As the GOP presidential "debates" show, to right-wingers what the country most desperately needs more of is -- morons

America needs more morons! The modern-day conservative philosophy might be summed up: "An uneducated voter is our best customer."

"This is a long way from the conservatism I used to respect. Although I often disagreed with conservatives, I admired their prudence, their affection for tradition and their understanding that the intricate bonds of community are established with great difficulty over time and not easy to reweave once they are torn asunder. At their best, conservatives forced us to think harder. Now, many in the ranks seem to have decided that hard and nuanced thinking is a telltale sign of liberalism."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post column
today, "The real conservative scandal"

by Ken

On Saturday Howie kicked around a question, "Why Do Conservatives Hate Education?," that really doesn't seem to me all that difficult to answer. Modern-day right-wingers hate education because, well, they hate the whole idea of "the people" being educated. Extreme right-wingers hate the idea even more extremely.

I can't tell you how mad the right-wing conspiracy to moronify the American public makes me (though not, goodness knows, for want of trying). Because we're not talking about merely taking advantage of natural inequalities in mental acuity. We're talking about making sure that broad masses of people never develop their actual intelligence sufficiently to be able to the obfuscation and lies dished out to them by greedy and/or power-lusting political and social forces who reduce them to puppet-brained servants.

The result is what we're getting as a Republican presidential contest. As I've said before, if we thought we'd hit rock-bottom in 2008, what is there to say about the 2012 version? Except maybe that nobody should be surprised -- the plan was already set in motion, and could hardly have led anywhere else.

Proof of the total mental and moral collapse is the endless series of "debates" among the contending clowns. Anyone with a shred less contempt for the voting public, or at least the Republican-presidential-nominating portion thereof, would quake at the though of making public the level of intellectual infamy to which GOP politicking has sunk. And yet those Republican presidential nominators seem adequately hoodwinked into thinking that they're being presented with actual contenders, when what they're being presented with is a bunch of life forms that for the health and safety of the general population should probably be confined in cages. I mean, really, the stuff coming out of these creatures' mouths!

Even more distressing is the extent to which the infotainment noozemedia is going along with the gag, pretending that these "debates" have any connection to the problems or possibilities facing the next president. I mean, why are people even trying to stifle laughter when, say, Michele Bachmann accuses CBS of "bias" because of her choice to develop herself into a raging mental defective.

Or, perhaps more topically, why are most of the infotainment noozers acting as if Rick "Don't Stop Me Before I Kill" Perry's famous debate "gaffe" was important because of its "gaffiness" rather than, as I wrote here, its stark demonstration that the creep is "a wholly unprincipled asshole who doesn't have the slightest idea what he's talking about."

It's hardly surprising that the Washington Post's E. J. Dionne Jr. gets it and isn't having any of it. From his column today, "The real conservative scandal":

What really matters is the subject that sent Perry's brain into lockdown. He was in the middle of describing sweeping changes in the federal bureaucracy closely connected to his spare vision of American government. One presumes a candidate for president ponders such proposals carefully, discusses them with advisers and understands their implications.

Forgetting an idea at the heart of your program, in other words, is not the same as forgetting a phone number, a friend's name, a football score or the title of a recently read book.

Perry's memory lapse showed that he wasn't asserting anything that he is truly serious about because he is not serious about what government does, or ought not to do. For him, governing seems a casual undertaking.

"And I will tell you," he declared, "it's three agencies of government when I get there that are gone: Commerce, Education and the -- what's the third one there? Let's see."

Yes, let's see what "gone" might imply. Would Perry end all federal aid to education? Would he do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the part of the Commerce Department that, among other things, tracks hurricanes? Energy was the department he forgot. Would he scrap the department's 17 national labs, including such world-class facilities as Los Alamos, N.M., Oak Ridge, Tenn., or -- there's that primary coming up -- Aiken, S.C.?

I'm not accusing Perry of wanting to do any of these things because I don't believe he has given them a moment of thought. And that's the problem for conservatives. Their movement has been overtaken by a quite literally mindless opposition to government. Perry, correctly, thought he had a winning sound bite, had he managed to blurt it out, because if you just say you want to scrap government departments (and three is a nice, round number), many conservatives will cheer without asking questions. [Emphasis added.]

Yes! Exactly! My goodness, does that man ever get it! "I don't believe he has given [these things] a moment of thought."

It's at this point that E.J. pens the paragraph I've quoted at the top of this post. What the heck, I think this is worth repeating:

This is a long way from the conservatism I used to respect. Although I often disagreed with conservatives, I admired their prudence, their affection for tradition and their understanding that the intricate bonds of community are established with great difficulty over time and not easy to reweave once they are torn asunder. At their best, conservatives forced us to think harder. Now, many in the ranks seem to have decided that hard and nuanced thinking is a telltale sign of liberalism.

I might just amend that last sentence to encompass any kind of actual thinking being thought of as "a telltale sign of liberalism." Modern-day right-wingers hate facts, and truly believe they're entitled to pretend that any kind of alternative reality they concoct is a reasonable substitute for actual reality if the poll numbers are good enough.

E.J. goes on to consider the fine mess that candidate Herman Cain has gotten himself into -- apparently just by being, you know, who he is, and then lying about it. (If there's anything that right-wing demagogues have learned it's that there are almost only rewards, and no punishment, to be had for lying, and the grander the lie, the more rewarding.) Here too I would argue that the nail in the coffin of Cain's candidacy ought to be the insultingly moronic gibberish he's passed off as his political "program."

(E..J. was of course writing before Cain had his fluff today over Libya ["Cain Stumbles On Libya Questions"], the poor dear being unable to remember whether he agrees or disagrees with the president's handling, though he's pretty sure he disagrees. Unfortunately he can't say why, undoubtedly because, like Governor Rick and his planned government rollback, he has no frigging clue what the hell he's talking about -- and what's more doesn't seem to think this speaks in any way to his presidential qualifications. "I got all this stuff twirling around in my head," he said at one point. Not only can I believe it, I would encourage him to seek prompt help for the condition at his nearest mental-health facility. I don't think running for president is the answer, for him or for the nation.)

But even regarding Cain's problem with the accusations of sexual harassment, E.J. is absolutely right to nail him for his preposterous attempt to blame it all -- most of the time, anyway -- on the "liberal media" and "the Democrat machine." At times, as E.J. notes, he has seemed aware that the likely source of the dirt is enemy Republicans. "In any event," E.J. continues,

while women of a variety of political stripes have been in the forefront in demanding accountability from Cain, plenty of liberals have been happy to look on and let the GOP settle this one. And most members of "the Democrat machine" defended Bill Clinton against impeachment in the Monica Lewinsky matter. They, too, have largely stayed away from the Cain controversy, aware as they are of the meaning of the word "hypocrisy."

Not so with the many conservatives who donned full feminist armor during the Clinton scandal and now defend Cain reflexively, not even asking that he come clean about the facts.

There are honorable exceptions: Bill Bennett, for one, and to some degree -- hard to admit, I know -- Karl Rove. [Not to worry, E.J. It seems clear that our Karl has no concern for the rights and wrongs of the matter, but only for the politics of it. -- Ed.] But that so many other members of a movement theoretically devoted to traditional values on sexual matters would eagerly jump into this mess on Cain’s side speaks volumes about its condition. To paraphrase Bennett from another context, where’s the outrage about a conservatism that is losing both its intellectual moorings and its moral compass?

"Intellectual moorings"? "Moral compass"? Among modern-day "conservatives"? This is a joke, right?

Sorry, pal, red-blooded American right-wingers don't have nuttin' to do with commie fag stuff like "intellectual moorings" and "moral compass." And don't forget, they've got guns, lots of guns, and a Supreme Court whose self-made morons say the peeps have the right to use them to defend themselves against, well, people who aren't morons.

#