How Much Does The Republican Base Absolutely Crave Being Lied To? And The Democrats?

Say NO to the anti-refugee assholes of both parties

Reality is more difficult for Republicans than for normal people. Not all Republicans, but many Republicans-- the ones whose minds have been damaged by Hate Talk Radio hosts and by Fox News. And that's a lot of Republicans. It's why the "dumbest states," as we saw last night, are all deep red states. The Republican base is, unfortunately, incapable of dealing with abstracts, even the most simple abstracts. They can repeat what they hear on Limbaugh's show and can grunt approvingly when something sounds like its confirming the notions in their tiny little minds. Reality TV sounds a lot more real-- and a lot more comfortable-- than reality. Most of them don't want someone with actual experience running the country; they want Donald Trump or Dr. Ben. They'd probably vote for Bozo the Clown if they could. In fact, according to a PPP survey released this morning, 79% of Republican primary voters-- despite the reality of 9/11-- think George W. Bush kept us safe. This is Republican Reality TV reality:

And that 53% are are convinced that the unemployment rate has risen since Obama became president... well, facts are the enemies of conservatives. Facts have always been the enemy of conservatives and always will be. Bush's economic policies crashed the economy in 2007 and unemployment started to rise. By the time Obama took over as president, the unemployment rate was around 8% (8.3% in February, 2009. The Bush policies pushed the rate to 10% by October, 2009. Once Obama's own policies started kicking in, the rate started decreasing, slowly at first-- Bush and the GOP did gigantic structural damage-- but the rate has been below 6% since the summer of 2014 and hit 5.0 in October, which is the number that should be freshest in the minds of the 53% of Republicans Mattingly reported were certain that the unemployment rate had risen since Obama has become president. Or are they uncertain of the difference between what an employment rate and an unemployment rate is. Who knows. But, if you think it's too implausible that the Republican primary electorate is going to nominate a Trump or a Carson or a Fiorina or a Cruz... think again. (This is actual reality:)

Every day there's another poll showing Trump triumphing over the a GOP "deep bench" that has proven to be so shockingly shallow-- and completely ineffective in standing up to a two-bit school yard bully who must have Mussolini's ghost doing cartwheels in hell. The most recent poll of Republican primary voters in New Hampshire, by WBUR, taken after the ISIS terrorism in Paris, shows Trump up 4 points and way ahead of any other candidate with 22%. And in Florida, home of two "top tier" Republican candidates, Trump whips both their asses and is increasing his lead over the pathetic pack of losers-- Trump 36%, Rubio 18%, Carson 15%, Cruz 10% and former Governor Jeb down in single digits.

Or, as Colbert put it the other night, "the Republicans essentially have a week left to take down Trump because... by Thanksgiving dinner next week people will stop worrying about the racist things some candidate might say and start worrying about the racist things their drunk aunt might say." And, on an ostensibly more serious note, "If Trump does well in Iowa and New Hampshire, there is no stopping him... Nothing he says or does can turn off voters. His campaign slogan might as well be 'Trump 2016-- You're stupid and ugly.' And his advice to the GOP Establishment types in their wing-tips: "The GOP needs to stop panicking over the idea of Donald Trump as your leader and embrace it. Instead of fighting this wave, learn to enjoy drowning."



Yesterday, the editors of the Washington Post took a slightly less cavalier look at the horrors Trump is already bringing to this country, pointing out that the man is an inveterate liar, every bit as "pathological" as what he insists Ben Carson is. And his lies do not exist in a vacuum; they're having real consequences already.

“Our President wants to take in 250,000 from Syria,” says Donald Trump, falsely. “Think of it, 250,000 people. And we all have heart, and we all want people taken care of and all of that, but with the problems our country has, to take in 250,000 people-- some of whom are going to have problems, big problems-- is just insane.”

It is not insane. It is a lie. It is a lie that Mr. Trump repeats, even as fact checkers and reporters point out that it is wrong. Not just repeats, but embellishes. Last month, the number was lower: “Now I hear we want to take in 200,000,” he said on ABC News. “We don’t know where they’re coming from. We don’t know who they are. They could be ISIS. It could be the great Trojan horse.”

We have grown accustomed to politicians exaggerating, sometimes stretching the truth, sometimes fogging it up for effect. But it is disturbing on a different scale to see a U.S. politician repeating a big lie again and again, in a way that is calculated to inflame bigotry and fan fears.

Here are the facts: President Obama wants to allow 10,000 Syrian refugees into the country next year. The number may increase a bit the year after that, but it will be nowhere close to 200,000 or 250,000. So far, over the course of a four-year civil war, the United States has accepted fewer than 2,000 Syrian refugees, and the screening process for each prospective admission can take up to 18 months.

...After the Paris attacks, it’s understandable that Americans ask questions about the quality of U.S. refugee screening. But the discussion must be based on reality, not phantoms. The risk from a small number of vetted refugees is far outweighed by the humanitarian imperative to help innocent people escaping from Syria’s evil rulers and from the Islamic State.

Mr. Trump is fanning hysteria in other ways. Whereas the integration of Muslims in U.S. society, including in the armed forces, is a success story compared with Europe, the businessman would have us believe the opposite.

“The hatred is beyond belief,” Donald Trump said Monday, as he talked about surveilling and even shuttering mosques. “The hatred is greater than anybody understands.”

We continue to have enough faith in voters to believe that Mr. Trump won’t wind up in the White House. But he can still promote misconceptions that pull his party down, sully the post-Paris policy debate and, ultimately, hurt innocent people. Given his serial refusal to accede to reality, we doubt he will agree. The rest of his party must do better.

I'm glad the Post's editors have faith because even some elected Democrats-- albeit so far just the bottom of the barrel Democrats-- seem to be reacting in exactly the way a coward reacts to a loud-mouth bully like Trump. Worst, as can be expected, is Senate Democratic Minority Leader-in-waiting Chuck Schumer (AKA- Little Chucky Schmucky) and his pathetic, cowardly DSCC lackey, John Tester (D-MT) as well as their sad-sack candidates in New Hampshire and Nevada, Maggie Hassan and Catherine Masto, all of whom are buckling to Trumpian fascism. Democrats need strong leaders to stand up to right-wing bullies, not craven cowards like Schumer who pee in their pants and agree with them and the first ripple of trouble. There isn't much Democrats can do in the GOP primary but we must stop Schumer from becoming Senate Leader. Are you in touch with a Democratic senator? Tell him or her that if Schumer is elected Senate Democratic Leader with their help, they will lose your support. So far not one Senate Democrat has refused to support Little Chucky Schmucky's power grab, not even Durbin, who was in line to become leader! Are Senate Dems all this morally bankrupt?

UPDATE: What Would God Say To Trump/Schumer?

How about if we look to the Bible that so many of the anti-refugee opportunists profess to love so very dearly? Who remember Jesus-- not Republican Jesus, Biblical Jesus?

Luke 10:25-37

The Parable of the Good Samaritan

25 And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” 26 He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” 27 And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” 28 And he said to him, “You have answered correctly; do this, and you will live.” 29 But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” 30 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. 31 Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. 32 So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. 34 He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35 And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ 36 Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” 37 He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”

Brian Babin (R-TX): "Mary and Jesus didn’t have suicide bomb vests strapped on them, and these folks do."

Amidst the abiding craziness, we channel some cheerily crazed communications beeped by the Zeitgeist

Tom Toles, Washington Post [click to enlarge]

by Ken

The political craziness level has, at least for the time being, flipped me out, and I refuse to let it crowd out some swell times I've been having on to such nifty places as The Players, the theatrical club founded by the great actor Edwin Booth on Gramercy Park South (a Municipal Art Society Tour with Matt Postal), Coney Island (a Municipal Art Society walking tour with Norman Oder), and the former Brooklyn Navy Yard (now a burgeoning industrial park, with tours offered by Turnstile Tours in conjunction with the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation. And that's just yesterday and today, with the first of the New York Transit Museum's "nostalgia rides" this season on tap for tomorrow, this one to the site, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, of the 1939 and 1964-65 New York World's Fairs (the meet-up time is 10am, and if you read this in time you may still be able to book it online -- be sure to bring your receipt -- as no tickets will be sold at the event).

Some of this stuff might be worth writing about, but for tonight I'm just going to channel a bit more of the crazinesa through some of the best Zeitgeist filters.

David Sipress, The New Yorker [click to enlarge]

Roz Chast, The New Yorker [click to enlarge]

Today's DILBERT by Scott Adams

[click to enlarge]

Tomorrow could be better. But don't bet the farm.

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"I have been a harsh critic of Barack Obama . . . but on [every] matter of serious contention in this election, Mitt Romney is decidedly worse" (Robert Scheer)

Tom Toles in the Washington Post [click to enlarge]

"I have been a harsh critic of Barack Obama for continuing that bipartisan capitulation to Wall Street, but on this and every other matter of serious contention in this election, Mitt Romney is decidedly worse."

-- Robert Scheer, in his Truthdig column "Vote for the B-"

by Ken

As I wrote last Thursday, after work today I head straight the Samuel Friedman Theatre on West 47th Street for Doug Hughes's Manhattan Theatre Club-on-Broadway staging of Rebecca Lenkiewicz's adaptation of Ibsen's Enemy of the People, carefully scheduled to keep me out of the line of fire of tonight's electoral media circus, which I don't think my nerves are up to.

(The stress is certainly not made easier by the fact that, at the presidential level, today's contest has no good outcome. But as Robert Scheer sets out so eloquently in the column, "Vote for the B-," that we'll get to eventually, there is one outcome that is measurably more horrible, significantly more horrible, than the other.)

Since the show is at 7, and I gather is a heavily chopped-down "adaptation" of what Ibsen wrote, I'm afraid it will put me back on the streets a good couple of hours earlier than I would wish. One thing I hope I won't be doing as a delay tactic is any significant eating. Since we've been back in our long-blacked-out Downtown Manhattan office (most of us were here Sunday, the day the lights came back on, to do whatever had to be done to have several of our magazines ready for the printer Monday morning) the office has been overflowing with food. Our version of "crisis mentality," I guess.

Even as I write I'm thinking about the remnants of the lasagna and the meatless ziti baked by one of my coworkers, who explained that she figured those of our coworkers still without power might be happy to have something hot to eat. Well, I never lost power at home, while I've still been delighted by her thoughtfulness. It's amazing how much mass transit has been restored given the devastation we suffered last week, but the commute has remained, shall we say, a challenge, and with the frigid turn the weather has taken, either the lasagna or the ziti fresh out of the microwave has been a treat.

Yes, we have power, and our computers and Internet connections are humming. One thing we don't have, and apparently won't for a while, is phones that connect to the outside world. But then, doesn't everyone have a cell phone? (Not me, actually. It's buried somewhere at home.) Another thing we don't have is heat. (Our office manager thoughtfully ordered in a wagonload of little space heaters, but when a bunch of them were turned on, one of the circuts blew, and the heaters were promptly reboxed and collected.)

My original thought was that if I get home around, say, 11, I could just flip the TV on and get the lay of the land, then either unplug myself or resign myself to riding out the storm. Now I'm thinking maybe I can leave all of that to the morning. if I'm home early, I've still got some of my Sunday-night TV pile-up stored on the DVR. I've already watched the Good Wife, Homeland, Boardwalk Empire, and Upstairs Downstairs, but that still leaves the Dexter and Tremé, where it's safe to venture that neither President-in-Waiting Willard nor his Boy Companion Paul will be mentioned -- not to mention the hundreds of other people running for assorted offices today.

I hope the rest of the country is doing better than we here in NYC are. At my little two-election-district polling place in Washington Heights, by shortly after 8am both ballot scanning machines were kaput. I had already realized, though, nothing on my ballot was really being seriously contested; we had several bruising contests, but they were all decided in the primaries. (I see that we weren't alone in Northern Manhattan: "Uptown Voters Face Broken Scanning Machines and Confusion While Voting.")

FOR THOSE OF US BEING MADE TO FEEL THAT A
STRONG PREFERENCE FOR OBAMA OVER WILLARD . . .

. . . makes us unwitting stooges of the oligarchy -- made to feel so by people I suddenly realize may not be as smart as I once thought, not to mention nowhere near as smart as they think -- I'm hard put to imagine the stakes in today's election being explained better than Robert Sheer does it in his Truthdig column today (which I read via Nation of Change). Of course this pass-along comes too late to be of any pradtical value, but I like to think that sagacity has some value that goes beyond the time-bound practical.

Vote for the B-

By Robert Scheer
TRUTHDIG / OP-ED
Published: Tuesday 6 November 2012

It’s crunch time, and I want to be on record, just in case some still undecided independent voter cares what I think. And one might, since I did write a decidedly nonpartisan book on the origins of the economic crisis entitled “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street.” I have been a harsh critic of Barack Obama for continuing that bipartisan capitulation to Wall Street, but on this and every other matter of serious contention in this election, Mitt Romney is decidedly worse.

A vote for Obama in a swing state is a no-brainer, because, on a host of issues, including immigration, women’s rights, gay rights, health care, campaign finance, income inequality, tax breaks for the rich and the legitimacy of trade unions, there is a vast partisan difference that should not be ignored. It matters greatly who appoints an anticipated two justices to the Supreme Court, which is already dominated by right-wing ideologues.

In a state where a protest vote will not elect Romney, a vote for the Green Party’s admirable Jill Stein, the consistent Libertarian Gary Johnson, or the populist Rocky Anderson sends an appropriate but measured signal of contempt for the sorry state of our two-party system.

That disgust is warranted by the fact that this president has followed the broad ideological outlines of his predecessor on national security. Witness the continuing assault on due process that is the island prison of Guantanamo and the killing of innocent civilians through drone attacks, as well as the unwarranted Nixonian persecution of alleged whistle-blowers Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.

But on all of that, Obama is the lesser evil compared to Romney, who has promised to increase military spending to fight a new Cold War that might, under his stewardship, turn hot against China, Russia, the forlorn Palestinians and anyone else with whom he can pick a fight. Romney is as dangerous as he is inexperienced in such matters. To compensate for his ignorance, he has turned to the same pack of neoconservative ideologues that lied us into Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

On economic policy, Romney has attempted to smear Obama as some kind of big government socialist, although the former vulture capitalist would surely have wasted just as much money as Obama rescuing his friends on Wall Street. Neither candidate would stop the Federal Reserve from continuing to purchase toxic assets to save the banks from their own folly. The candidates split on a bailout of the auto industry, with Obama helping save some decent American jobs, and they disagree about how much the obscenely wealthy should pay in taxes, although sometimes Romney disagrees with himself on that score.

Obama sold out to Wall Street when he appointed Lawrence Summers, who had pocketed more than $8 million in bank and hedge fund fees while serving as a top Obama campaign adviser, to be his key White House expert on the economy. This was an egregious error vastly compounded when he appointed as his Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, former head of the New York Fed and faithful ally of the Bush administration in filling the lifeboats to capacity with bankers. However, Romney blasts Obama for not being solicitous enough in catering to Wall Street greed and defines the extremely minor reforms of Dodd-Frank as an attack on capitalism, when it is anything but.

As Gretchen Morgenson, the sharpest business journalist of our day, noted in a recent column in The New York Times: “Many Americans probably think the Dodd-Frank financial reform law will protect taxpayers from future bailouts. Wrong. In fact, Dodd-Frank actually widened the federal safety net for big institutions. Under that law, eight more giants were granted the right to tap the Federal Reserve for funding when the crisis hits.”

But Romney finds objectionable even the slightest improvement in transparency and accountability in Dodd-Frank, including a much-needed consumer protection agency championed by Elizabeth Warren. He absolves Wall Street and the Bush administration that let greed run wild of any responsibility for the economic mess and, indeed, seeks to cut funding for programs that aid its victims.

Romney’s talk of the deficit is specious. He would spend multiples of Obama’s stimulus on the military, alone, while relegating the unemployed, disabled and impoverished to the hope of charity and warm weather. Consider the millions of Americans kept fed by Obama’s hard-won extensions of unemployment benefits and food stamps during the worst lows of the recession. How would President Romney have handled such a crisis?

To employ the vernacular used in my day job teaching college students, I give Obama a generous B- grade for initiating a national health care plan that, while flawed, is a start, ending discrimination against gays in the military, easing the student loan crisis, signing equal pay legislation and appointing reasonable Supreme Court justices, among other achievements. Meanwhile, the rapacious capitalist turned candidate Romney—poster boy of the 1 percent—denigrates the less economically fortunate among us while growing filthy rich by slicing and dicing good American jobs out of existence and exploiting every tax loophole to aggrandize his own fortune. He earns a solid F and makes Obama look quite good in comparison.

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Climate-change deniers have never cared about "truth"; they merely demand the right to vilify honest people with their lies and delusions

Washingtonpost.com has a wonderful slide show up of 14 Tom Toles cartoons "about the environment and global warming."


"'Global warming is real,' [Berkeley physicist Richard] Muller wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.

"Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention."

-- Eugene Robinson, in his Washington Post column today,
"The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate"

by Ken

As I write (a little after 3pm ET) there are 2358 comments on Washingtonpost.com responding to Gene Robinson's column today, "The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate." Believe me, I didn't venture deep into the muck. Here are just a couple of treasures I mined near the surface:

SteveSJ: Talk about clueless. Your article is clueless and missleading the public. But what's new?

For those who want the truth; [LINK OMITTED ON THE GROUND THAT IT'S PSYCHOTIC BULLSHIT AIMED AT DESTROYING LIFE ON EARTH -- Ed.]

Benson: Hey, Gene-Van-Winkle. Time to wake up and address our biggest current problem: unemployment.

Global Warming has long ago faded as the most important issue of the day.

While we're correcting the record, we should point out that Muller was never a global warming skeptic. He just acknowledged that the skeptics made some good points about problems with the data, which he set out to address.

Of course these sad souls are too far gone to have any idea, not just how wrong, but how dangerously wrong, they are.

There's no way of knowing whether "Benson," for example, it's terminal stupidity or pathologically dishonest to imagine that "we should point out that Muller was never a global warming skeptic" is an answer to Gene Robinson's characterization of "respected physicist" Richard Muller "an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own."

Even now Muller begins his October 21 WSJ piece "The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism"): "Are you a global warming skeptic? There are plenty of good reasons why you might be." However, his conclusion, after two years of research by his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, is:

When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

More serious, though, is Benson's delusional notion that we get to put climate disaster on the back burner while we worry about joblessness. It's a reminder that to these people, none of these "issues" are real -- it's all make-believe stuff through which they can vent the products of their diseased non-thought processes for the purpose of . . . well, you've got me. I don't know what they think the purpose of lying their putrid guts out is. I might guess that reality is just too overwhelming and, you know, real for them to cope with. What I do know, though, is that vicious, at-the-top-of-their-lungs flight from reality has become a way of life among a large (and growing) sector of the country.

In his WSJ piece Muller lays out once again why he and his colleagues thought "there are plenty of good reasons why you might be" a global-warming skeptic, except that it turns out that, well, no, there aren't. A WSJ editor has helpfully provided a blurb for the piece: "There were good reasons for doubt, until now."

So all those "reasons" were "good reasons for doubt"; they just happen to be wrong. This includes essentially all the individuals, groups, and organizations that have been routinely vilified by the Psychopathic Liars of the Right. Robinson points out, for example: "Muller’s figures also conform with the estimates of those British and American researchers whose catty e-mails were the basis for the alleged “Climategate” scandal, which was never a scandal in the first place." But of course that round of character assassination was never about the "truth"; these people have an apparently pathological loathing for the truth.

Robinson writes:

Muller and his colleagues examined five times as many temperature readings as did other researchers -- a total of 1.6 billion records -- and now have put that merged database online. The results have not yet been subjected to peer review, so technically they are still preliminary. But Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence.

Not so, I predict, with the blowhards such as Perry, Cain and Bachmann, who, out of ignorance or perceived self-interest, are willing to play politics with the Earth’s future. They may concede that warming is taking place, but they call it a natural phenomenon and deny that human activity is the cause.

It is true that Muller made no attempt to ascertain “how much of the warming is due to humans.” Still, the Berkeley group’s work should help lead all but the dimmest policymakers to the overwhelmingly probable answer.

We know that the rise in temperatures over the past five decades is abrupt and very large. We know it is consistent with models developed by other climate researchers that posit greenhouse gas emissions -- the burning of fossil fuels by humans -- as the cause. And now we know, thanks to Muller, that those other scientists have been both careful and honorable in their work.

Nobody’s fudging the numbers. Nobody’s manipulating data to win research grants, as Perry claims, or making an undue fuss over a “naturally occurring” warm-up, as Bachmann alleges. Contrary to what Cain says, the science is real.

It is the know-nothing politicians -- not scientists -- who are committing an unforgivable fraud.

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Matt Taibbi and Tom Toles tackle the terribly tenacious grip of imbecility on American life

"At times the overt longing for simple answers that you get from Tea Party leaders is so earnest and touching, it almost makes you forget how insane most of them are."

-- Matt Taibbi, in his new book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

by Ken

I try periodically to make sense of the phenomenon that seems to me really at the heart of what we might call the Dittohead School of Political Discourse: an impassioned, almost desperate belief, or rather insistence, that complexity is a liberal plot, that in fact everything worth knowing can be reduced to a four-word mantra that can be spouted by a four-year-old. Now Matt Taibbi has made what seems to me a signal contribution to the taxonomy of American imbecility.

AlterNet has posted a chunk ("Taibbi: the Tea Party Moron Complex," originally posted on DailyKos in its preelection "GOTV" series) from Matt Taibbi's new book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America. We start with his laying out of what he suggests would be the logically appropriate division of the American body politic-- instead of ("two giant political parties of roughly equal size perpetually fighting over the same 5–10 percent swatch of undecided voters"):

[T]he parties should be broken down into haves and have-nots -- a couple of obnoxious bankers on the Upper East Side running for office against 280 million pissed-off credit card and mortgage customers. That’s the more accurate demographic picture of a country in which the top 1 percent has seen its share of the nation’s overall wealth jump from 34.6 percent before the crisis, in 2007, to over 37.1 percent in 2009. Moreover, the standard of living for the average American has plummeted during the crisis -- the median American household net worth was $102,500 in 2007, and went down to $65,400 in 2009 -- while the top 1 percent saw its net worth hold relatively steady, dropping from $19.5 million to $16.5 million.

Of course it's never going to happen, "mainly because it’s so pathetically easy in the TV age to set big groups of voters off angrily chasing their own tails in response to media-manufactured nonsense, with the Tea Party being a classic example of the phenomenon."

If you want to understand why America is such a paradise for high-class thieves, just look at the way a manufactured movement like the Tea Party corrals and neutralizes public anger that otherwise should be sending pitchforks in the direction of downtown Manhattan.

There are two reasons why Tea Party voters will probably never get wise to the Ponzi-scheme reality of bubble economics. One has to do with the basic sales pitch of Tea Party rhetoric, which cleverly exploits Main Street frustrations over genuinely intrusive state and local governments that are constantly in the pockets of small businesses for fees and fines and permits.

The other reason is obvious: the bubble economy is hard as hell to understand. To even have a chance at grasping how it works, you need to commit large chunks of time to learning about things like securitization, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, etc., stuff that’s fiendishly complicated and that if ingested too quickly can feature a truly toxic boredom factor.

So long as this stuff is not widely understood by the public, the Grifter class is going to skate on almost anything it does -- because the tendency of most voters, in particular conservative voters, is to assume that Wall Street makes its money engaging in normal capitalist business and that any attempt to restrain that sector of the economy is thinly disguised socialism.

That’s why it’s so brilliant for the Tea Party to put forward as its leaders some of the most egregiously stupid morons on our great green earth. By rallying behind dingbats like Palin and Michele Bachmann -- the Minnesota congresswoman who thought the movie Aladdin promoted witchcraft and insisted global warming wasn’t a threat because "carbon dioxide is natural" -- the Tea Party has made anti-intellectualism itself a rallying cry. The Tea Party is arguing against the very idea that it’s even necessary to ask the kinds of questions you need to ask to grasp bubble economics.

The star of "the Dumb and Dumber approach to high finance," of course, is Michele Bachmann, who " If you want to understand why America is such a paradise for high-class thieves, just look at the way a manufactured movement like the Tea Party corrals and neutralizes public anger that otherwise should be sending pitchforks in the direction of downtown Manhattan.

There are two reasons why Tea Party voters will probably never get wise to the Ponzi-scheme reality of bubble economics. One has to do with the basic sales pitch of Tea Party rhetoric, which cleverly exploits Main Street frustrations over genuinely intrusive state and local governments that are constantly in the pockets of small businesses for fees and fines and permits.

The other reason is obvious: the bubble economy is hard as hell to understand. To even have a chance at grasping how it works, you need to commit large chunks of time to learning about things like securitization, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, etc., stuff that’s fiendishly complicated and that if ingested too quickly can feature a truly toxic boredom factor.

So long as this stuff is not widely understood by the public, the Grifter class is going to skate on almost anything it does -- because the tendency of most voters, in particular conservative voters, is to assume that Wall Street makes its money engaging in normal capitalist business and that any attempt to restrain that sector of the economy is thinly disguised socialism.

That’s why it’s so brilliant for the Tea Party to put forward as its leaders some of the most egregiously stupid morons on our great green earth. By rallying behind dingbats like Palin and Michele Bachmann -- the Minnesota congresswoman who thought the movie Aladdin promoted witchcraft and insisted global warming wasn’t a threat because "carbon dioxide is natural" -- the Tea Party has made anti-intellectualism itself a rallying cry. The Tea Party is arguing against the very idea that it’s even necessary to ask the kinds of questions you need to ask to grasp bubble economics."

After establishing our Michele's storied Dumb and Dumber credentials, Matt gets to the point:

Bachmann has a lot of critics, but they miss the genius of her political act. Even as she spends every day publicly flubbing political SAT questions, she’s always dead-on when it comes to her basic message, which is that government is always the problem and there are no issues the country has that can’t be worked out with basic common sense (there’s a reason why many Tea Party groups are called "Common Sense Patriots" and rally behind "common sense campaigns").

Common sense sounds great, but if you’re too freaking lazy to penetrate the mysteries of carbon dioxide -- if you haven’t mastered the whole concept of breathing by the time you’re old enough to serve in the U.S. Congress -- you’re not going to get the credit default swap, the synthetic collateralized debt obligation, the interest rate swap, etc. And understanding these instruments and how they were used (or misused) is the difference between perceiving how Wall Street made its money in the last decades as normal capitalist business and seeing the truth of what it often was instead, which was simple fraud and crime. It’s not an accident that Bachmann emerged in the summer of 2010 (right as she was forming the House of Tea Party Caucus) as one of the fiercest opponents of financial regulatory reform; her primary complaint with the deeply flawed reform bill sponsored by Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank was that it would "end free checking accounts."

Our world isn’t about ideology anymore. It’s about complexity. We live in a complex bureaucratic state with complex laws and complex business practices, and the few organizations with the corporate will power to master these complexities will inevitably own the political power. On the other hand, movements like the Tea Party more than anything else reflect a widespread longing for simpler times and simple solutions -- just throw the U.S. Constitution at the whole mess and everything will be jake. For immigration, build a big fence. Abolish the Federal Reserve, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Education. At times the overt longing for simple answers that you get from Tea Party leaders is so earnest and touching, it almost makes you forget how insane most of them are.

By coincidence, Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles is on the case too, paying tribute to parents who make it their life's work to pass on to their children their "delusional worldview."

[Don't forget you can click to enlarge.]

Tom offers this online commentary:

Way to go!

The economy of the 21st century will be based on an educated workforce. This will entail a familiarity with science and technology and the ability to recognize that peer-reviewed scientific work is a conspiracy. Employers will be looking for people to compete against foreign workers by having the skills to look online and find a Web site that tells them that entire fields of science are a hoax.

The United States is still, even in this era of budget cuts, able to turn out millions of adults ready and willing to cite obscure e-mails to prove that all scientists want is to control their lives. Adults able to seek out and find television and radio programming that gives them CLEAR, CONSISTENT misinformation that they can use to elect politicians who will turn that misinformation into policy.

And parenting is key. If you are one of the fortunate millions who have had these opportunities to arm yourself with a delusional worldview, be sure to PASS THAT ON to your children. This will equip them for a productive life in the global dust bin. This is how the U.S. will position itself for leadership in a world that is changing, in more ways than one.

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Confidential to Wingnuttians: We realize you haven't heard the news, but REAL Americans believe that "all men are created equal"

[Click to enlarge]

by Ken

I'm still pretty steamed about a lot that happened in the course of the presidential campaign, but I suppose today isn't the day to dwell on it. Let's enjoy it a little.

Okay, so maybe we'll dwell just a little. And blame Tom Toles for bringing it up.

I didn't think I could be much more offended than I was by the McCranky campaign's invention of a distinction between "real Americans" and presumably some other, "unreal" kind, including the stupefying lie that only its presumed "real Americans" work for a living. How stupid and dishonest can you be? (Well, apparently, if you're the Princess Sarah, there's no cap on either category. You were born to have contempt for actual knowledge and to lie your fool head off.) But then there was that McCrankyite wingnut who proclaimed that equality isn't an American value, that it's more a French thing, whereas we go in for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

These people pretend to be the "real" Americans, and they don't even know our single most stirring and as well as most defining declaration, the Declaration of Independence? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are of course "among" the rights (not the rights but among the "unalienable rights" with which we are endowed by our Creator in consequence of the "self-evident" truth "that all men are created equal."

There is no more inherently American value, and any wingnut doodyhead who doesn't know it might want to consider shutting the fuck up about what it means to be an American.

I'm just saying. (Okay, I've got that off my chest.)

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With Senator Clinton THIS CLOSE to endorsing the Democratic nominee, maybe we shouldn't rock the boat -- her supporters can be SO touchy

We're hearing, after all, that the senator may pony up her endorsement as soon as Saturday! So let's all tiptoe very gently, and try not to cause any agitation.

Difficult as it's proving to bring Senator Clinton around, the really big task, we're constantly reminded, is bringing her supporters into the Democratic fold. So far the people who claim to speak for them will only say that putting their candidate on the ticket will do it. Since it's looking increasingly as if there's not a whole lot of enthusiasm for this option in the Obama camp, and since some of the Clintonites with supposed inside knowledge of the senator's actual beliefs claim that she doesn't want the nomination anyway (although some of those insiders insist that she does want to be asked, that leaves the question of what else the loyal Clintonistas would accept in exchange for their support.

I'm just throwing this out, and I may be way off-base, but has anyone thought of offering them a pony?


OKAY, THAT WAS PRETTY SNARKY AND CONDESCENDING

Let me say straightaway that, owing to some quirks of blog scheduling, the above post was actually written before I saw our colleague Jon's "Lost in the Historic Moment With a Bitter Asterisk," which wound up being published earlier. Well, the scheduling quirk isn't all that mysterious. As soon as I read what we've presented as Jon's "personal reflection," I considered it a priority to get it up as quickly as possible. I may be biased, but I was overwhelmed by it.

In recent weeks I've been hearing an assortment of stories of the disappointment, heartbreak, even despair felt by supporters of the Clinton presidential candidacy. Some of them have really moved me. But none has hit home with me as forcefully as Jon's description of his mother's pain, and the unexpected gulf that has opened between them.

I might add that I've never met Jon's mom. But from the way he's talked about her, and about his dad too -- a pair of small-town Southerners who brought up their two sons to cherish and live according to the noblest of traditional liberal values -- I feel as if I know them, and they've become two of my favorite people. His mom's pain has really hit me personally, and I would hate to do anything to add to it, (For Pete's sake, don't anybody tell her about this tactless post!) I just wish I weren't the sort of person who would do most anything for a cheap laugh. Sigh.

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At last we have the design for an appropriate memorial to the aspirations of the Bush regime, courtesy of the Washington Post's Tom Toles

Tom Toles, in Sunday's Washington Post (click to enlarge)

In case you missed it, or didn't catch the exact exchange, here is Vice President "Big Dick" Cheney, in an interview with ABC News' Martha Raddatz last Wednesday in Oman, showing that he knows even less about Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War than he seems to know about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq:

MARTHA RADDATZ: Two-thirds of Americans say [the war in Iraq] is not worth fighting, and they're looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives.

BIG DICK: So?

MARTHA RADDATZ: So -- you don't care what the American people think?

BIG DICK: No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. Think about what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had paid attention to polls, if they had had polls during the Civil War. He never would have succeeded if he hadn't had a clear objective, a vision for where he wanted to go, and he was willing to withstand the slings and arrows of the political wars in order to get there. And this President has been very courageous, very consistent, very determined to continue down the course we were on and to achieve our objective. And that's victory in Iraq, that's the establishment of a democracy where there's never been a democracy, it's the establishment of a regime that respects the rights and liberties of their people, as an ally for the United States in the war against terror, and as a positive force for change in the Middle East. That's a huge accomplishment.

[from the transcript released by the Office of the Vice President]

Washingtonpost.com's Dan Froomkin has some fall-out from that interview in his column today, "Cheney's Unforgivable Egotism," which leads off with a suitably stinging response to Big Dick's even more astonishing declaration in another interview with Martha Raddatz--yesterday in Ankara, Turkey--responding to her request for "your thoughts" on "the milestone today of 4,000 dead in Iraq":

"The President carries the biggest burden, obviously; he's the one who has to make the decision to commit young Americans."

Here's Dan's take:

That President Bush and Vice President Cheney live in a bubble of flattery and delusion, largely sheltered from the people who are actually suffering from the consequences of their actions, is not exactly news.

But perhaps nothing has crystallized their detachment and self-involvement so vividly as Cheney's assertion yesterday that when it comes to the war in Iraq, it is Bush -- not the soldiers and Marines who fight and die, or their families -- who is bearing the biggest burden.

And in an era where failing to support the troops is the ultimate political sin, Cheney's breezy dismissal of their sacrifice -- heck, they're volunteers, and dying goes with the territory -- was jaw-dropping even by the vice president's own tone-deaf standards.

Does Cheney really believe that Bush's burden is so great? The president tells people he's sleeping just fine, thank you, and in public appearances appears upbeat beyond all reason.

Or does Cheney simply have no idea what it means to go to war? He and Bush, after all, famously avoided putting themselves in the line of fire when it was their time.

Or are they just so wrapped up in themselves they can't see how ridiculous it is to even suggest such a thing?