against us, a very very nefarious plot. God is on our side. We love America, so they must hate it.

Don't you love science?

We're Going Down

Selective? Probably. But it seems every tea party rally, every group assembled to laud their lions, Glenn and Sarah most particularly, is rife with such people. Convinced that we're going to hell in a hand basket, swallowing whole the delusional claims of their leaders, but entirely unable to articulate anything specific other than aggrievement. Surely they can come up with something specific. I know I can.

That such a big chunk of citizens can have been riled up by people with big egos and bigger wallets, without so much as a thought that they've been played, manipulated, is beyond understanding. They're so sure they're right, but they can't point to a single thing. What explains it?

I just watched a remarkable show on HBO, "My Trip To al-Queda." I highly recommend it for everyone, no matter your political leanings. It's mostly the one man show of Lawrence Wright, who wrote "The Looming Tower: Al-Queda and the Road To 9/11." It's both a personal reflection on his reporting, in which he got to know several pretty questionable guys, and a very revealing history of the roots of al Queda and its main leaders. He's no sympathizer, as the end of the show makes clear. But he does show, convincingly, how our response to 9/11 fulfilled exactly the narrative bin Laden hoped for.

It was his focus on the idea of humiliation -- from the point of view of many Arab Muslims -- that is relevant to the above clip of folks at the Glenngasm. Humiliation, he said, is a great excuse for hate. He compared the showing of the same clip of a couple of GIs taking an Iraqi family out of its house, as seen on CNN and al Jazeera. You don't have to be a bleeding heart or Deanna Troi to see how it would be seen in the Muslim world.

How humiliating it must be to those teabaggers that people they despise, liberals, a black family in the White House, took the upper hand. They want their country back in the same way al Queda wants to reëstablish the caliphate. Read these signs, decide if the people carrying them could be described as thoughtful, or manipulated. The words of a couple of paranoid lunatics have convinced them.* Given the credulity and shallowness (to put the best face on it) we see in Sam's clip, it's clear nothing will convince them otherwise.

A lot of that is going around.

____________________________

*Of the four leaders in question (Beck, Palin, OBL, and al-Zawahiri), I think only Beck is literally crazy (assuming he actually believes his white-board demonstrations), and only Palin is demonstrably stupid. OBL and a-Z seem neither of those (although that level of religious zealotry, like Beck's delusions, can certainly be associated with schizophrenia), but are clearly more overtly and inarguably evil and single-mindedly committed to literal destruction. But I'm not sure who actually has the ability to do more lasting harm to our country. 9/11 took many innocent lives and cost a lot of money, shook our sense of security, but of itself it had no ability to destroy us. The next attack, the same. The destruction of a society like ours has to come from within, from us. From Glenn, Sarah, and their ilkiness among the RWS™, the destruction is harder to see (to some), but is more fundamental and pervasive, and, ultimately, more deadly to us all.

Many, of course, see Obama as a destroyer. But he's doing only what he promised to do when elected (or, in some sad cases, less). Whatever you think of stimulus money, health care, money for vets and roads, Wall Street reform, it's all been done as a result of elections. What the Glennsarahscreamer crowd are about is nullifying elections and perverting the electoral system by replacing informed voters with propagandized ones, using lies, hate, and intolerance instead of planes. Much more powerful, I'd say. Find the HBO documentary and watch it. The parallels are remarkable, despite the fact that it was clearly not the point of the film.

Logical

Something's wrong.

You have pains somewhere, or bleeding, or you're losing weight, peeing orange. Whatever. Constipation, diarrhea. Take your pick. So you see your doctor. She sends you to some specialist or other who collects some inadequate or irrelevant data, and, having interpreted it exactly wrong, makes a diagnosis. You see a surgeon, who concurs with the diagnosis, or maybe comes up with a new one based on a few more irrelevant tests. Anyway. So he takes you to the OR, and does the wrong operation, carries it out badly, ham-handed, crude. Probably doesn't even do the one he said he'd do. Sews your asshole to your ear. There are complications. You lose a leg, or an arm, can't speak anymore, or can't hear. You're in a wheelchair with stool draining out your belly button, you're breathing through a hole in your neck, you have to eat through a straw. Or a tube in your gut, or your subclavian vein. Your original doctor is horrified, and spells out in no uncertain terms exactly how the surgeon screwed up. It's outrageous, she says. Sue the sonofabitch. Call the cops.

What do you do?

Well, naturally, you recommend the surgeon to your friends, send him Christmas cards, and, next time you need an operation, probably to correct the problems he created, you head right back to him. Who wouldn't?

With the same unassailable reasoning, we're about to return to power representatives of the very party who made nothing but false moves, both when they were in the majority and put into place all the policies that have done us in, and more recently, when they were out of power, who railed at the plans to undo the problems they created, stonewalled them, and were unanimously wrong about everything they predicted over the efforts to fix things.

At a moment of crisis, conservatives made a series of predictions, assessments, and guarantees -- all of which turned out to be hopelessly backwards. Rewarding the confused [ed. note: confused? A misnomer if ever there was one.] only encourages more confusion, while punishing those who were right only encourages worse policymaking.

What to do? Reëlect 'em, hand them back the reins.

Makes sense to me.

The Beckoning

If blogging is an exercise in egotism, then what's it called when you rent the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of one of the most important speeches in American history, and use the occasion to proclaim that by the force of your personal perfection, it marks the moment when the country turns back to God?

I doubt I have anything to say about the Glenngasm that hasn't already been said, other than it finally occurred to me what the origin was of the calls I kept getting that were ID'd only as 828.

Despite not having a lot to add, I'll say I'm still waiting for an answer to my question: if, out of respect to those who object, the non-mosque at non-ground-zero shouldn't be built, what's the counter argument, vis á vis Beckopalypse and those who considered the day and place sacrosanct?

Okay, I guess I do have to ask: in what way has our honor been lost, and by what means shall it be restored? Did the dishonor start when we let black people live in the White House, or was it when we opened Gitmo? Did it have anything to do with Abu Ghraib, or is it just the attempt to provide health care for all? Will we get it back when we get rid of all Muslims in America, or will outlawing gay marriage once and for all do the trick? As we turn to God, what will he whisper in our collective ear? Is he still into the "love thy neighbor" thing or, like the flock at the 'flecting pool, has he moved on from that namby-pamby liberal crap?

Nor is it exactly as if this country has turned away from God, especially the one to which the Beckofoxians would have us genuflect. There's no country in the West that even approaches our claimed levels of belief or our houses of worship per capita; nor the percent that disbelieve evolution or consider the Bible literally true. So what the hell is he talking about? The fact that so many people eat pork and shellfish, and fail to stone their kids to death? Turn back to God. As opposed to what? The purpose of a self-centered event produced by a egomaniacal lunatic is to get people to do what they've already done. Weird, isn't it? Sort of a microcosm: the anger at what isn't.

What is really on the minds of that virtually all-white crowd? What part of their country do they want back, and, like the dog that chases the car, what will they do with it when they get it? Clearly, they don't want the dirty parts; the ones with Mexicans and gays and Muslims. Shouldn't their signs read "I want certain parts of my country back, preferably without having to pay for them, please. Or govern them."

I did note the comments of one attendee and they were cogent: the federal government, he said, should only be there to protect us, and to help us when we need it. Otherwise, he added, everything should be up to the states. Okay. That's a clear statement of classic states rights and old-school conservatism, and I get it. Arguments can be made, and have been, by intelligent people. It's at the very heart of the debate over our founding documents; where one falls along the spectrum defines (or used to, anyway) the extent to which one is a liberal or a conservative. I'd much rather have that discussion than to abide people whose only position is that they don't like what's happening, and whose only suggestion is to cut taxes, along with other ideas that would actually make things worse. And, in their spare time, to deny marriage rights to gays.

I'd like to hear what that Beckophile thinks constitutes help, and what defines need. And whether he thinks there's a federal interest, say, in food and drug safety, or would rather it be left to the kids who are taught in young-earth creationist schools that science is evil, and grow up to run his state.

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Update: sticky wicket?

Obtuse Angle

And thus the raison d'etre for Fox "news."

Think about it: this tiara of teabaggers thinks democracy works best when the press is beholden to our government, asking not only just easy questions, but only the ones they want asked, so they can give pre-selected answers. Not to mention ask for money.

I suppose I should give her credit for honesty, but, really, this is just so stupid that I think the stupid filled the room, displacing air along with reason, making everyone nearby stupid. Maybe even people who watch the video, in which case I apologize. It's stupid as baseline; stupid that replicates and infects, destroys gray matter just by existing. And yet, it certainly reflects the thoughts of teabaggers and their ilk ("ilk". Such a nasty, condescending word. This might be the first time I've used it, but there's no one more ilky than a teabagger. I'll take mine with ilk, please.) And it's exactly why we're in trouble and heading for much, much more. People only want to hear what they think they already know, and they gravitate to the "news" outlet that gives it to them.

Fox brags that it's the most watched cable network. Really, it ought to be a mark of shame.

Truth Teller

Saying the obvious, Ronald Reagan's own budget director (David Stockman is still alive? Who knew?) calls out Congressional Republicans. To people with fingers in their ears, saying "la la la la la" as loud as they can, he argues:

IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.

The article, which appears in NYT online next to an ad (when I first saw it, anyway) showing Fred Thompson asking for help in keeping the Bush tax cuts (because god knows we need to help the rich actors, for the good of... the rich actors) also says:

More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.

This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. [Emphasis mine, but it should be everyone's.]

Okay, yeah, the Keynesianism dig is aimed at Democrats. Nevertheless, it's refreshing, if also amusingly ironic, to have the guy who engineered the first shot at destroying fiscal responsibility under wrongly-revered Ronnie Reagan speak up now. A few decades too late, but still...

Andrew Sullivan, among the last thoughtful conservatives writing in public, had this to say after reading Stockman's piece:

No intellectually honest person can hold Barack Obama responsible for this long term sabotage of America's fiscal health. The spending he has authorized has to be seen in the context of the massive financial crisis that nearly caused the second Great Depression and may well still cause a lost generation of output and jobs and productive lives.

But the central point Stockman makes is that all of this was not conservatism as it should be, but the degenerate mockery of conservatism that has come to dominate the GOP: a blend of fiscal abandon, politicized religion, lawless foreign policy and utter electoral cynicism. Until this is confronted, owned and refudiated, we may have a Republican future ahead, but not a conservative one.

Such reality-based thinking, of course, has been and will always be thoroughly rejected by the RWS™ and their teabagging fodder.

Off With His Head

When a party purges any and all members who speak truth, what will come next? In the short run, it seems, they'll win some elections. In the long run, when it's necessary to generate real ideas that address real problems, will it be too late? Will the people who voted them into office realize, as I've been saying forever on this blog, that they've been played for fools?

Not yet. Among the casualties of the putsch is this guy, who had the audacity to speak truth:

"There were no death panels in the bill ... and to encourage that kind of fear is just the lowest form of political leadership. It's not leadership. It's demagoguery," said Inglis, one of three Republican incumbents who have lost their seats in Congress to primary and state party convention challengers this year.

Inglis said voters eventually will discover that you're "preying on their fears" and turn away.

"I think we have a lot of leaders that are following those (television and talk radio) personalities and not leading," he said. "What it takes to lead is to say, 'You know, that's just not right.'"

Is there a precedent for this, in the US, anyway? He wasn't just defeated; he was crushed. Nor is he the only one summarily expunged. For indicating willingness to work across the aisle, seeking solutions, the penalty is political death; for the unforgivable sin of willingness to help, the teabaggers will steep you in boiling water. But oh how they love America!

Giving homage to the certifiably insane and the demonstrably clueless, teabaggers have forced a purity pledge on their candidates which is both severe in its demands and empty in its content. Take back our country!! Love America!! No to... whatever!! Return to the ideas that (don't say it!)... well, that were easy: no taxes, no regulations!! No immigrants!! Yes Christians!! No actual ideas, no way forward, no grasp of how democracy works. No compromise. No plans, apart from disencraniating anyone who speaks the truth.

Answering my own question: No. I think this is new. It's the full institutionalization of emptiness, throughout an entire major party. It's not these guys. It's the whole Republican party, caving to fear, lowering themselves below see level, succumbing to stupid. For the power to do.... what? So I ask again: Will the people who vote them into office realize, as I've been saying forever on this blog, that they've been played for fools? And if so, will they wake up before it's too late?

I know the answer to that, too. But it's too painful to say.

Spotting Virgins

Something about a red spot behind the ear proves whether a man is a virgin or not. So says a Vietnamese acupuncturist. Of great interest, and happily, neither gay sex nor jerking off affects the test.

She says she was first taught how to determine if a man has ever had sex by feeling their pulse. She later developed the ear-spot method on her own. She says the spot will only disappear after heterosexual intercourse and is not affected by gay sex or masturbation.

It's in print, so it must be true. It's so true, in fact, that it led to the freeing of three men convicted of rape. To the admiration of lots of folks.

Vietnamese newspapers have dedicated profiles to Hong and her virginity test, crediting her with helping to free the men while not expressing any skepticism of her ability. Earlier this week, she went on an online chat on Pioneer newspaper where readers expressed their "great admiration" for her efforts.

There's a reason I'm posting this. It shines a bright light on belief in silly things, like "alternative medicine." This lady's techniques are no different from homeopathy, reiki, you name it: unproven claims (disproved, in many cases), supported with wild credulity. I'd assume that most Western people who believe in alternative medicine (I repeat: if it works, as proved by studies, it's not "alternative," it's medicine) would laugh at this lady's virginity test. But they're totally down with their water and its memory, their chakras and chi, their flushes and detoxifiers. From twenty thousand feet, there's not a bit of difference: needing sop, wanting magic, hating the hard stuff, people buy the b.s. peddled by fakers, quacks, and the self-deceived.

For that matter, it's exactly like teabaggerism and Reaganomics; and all of it is explained by this.

God The Rapist

The hope of teabaggers everywhere, Sharon Angle thinks rape is God's plan.

In an segment that has gone unnoticed since it first aired, the Tea Party-backed candidate told the Bill Manders show -- a favorable platform for Republican candidates -- that she opposed abortion even in cases of rape and incest. A pregnancy under those circumstances, she said, was "God's plan."

So, if a pregnancy implanted by a rapist is a plan of the sort of god in which she believes, what the hell isn't? And, by that logic, why have any laws at all? God does what he wants, does he not? For that matter, as I've asked many times, many ways, why pray? If a raped woman prays that she not get pregnant (or, heaven forfend, that she not be raped in the first place) why would that be less of an affront to god than having an abortion? If he causes rapes and pregnancies, doesn't he cause abortions? Or is god in cahoots only with rapists? (For a good explanation of God's family planning criteria, read this.)

This woman has an excellent chance of becoming a US Senator. More than Wall Street crimes, more than wars abroad, more than a failed fourth estate, this kind of thinking will be the death of us. Because, more and more, she's everyman: deaf, dumb, and blind. More and more, people are giving up on themselves and on the rest of us, turning it over to a god who, if he's there (and, believe me, I've tried in times past to find evidence), and if he's anything at all like the one in whom Sharon Angle believes, is bumbling at best and cruel and hateful and capricious at worst.

In my view, it's not whether god exists: it's whether people whose view of him mirrors that of Sharon Angle are going to be running our government. The answer, it's becoming more and more clear, is yes. They already control the entire Republican party and their teabagging surrogates. And those people have made it crystal clear they have only anger, not answers. Giving it over to them is giving it over to god. And it's pretty clear that he hasn't been paying much attention. Or is screwing with us: told GWB to invade Iraq, whispered in Delay's ear like Froggy the Gremlin.

If Sharon Angle wouldn't choose an abortion in the case of brutal rape, that's fine with me. What's not fine is to foist on other women that choice, which, as she so clearly stated, is unarguably religious-based. The problem isn't what she believes. It's that she wants to make her religious views the law of the land. To the rapturous joy of her followers, and, as her views are entirely disconnected to reality and devoid of basic knowledge, to the death and destruction of the rest of us.