a couple of thoughts

I've been reading right wing comments on various articles about the debt limit crisis, the compromise that temporarily allayed it, and the S&P downgrade.

I'm far from defending President Obama's every move, but the virulent hatred and delegitimization I see expressed routinely against him and the federal government in general lead me to realize that another name for the average Tea Party guy could be "Johnny Reb."

Right wingers justify this by saying the Left did it to Bush II. Lefties certainly expressed powerful dislike for him, and delegitimization for his victory by Supreme Court fiat in 2000. However the difference is shown in the Left's acceptance of his victory in 2004, in which he certainly won the vote, even if you grant the level of vote suppression that some say went on. Also, no one claimed Bush wasn't an American citizen. That takes it to a whole new level.


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Second thought: If you ask an American--Left or Right--whether they'd prefer the government of Iran to be "liberal" or "conservative" without them getting any further description of that government, wouldn't nearly everyone say "liberal?" How about Russia? Burma? China? Zimbabwe? Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Iraq?

So why would American conservatives wish that these countries would have a different kind of government than what they wish for us?


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Third thought: I get the impression that the average Tea Party type person is terrified. They keep warning us not to do anything that might annoy the richest people in American, for fear that these ultrarich folks might let fewer crumbs dribble off their table onto the ground for us to scramble around trying to pick up.

They seem to worship these ultrarich people the same way that folks in primitive countries might worship the god of the local volcano--less out of love than out of fear, out of a desire to propitiate this cruel and capricious deity.

I wonder if they have the slightest idea what these ultrarich think of them and of what that deserve...how the ultrarich plan to repay their loyal followers for continuing to elect people who will fight to protect the perks of the ultrarich, no matter how much the rest of us have to sacrifice to do so.

Sociological research of the attitudes of the ultrarich indicated that they believe every cent of their wealth is deservedly theirs, just as your relative poverty is deservedly yours. They feel no sense of common purpose with Americans in general. Their children don't fight in our armed forces. And they feel no gratitude for those who do. They are profoundly disconnected from the America of the rest of us.

But their sock puppets in government mimic the appearance and speech patterns of the people you might see in church on Sunday, and if someone looks like someone you trust, well, you should trust them too, right?


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Fourth thought: Shouldn't "conservative" mean "someone who conserves?" Conservative Supreme Court Justice (and Republican appointee and former Republican legislator) Sandra Day O'Connor said "The Constitution is not a suicide pact."

That means she thought we shouldn't interpret it in a way that destroys us.

Yet today's conservative House seems to think that the Constitution is just that. How is that "conservative" in any way--to consider "compromise" a dirty word?


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The "supreme ruler" of Iran, Ayatollah Khameni, has said that he will never compromise in the slightest about anything, regardless of pressure or threats. And he has been true to this statement since day 1 of his long reign.

Of all the world's rulers, he's the one who most resembles the Congressional Republicans in this regard.

Think about it.

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And when you speak with Billionairians, would you ask them how hard it was to give up Christianity for this new religion?

Raising the debt limit: there there the big spenders go again--or jeapordizing our economic standing for political gain?

NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman wote an editorial about raising the federal debt limit, titled

To the Limit:It isn’t at all unthinkable that the battle to raise the federal debt ceiling could end in failure.

In the editorial, Prof. Krugman detailed the contest between the Democratic and Republican leaderships, faulting President Obama for not standing up to GOP extortion, as he saw it. My answer (which the NYTimes apparently rejected):

The question isn't what the billionaires' serviceable villains are up to. It's how they manage to keep getting elected by the very people they have most betrayed. After all, rank and file Republicans aren't profiting from their party's perfidy. They're losing. Big time. Then blaming that loss on the very people who are trying to save them.

H.L.Mencken said “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

Put that message through a thousand well-financed bullhorns every day for decades, and many will ignore what little activity goes on across their cerebral cortices in favor of the chimpanzee brain always lurking below. There, where tribe trumps reason, the GOP has convinced half the country that the Democrats are not in the American tribe. They're alien occupiers not to be believed--actually not even to be listened to in the first place.

And when you try to counter slick, well-financed, utterly internally consistent (at the emotional level) propaganda with reason, you have to realize that what they hear bears very little resemblance to what you said. They will hear what their leaders have taught them to "hear" when Democrats speak: what they perceive as the enemy tribe trying to trick Real Americans into surrendering their precious body fluids.

Good luck with that.

FDR was able to win because he could match them at their own game. What I fear our president doesn't understand is that it is irrational to treat people as if they are rational.

It wouldn't hurt, of course, if the Democratic Party stopped telling blue-collar Anglos that they must make whatever sacrifices needed to accommodate the needs of our Latin neighbors to solve their overpopulation crisis by exporting it here, to either take their jobs or drive wages down to starvation levels, by people whose jobs are neither endangered nor diminished by the illegals.

That's how we play into the GOP's hands.

What all of us should ask of all political parties

President Obama's State of the Union address was followed by two Republican responses, one from what purports to be mainstream Republicans, the other from the Tea Party.

Of course these speeches differed in political philosophy. But--they also differed in truthfulness.

Both www.factcheck.org and www.politifact.com did fact checks on the three speeches. The President's was not totally truthful. It contained some spin, some best-case assumptions, some flat out wishful thinking. But the opposing speeches simply lied, according to the two fact-checking organization I went to--both of which have not hesitated to call out any and all national Democratic leaders on factual misstatement/spin.

The many Republicans I know tend, as a group, to be honest personally. Honest and trustworthy. Yet whenever I point out to them that their party's leaders are serial, mass liars, they defend the leaders and the lies, and impeach the trustworthiness of the avowedly nonpartrisan fact-checking organizations that say the Republican leaders are lying.

It's like Ray, a nice guy who's never touched a gun or hit anyone, but who drives the getaway car in a bank robbery where a guard was killed.

It the eyes of the law, that makes Ray a murderer.

Likewise, in their defense of lying liars and their lies, that makes my honest, trustworthy Republican friends liars as well.

This is not one sided. Anyone who says Obama said nothing but the truth in his speech would be an accessory to spinning and exaggeration at the very least.

And I have caught Democrats from the President on down in lies and rhetorical fallacies.

When I say as much to my Republican friends they say that the Democrats' lies are nation-threatening catastrophies, while those of the Republicans are necessary because the Democrats control the mainstream media and if the other side gets in the ring with brass knucks you need 'em too.

This is doubly false--first, the national media are controlled by for-profit corporations, which means that the national media are guided above all by ratings and sales figures--and as a consequence the national media has if anythiung been reduced to simply reporting what Democrat and Republican leaders claim rather than actually telling us who's lying and who's truthing. There's a little but not much.

It is an indisputable fact that the number of investigative reporters working for national media has dwindled over the past few decades, as corporate holding companies have discovered that they make more profit with fewer reporters assigned to basically turning political press releases into he said she said articles, while the rest of the medium devotes itself to Angelina Jolie, Michael Vick, crime and traffic accident reports, and puppies trapped in wells

I have certainly seen bias in reporting--especially as regards illegal immigration--but the overall amount is wildly exaggerated by Republicans.

It's like comparing some pickpockets with Bonnie and Clyde.

And the three State of the Union addresses exemplify this, with one side exaggerating a bit and indulging in some wishful thinking, while the other side opts for an emotionally compelling narrative that is factually incorrect (the nice way to say "lying") from one end to the other.

When did it become a part of being a conservative to lie all the time? Or to be honest personally but support public lying all the time? How is that conservative?

What I ask of any party is that it tell the truth and be true to its own principles. Personally I think any nation does best if its politics is an ongoing three-way dialogue between people who are liberal, in the basic, dictionary sense of the term, conservative, likewise, and centrist, likewise.

But you can't have a debate with someone who's lying about the facts you're arguing about. You have to get on the same page factually before you can argue. If you say the Antarctic ice cap is melting, as reported by scientists working there, and your opponent says no it isn't and them scientist guys are lying because they're part of a worldwide conspiracy of leftist scientists, you aren't going to have a debate--just a shouting match. And Republicans are very good at shouting--the red-faced, spittle-flying, choleric rage style of shouting iin particular.

And another key factor is angrily denouncing the Democrats for lying, to put them on their back foot, to make the conversation about Republicans claiming Democrats are lying and Democrats defending themselves, instead of dealing with whatever issue is at hand--and which any objective fact checking will say the Republicans are lying about.

If you watch TV debates you'll see that they do this by flying into an instant rage if a Democrat says anything critical of anything Republican. The Republican starts shouting and won't even let the Democrat finish his sentence, and the moderator is usually too cowed by these bully boy tactics to intervene. So in a debate the Republican usually gets most of the airtime, with the Democratic part consisting of half-sentences interrupted by Republican tirades. Voiced anger is a great tool for silencing people.



Here Republicans usually point to the shameful tactics of college leftists in silencing right wing speakers on campus. This complain is correct, and it's one of many examples why Democrats have to disavow their Sister Souljahs if they want any credibility themselves.


The Congressional Budget Office has been praised by the Republicans as objective, hard-headed, and financially trustworthy by Republicans--when it suited them. But what was said in the Republicans' State of the Union speeches contradicted what the CBO said. So now they say the CBO is just someone's opinion.

That's the sort of cherrypicking of facts that George Bush II did for eight years nonstop. It hasn't changed in his absence, so it's not a trait of him personally--it's a trait of the current Republican Party.

The last election showed that lying consistently, in ways that pander to people's fears and selfishness, in ways that link all the individual lies into a lying but internally consistent narrative, with enormous financial backing that floods the media with your lies, can win elections decisively. So we can't expect the lying to stop any time soon. We'll just have to see whether the Democrats can stand up to such a blitzkreig of coordinated lying.

Utah primary sez mucho about whither GOP

If Bob Bennett--as solid a conservative as they come and a proven competent, veteran legislator--can't even get on a primary ballot in Utah, then the GOP has collectively lost its mind--like someone gone mad with grief over some great loss, tearing their own hair out and wounding themselves.

America should have a conservative party, and it should be a major one. I honestly regret the departure of the Republican Party from this role.

Words to remember

The head of Congress' House Republicans stated, for the record, that the healthcare reform bill "will ruin our economy."

I also saw him call passage of the bill "Armageddon" in another interview.

So if our economy isn't ruined by the bill, may I assume that Representative Boehner will admit that the Republican Party was profoundly wrong on this critical issue, and then switch to the Democratic Party?

If the economy is ruined, I'll be glad to pledge to renounce the Democratic Party and become a Republican....

How lies that work...work

Lots of people will believe complete fabrications from political operatives. But only under certain conditions:

1. The lie has to be part of a plausible narrative--a story that supplies motive, means, opportunity, and a timeline.

2. You have to hear it repeated a zillion times, from multiple sources.

3. It has to dovetail with your worldview.

4. It has to appeal to your more juvenile instincts.

5. It has to trigger powerful emotions--especially the ones the average chimpanzee also experiences.

6. The lie's envelope of justification has to provide you with cover (i.e., you can't hate Obama because he's a Negro--but you can hate him if you can say it's because he's a foreigner who holds office illegally).

7. Usually the lie stands on the shoulders of other lies that have already been established in your head.

8. It has to forestall your listening--actually listening--to refutations of the lie. This is usually done by claiming that anyone debunking the lie belongs to the enemy tribe, and because therefore his motives must be bad, you don't have to pay attention to his logic or his facts.

9. It helps if the lie appropriates the other side's language. Thus attacks on climate change by human activity often call climate warming proofs "junk science" when it's the denial that's the junk science.

10. And it also helps if the lie is part of a cascade of related lies. You put out Lie A and the media pick it up and run with it for a week or two; meanwhile investigative reporters are digging for data. But the moment they start to publish their fact-checking refutations, you come out with Lie B. Stir and repeat as needs. For example the "Obama's not American" campaign went though a series of morphs in this manner.

11. For the most vile lies, have people with no known connection to your party promulgate them, while Party leadership says well, they don't know, but where there's smoke there's fire, and we must investigate this "controversy." Then if the lie is successfully debunked, you can claim clean hands, Pontius Pilate-style.

12. If anyone calls you on your lie, fly into a rage at the manner in which the person called you on it. Sean Hannity is particularly adept at this--maybe it's an Irish thing. Then attack the truth-teller's motives. Make the debate personal and tribal, so that a viewer feels like he'd be betraying his political tribe by giving in.

Political lies are carefully crafted to satisfy all these requirements, then disseminated through sophisticated campaigns, with the lie's envelope shaped to fit the venue--academic types to push it on PBS, rabble rousers to do same on Fox, with further shaping for demographic slices like fundamentalist Christians, or, for the left, the more Luddite Greens, say.