What Happenes When The Profoundly-- Aggressively-- Ignorant Get Their Hands On The Levers Of Power?

Petulance

Krugman's column Sunday didn't pull any punches-- the GOP "dislikes the whole idea of applying critical thinking and evidence to policy questions. And no, that’s not a caricature: Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking skills,” because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

The truth is that America’s partisan divide runs much deeper than even pessimists are usually willing to admit; the parties aren’t just divided on values and policy views, they’re divided over epistemology. One side believes, at least in principle, in letting its policy views be shaped by facts; the other believes in suppressing the facts if they contradict its fixed beliefs.

In her parting shot on leaving the State Department, Hillary Clinton said of her Republican critics, “They just will not live in an evidence-based world.” She was referring specifically to the Benghazi controversy, but her point applies much more generally. And for all the talk of reforming and reinventing the G.O.P., the ignorance caucus retains a firm grip on the party’s heart and mind.

So we have a situation where an unpopular closet case up for reelection in angry and ignorant South Carolina feels he needs to shore up his "rep" by blocking all the president's national security nominees until... whatever. Bad for the country? Sure, but for a slimy little shit like Lindsey Graham, that's not even a consideration.

Worse, the official Republican Party line on the sequester is that it would be catastrophic for the economy and for national security-- but they're unwilling to stop it unless they get their way 100% of whichever of their childish, anti-social demands are uppermost in their minds right now. Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer tried to use facts and reason to explain how the congressional Republicans are dragging the country out onto thin ice for the sake of their ideology and partisan politics.

With less than three weeks before devastating, across the board cuts-- the so-called "sequester"-- are slated to hit, affecting our national security, job creation and economic growth, we must make sure we are having a debate over how to deal with these looming deadlines that is based on facts- not myths being spread by some Congressional Republicans who would rather see these cuts hit than ask the wealthiest and big corporations to pay a little bit more. 

So what's the problem? Why not get to work and prevent this man-made-- of congressman-made disaster from engulfing the nation? Probably drunk, Boehner bragged to the Wall Street Journal that he planned to use threat of harm to the country posed by the sequester as "leverage" to push for the Republicans' partisan, unbalanced Austerity agenda:

Mr. Boehner says he has significant Republican support, including GOP defense hawks, on his side for letting the sequester do its work. "I got that in my back pocket," the speaker says. He is counting on the president's liberal base putting pressure on him when cherished domestic programs face the sequester's sharp knife. Republican willingness to support the sequester, Mr. Boehner says, is "as much leverage as we're going to get."

On Meet The Press Sunday, Eric Cantor was pretty much in his own world in the way he framed the sequester discussion. His claim is the old GOP trope: there's a spending problem and that the Democrats just want to tax and spend and nothing else and the Republicans are holding them back. None of this matches up with the facts. But... so what? Republican base voters get their "facts" from media clowns like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity-- and so does Eric Cantor, John Boehner and Lindsey Graham.