The problem you face talking to Uncle Harry the gun nut

If you want to understand what happens when you try to reason with a gun rights zealot, you need to

remember that Gary Larson cartoon "What dogs hear."


It shows a man lecturing his dog about getting into the garbage. Of course all the dog recognizes is his name.
Similarly, in an argument with a gun nut (as opposed to a responsible gun owner), all your arguments sound like to him is "enemy tribesman speaking, therefore is all lies."

Then when he responds, mostly with stuff from the NRA's Fake Fact Factory, to you it sounds mostly like nonsense that anyone could refute with a few minutes' research of nonpartisan fact checking organizations such as factcheck.org and politifact.com.

But the gun guy would reject anything from those sites because it doesn't support his tribe--what we imagine to be the Republican Party, but now reconstituted as a primitive tribe--100% of the time.

The fact that the fact checkers challenge liberals daily for their own exaggerations and misrepresentations means nothing to Republican tribesmen, because everyone and everything is either friend or enemy, and anyone and anything that isn't 100% friend is 100% enemy.

And they don't actually know how to think. They were raised to take in ideas worshipfully, in church. They really have no idea what analytic thinking is. It just looks like defective worshipful thinking to them.

Add to this the fact that they usually know a lot more about guns and how they operate than liberals do. They use their superior knowledge of guns as further proof that no one who doesn't agree with them has anything useful to contribute, and that they're speaking ignorantly.

So you won't even get a foot in the door, metaphorically speaking, unless you educate yourself about guns. It doesn't take long--it ain't rocket science,  folks. And it's worth it just for the confused look they get on their faces when you show you see through their malarkey (they frequently lie about guns to liberals, figuring that they can get away with it).

Guess what it costs to vote to repeal ObamaCare?

I heard a plausible estimate today that it has cost about $2 million each of the 33 times the Republican Congress has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act (which they invariable call ObamaCare because most of their voters aren't heavy on complicated thinking), knowing full well that the Senate would never pass it and the President would always veto it even if it did.

So that's $66 million in yours and my taxes devoted to building a legislative bridge to nowhere. I can think of better uses for $66 million of our money. Can't you, regardless of whether you're liberal, centrist, conservative, or a fringer?

The biggest point this makes is that the Republican Party's alternative to the Affordable Care Act is nothing. They haven't been passing an alternative healthcare reform bill designed to supersede the ACA. So now they've made their legislative healthcare agenda clear: their alternative to the ACA is nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch-o.

Then their patrons, the health insurance (until you need it) industry, get to return to:
a. denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions.
b. forcing seniors to pay the highest prices any citizen of any country on Earth pays for prescription drugs.
c. forcing college-age offspring off their parents' healthcare plans.
d. enabling employers to deny covering preventive health services for women.
e. enabling health insurance providers to continue their death panels in the form of setting lifetime caps for medical care.
f. enabling employers to continue the lucrative practice of finding and using any excuse to not just deny continuing coverage for anyone who gets really sick, but to sue people they dump for what the insurance company paid out for healthcare up to that point. It has been proven that the healthcare insurance industry employs substantial staffs of doctors and researchers to do just this, as they should if profit is their only goal (and the GOP says profit should be the only goal of any private company, since they're devout social Darwinists).
g. enabling freeloaders who'd never paid for healthcare insurance to avail themselves of doctor and hospital care when they're indigent, with the costs passed on to the rest of us (which Governor Romney said was contrary to the free market six years ago).

What wrong with the status quo? It's unsustainable. Anyone who has studied the current system, regardless of their political flavor, knows this. Yet this is the GOP plan: the status quo.

Governor Romney claims he has a detailed plan. I doubt it, but say he does. So? He's not running for King and he's not running for Congress. Only Congress can create and pass legislation. They could model a healthcare bill after Romney's supposed plans, but they choose not to. They choose to simply repeal the only healthcare reform bill passed in a century of trying by everyone back to Teddy Roosevelt, and replacing it with nothing.

So when they reiterate the mantra "Repeal and replace" they're being honest about the former and lying about the latter. It's Repeal, pure and simple.

Yet another example of how radicalized the GOP has become--and, in its efforts to root out every single scrap of Democratic legislation since the New Deal, it has become nihilistic--a legislative lynch mob, full of torches and pitchforks and ropes to throw over the nearest tree branch...

New litmus test for discovering who puts their party before their country: the START treaty

Our fewer-nukes treaty with Russia passed over the No votes of the vast majority of Congressional Republicans, despite it being supported in its present form by numerous moderate Republicans, every living Secretary of State of both parties, nonpartisan arms control experts, our military leadership's nukes experts, and that famous so-shul-ist Henry Kissinger.

If ever there was a Mom & Apple Pie issue this was it. Yet the Republican Party proved not just how extremist it has become--but also conservative it isn't. This was an issue that was supported by anyone who was a sane conservative (as opposed to people who call themselves "Conservatives"--you've heard the self-sanctifying way they say the word as if it makes them perfection personified). 

And the emotionalism of their approach was demonstrated by their arguments against it--as if the real issue was some sort of contest to see  which nations' leaders had bigger male organs. The Republican leadership sounded like those "male enhancement" ads you hear on late-nite cable TV.

It was especially disappointing to see Lindsay Graham join the whirly-eyes' side on this.

In my book every politician who opposed passing this this week is either a poltroon (great word!) or a political extremist who firmly puts his cause before his country. Not traitors--just disloyal.

I should add that their paragon, Ronald Reagan, would have done the same thing Obama did.

And if having the treaty on their desks for six months wasn't long enough, they need to get into a remedial reading class.

This is a great issue to use to discover if your friends who say their conservative really are, or if they just use the term as a tribal ID word.

Healthcare reform under the hood

The press talks about the healthcare reform effort in Congress as being a contest between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

But another way to look at it would be to see it as a contest between the healthcare insurance industry and the voters. From this viewpoint you could say that the healthcare insurance industry owns nearly all of the GOP congressmen and enough of the Democratic ones to prevent the most meaningful aspects of reform from passing.

GOP congressmen and pundits deny this hotly of course, and point to public opinion polls supporting their opposition to healthcare reform.

But what they never mention is the $1.4 million a day the healthcare insurance industry has been spending for months and month on shaping public opinion--just as they did the last time this was tried.

And that opinion-shaping takes the form of scaremongering lies that have been thoroughly debunked by nonpartisann factchecking organizations like www.factcheck.org and www.politifact.com.

They also have as a partner in crime the Angry Billionaires' Club--America's richest 1/2 of 1%, none of whom need any social services, and who want to preserve the Third World income distribution profile America now has. They have invested countless millions of dollars in a PR campaign to make Americans fear and distrust government in toto, and to voluntarily abandon the only things that protect individual Americans from being exploited the way workers were in the England of Charles Dickens.

So whenever government tries to regulate any business sector, the industries involved can tap into this free-floating government distrust that has been inculcated by the minions of the Angry Billionaires' Club for decades.

Listen to congressional opponents to healthcare reform and you'll see how they invoke this general distrust of government--reaping the harvest created by this careful cultivation of the American foundational attitude towards a distant and uncaring government on the other side of the Atlantic back in the 18th century.

How much is that pundit in the window?

We view Congress and elected offices in general as seats of great power. Even if you have serious beefs with Congress...still, a visit to the chambers is going to affect you. You'll feel a bit of awe.

Thus it's hard for the average American--Democrat and Republican--to understand how America's richest 1/2 of 1% see Congress.

They see it the way we might look at a pet shop.

They go there to buy Congressmen, then take them home and train them. And like any good pet owner, they rarely beat their pets. They learn the tricks needed to discipline and control them. And of course sometimes a pet becomes intransigent--it might even attack its owner. Such pets must be dealt with, of course.

Meanwhile, most pets, like a good German Shepherd or Siamese cat, say, try to maintain their dignity while keeping their pet perks coming. It's quite a trick but the best pets learn how to do it.

And of course while you may come to feel a lot of affection for your pets, and they may feel quite at home around you, you never forget that they are not your equals. They're your treasured pets, nothing more, nothing less.

Then, once the Masters of the Universe have mastered the art of acquiring and training CongressPets, they use the same tricks on voting blocks and pundits. Make Mexican Americans think they'll be lost without your guidance--and that they can't trust anyone but you and your peeps. Make Fundamentalists think that God will smite our nation for its pornography and ho-mo-sex-uality (except for yours, of course, which is to be forgiven, since you're my peeps) unless you put your trust in me, who looks and talks just like you (except in my private life).

And the pundits will get in line too, of course. It's just a matter of figuring out the carrots and the sticks appropriate to the particular person.

Not everyone's for sale, to be sure. But they tend to get ground down by the river of money flowing around them. To make small, unimportant compromises at first...

The next time you see a Congressman spouting off on TV, think of how the powerful people you never see see him. Or her.

I'm not saying this to say it's hopeless. Just to help you see others' perspectives. And the magnitude of the task reformers face, both in and out of government.

Now there's a good boy. Here's a chew toy. Sit!