What's more dangerous than a Right that has declared war on reality?

"I am a biology professor, not a lawyer, and I had never considered bringing a gun to work until now. But since many of my students are likely to be armed, I thought it would be a good idea to even the playing field. . . .

"In terms of the campus murder rate -- zero at present -- I think that we can all agree that guns don't kill people, people with guns do. Which is why encouraging guns on campus makes so much sense. Bad guys go where there are no guns, so by adding guns to campus more bad guys will spend their year abroad in London. Britain has incredibly restrictive laws -- their cops don't even have guns! -- and gun deaths there are a tiny fraction of what they are in America. It's a perfect place for bad guys."

-- Boise State U. Prof. Greg Hampikian, in a NYT
op-ed piece, "When May I Shoot a Student?"

by Ken

The answer I'd like to propose to the question in the title of this post is: A Right that is taking steps to escalate its War on Reality from cold war to hot.

Very likely you've already seen the NYT op-ed piece from which I've quoted above, but if not, it's important that you do, and I'm not going to apologize for inflicting it on readers who have already read it.

As far as I know, history doesn't record the exact moment when America officially went off the Reality Standard, but there are clearly two turning-point markers. There was, first, Ronald Reagan's declaration of Morning in America, by which he offered an eager nation relief from the tyranny of reality, a time and place in which the only standard of "reality" that applied was what you wished reality to be. And second, there was that glory time during the (George W.) Bush regime when the regimistas took to chortling over the pathetic prattling of the loser leftish loons they so chucklingly dubbed "the reality-based community." And the Right has never looked back.

As between the often-nasty realities of, you know, reality and the pastel-colored gazebo of believe-what-you-wish, it proved no contest. And by the time of the 2008 election season, the Reality Standard was clearly out the window. That was the historic year in which every word out of the mouth of every Republican candidate in every race from the presidency on down was a fantasy, a delusion, or most commonly and out-and-out lie. And from the moment on Election Night when it became unmistakably clear that the presidential race, at least, was lost, the Right rose up with every weapon at its disposal up to and possibly including violence to stuff its fantasies, delusions, and lies down the throat of Reality.

In retrospect, it seems clear the correct answer to the quesion "Do you have to be insane to be a right-winger?" was a resounding and unequivocal "You betcha!"

You might think it couldn't get worse, but I'm thinking you would be wrong. Again in retrospect, the escalation of the insanity was probably inevitable. Now it's not just the danger of right-wing insanity which threatens us, but the active promotion of insane paranoia designed to delude captive minds into thinking that their enemies are within reach of having them at their mercy.

At the moment, the form of paranoia sweeping the country is the laughable premise that Christianity is under siege, when in fact Christianity in this country has never been more swaggeringly bullying. The only person the rampaging Crap Christians treat with more loathing and contempt than their delusionally anti-Christian "enemies" is Jesus himself, who is the object of every ounce of psychotic rage they can muster. That's the genius of Crap Christianity: It can, in the name of Jesus, wage holy war against everything that Jesus said and stood for.

Viewed from this perspective, it's easy to see that the groundwork for hot war against the imagined enemies was laid with the psychotic gun "rights" movement. The political masterminds of the movement have raised the stakes from garden-variety insanity to criminal insanity by persuading already mentally enfeebled and destabilitzed minds to arm themselves everywhere they go, even in school and in church. "We're crazier than coots," they have their people saying, "and we're gunnin' fer ya."

I think what I love so much about Professor Hampikian's op-ed piece that he takes the gun-nutters at face value. "Since many of my students are likely to be armed," he says in this letter to the chief counsel of the Idaho State Legislature, "I thought it would be a good idea to even the playing field." He notes that "at present, the harshest penalty available here at Boise State is expulsion, used only for the most heinous crimes, like cheating on Scantron exams," and argues utterly reasonably, it seems to me: "Now that lethal force is an option, I need to know which infractions may be treated as de facto capital crimes."

When May I Shoot a Student?

By GREG HAMPIKIAN
FEB. 27, 2014

BOISE, Idaho -- To the chief counsel of the Idaho State Legislature:

In light of the bill permitting guns on our state's college and university campuses, which is likely to be approved by the state House of Representatives in the coming days, I have a matter of practical concern that I hope you can help with: When may I shoot a student?

I am a biology professor, not a lawyer, and I had never considered bringing a gun to work until now. But since many of my students are likely to be armed, I thought it would be a good idea to even the playing field.

I have had encounters with disgruntled students over the years, some of whom seemed quite upset, but I always assumed that when they reached into their backpacks they were going for a pencil. Since I carry a pen to lecture, I did not feel outgunned; and because there are no working sharpeners in the lecture hall, the most they could get off is a single point. But now that we'll all be packing heat, I would like legal instruction in the rules of classroom engagement.

At present, the harshest penalty available here at Boise State is expulsion, used only for the most heinous crimes, like cheating on Scantron exams. But now that lethal force is an option, I need to know which infractions may be treated as de facto capital crimes.

I assume that if a student shoots first, I am allowed to empty my clip; but given the velocity of firearms, and my aging reflexes, I'd like to be proactive. For example, if I am working out a long equation on the board and several students try to correct me using their laser sights, am I allowed to fire a warning shot?

If two armed students are arguing over who should be served next at the coffee bar and I sense escalating hostility, should I aim for the legs and remind them of the campus Shared-Values Statement (which reads, in part, “Boise State strives to provide a culture of civility and success where all feel safe and free from discrimination, harassment, threats or intimidation”)?

While our city police chief has expressed grave concerns about allowing guns on campus, I would point out that he already has one. I'm glad that you were not intimidated by him, and did not allow him to speak at the public hearing on the bill (though I really enjoyed the 40 minutes you gave to the National Rifle Association spokesman).

Knee-jerk reactions from law enforcement officials and university presidents are best set aside. Ignore, for example, the lame argument that some drunken frat boys will fire their weapons in violation of best practices. This view is based on stereotypical depictions of drunken frat boys, a group whose dignity no one seems willing to defend.

The problem, of course, is not that drunken frat boys will be armed; it is that they are drunken frat boys. Arming them is clearly not the issue. They would cause damage with or without guns. I would point out that urinating against a building or firing a few rounds into a sorority house are both violations of the same honor code.

In terms of the campus murder rate -- zero at present -- I think that we can all agree that guns don't kill people, people with guns do. Which is why encouraging guns on campus makes so much sense. Bad guys go where there are no guns, so by adding guns to campus more bad guys will spend their year abroad in London. Britain has incredibly restrictive laws -- their cops don't even have guns! -- and gun deaths there are a tiny fraction of what they are in America. It's a perfect place for bad guys.

Some of my colleagues are concerned that you are encouraging firearms within a densely packed concentration of young people who are away from home for the first time, and are coincidentally the age associated with alcohol and drug experimentation, and the commission of felonies.

Once again, this reflects outdated thinking about students. My current students have grown up learning responsible weapon use through virtual training available on the Xbox and PlayStation. Far from being enamored of violence, many studies have shown, they are numb to it. These creative young minds will certainly be stimulated by access to more technology at the university, items like autoloaders, silencers and hollow points. I am sure that it has not escaped your attention that the library would make an excellent shooting range, and the bookstore could do with fewer books and more ammo choices.

I want to applaud the Legislature's courage. On a final note: I hope its members will consider my amendment for bulletproof office windows and faculty body armor in Boise State blue and orange.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Greg Hampikian is a professor of biology and criminal justice at Boise State University and a co-author of "Exit to Freedom."

Just remember "that we can all agree that guns don't kill people, people with guns do." And that's "why encouraging guns on campus makes so much sense." Let's hope the Idaho legislature comes through with the bucks for those bulletproof office windows and faculty body armor in Boise State blue and orange. After all, this is war.

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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.

9/11 and the case for reality (Part 1): In the world of science, and in the life and work of Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth

Can you believe that Martin Chalfie, Osamu Shimura, and Roger Tsien goofed around with jellyfish nervous systems? Ha ha ha! Okay, so they shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for work that "led to advances in cancer diagnosis and treatment, increased understanding of brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and improved detection of poisons in drinking water." Still, jellyfish nervous systems? Gimme a break!

by Ken

Maybe it has something to do with the calendar. We all know what day is coming up tomorrow, and while 9/11 has for the last 11 years been a crucial jumping-off point for much of America into a world of delusion and lies, maybe it's also an occasion for some people to attempt to face up to reality, and the massive challenges it's routinely subjected to.

Or maybe it's just a coincidence. But it's been a wildly overstimulating reading day, and when I'd read as much as I could absorb in a day, I realized there was a common thread running through much of it: society's tenuous grasp on reality.

"IT'S TIME TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT SCIENCE"

It all started innocently enough with an eager, commonsensical Washington Post op-ed piece titled as above, by Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN) and Alan Lesher, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of Science, the much-respected magazine on, well, science.

The authors tackle head-on the mythology that has built up around scientific research projects with names that lend themselves to guffawing ridicule from "some policymakers, including certain senators and members of Congress," whose "press releases are perhaps already waiting in the drawer, with blanks for the name of the latest scientist being attacked. The hottest topics for ridicule involve sex, exotic animals and bugs." They cite the increasingly unfortunate precedent of Sen. William Proxmire's monthly Golden Fleece Awards, which from 1975 to 1988 "became a staple of news coverage," drawing reliably hearty guffaws.

Unfortunately, nonscientists tend to be appallingly inept judges of what constitutes potentially valuable research, especially when it's being twisted into comedy material. (Bill Proxmire was an admirable pol in many ways, but not this one.) The authors think "maybe it's time for researchers to fight back, to return a comeback for every punch line," as the U.S. faces the possibility of "falling behind in scientific discoveries as other countries increase their science funding."

We are already investing a smaller share of our economy in science as compared with seven other countries, including Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. Since 1999, the United States has increased R&D funding, as a percentage of the economy, by 10 percent. Over the same period, the share of R&D in the economies of Finland, Germany and Israel have grown about twice as fast. In Taiwan, it has grown five times as fast; in South Korea, six times as fast; in China; 10 times. In the United States, meanwhile, additional budget cuts have been proposed to R&D spending for non-defense areas. If budget-control negotiations fail, drastic across-the-board cuts will take effect in January that could decimate entire scientific fields.

And so the authors indeed fight back, providing examples of improbably research that changed the world. There was Charles H. Townes's ridiculed play with "an obscure technique for amplifying radiation waves into an intense, continuous stream," which laid the groundwork for laser technology. There was "research on jellyfish nervous systems" by Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie and Roger Y. Tsien which "led to advances in cancer diagnosis and treatment, increased understanding of brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and improved detection of poisons in drinking water" -- and, oh yes, a shared Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2008. There was a study called "Acoustic Trauma in the Guinea Pig," and another of "the sex life of the screwworm, and on and on.

Not a whole lot of basic science goes on these days, the authors remind us, without government funding. Bottom-line-obsessed corporations fund almost entirely applied science, the sort of thing they hope will lead to immediate payback. All in all, it was invigorating to have an unapologetic case made for the indispensability of science.

And then there was a fascinating pair of pieces from The New Yorker by a pair of distinguished authors, Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth. Roth's case concerns just a single book of his; Rushdie's concerns his whole life. Let's start with the narrower case.

PHILIP ROTH VS. WIKIPEDIA

Roth begins what is, as far as I can tell, just a newyorker.com blogpost, "Open Letter to Wikipedia":

Dear Wikipedia,

I am Philip Roth. I had reason recently to read for the first time the Wikipedia entry discussing my novel The Human Stain. The entry contains a serious misstatement that I would like to ask to have removed. This item entered Wikipedia not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip -- there is no truth in it at all.

Yet when, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the "English Wikipedia Administrator" -- in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor -- that I, Roth, was not a credible source: "I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work," writes the Wikipedia Administrator -- "but we require secondary sources."

At issue is a statement in the Wikipedia article that The Human Stain was "allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard." Except that it wasn't. Roth goes into great detail about his exceedingly limited dealing with and biographical knowledge of Broyard to demonstrate just how impossible it would have been for Broyard to figure in the book's genesis in any way, going so far at to reveal theactual source for"the core" of The Human Stain, "the initiating incident" that causes the undoing of the protagonist, Coleman Silk. It was, he says, a "witch hunt" that followed the wholly innocent use by Princeton Prof. Melvin Tumin -- whom Roth met when he was artist-in-residence in Princeton in the 1960s -- of the word "spooks" in inquiring whether anyone in class knew two students with whom, as of mid-semester, he had as yet had no contact, either in or out of class.

"Does anyone know these people?" Professor Tumin asked the class. "Do they exist or are they spooks?"

The context, you would think, should have allowed no possible misunderstanding as to what the professor was asking. Unfortunately for him, the missing students happened to be African-American. The furor that ensued over the months that followed led to the unraveling of the life of a man who, ironically, had established himself as one of the country's foremost researchers into racial inequality and advocates for improved race relations. "None of these credentials counted for much," Roth writes, "when the powers of the moment sought to take down Professor Tumin from his high academic post for no reason at all, much as Professor Silk is taken down in The Human Stain."

Most of the rest of the fictional Professor Silk's life, Roth writes, is the product of his imagination. "Novel writing is for the novelist a game of let's pretend. Like most every other novelist I know, once I had what Henry James called 'the germ' -- in this case, Mel Tumin's story of muddleheadedness at Princeton -- I proceeded to pretend and to invent" all the rest.

With regard to the Wikipedia administrator, you know what he/she is getting at in not accepting the author's word as the only word on a subject. After all, authors have a vested interest in telling only their side of the story. It's why, after all, biographers take such a careful, indeed jaundiced view of their subjects' autobiographies and memoirs. Still, you'd think the administrator might understand that there's no rule about the reliability or unreliability of primary sources. And surely you'd expect some sense of reality to kick in by the time he/she hears him/herself declaring that primary sources don't count only secondary sources matter. Are even such august personages as Wikipedia administrators truly gifted enough to evaluate the validity of any and all secondary sources dumped in their laps?

SALMAN RUSHDIE VS. AYATOLLAH-STYLE "REALITY"

The other New Yorker entry in the Author's Reality Sweepstakes is a riveting, must-read "personal history" piece by Salman Rushdie, "The Disappeared: How the fatwa changed a writer's life," his telling of how Ayatollah Khomeini"s fatwa ordering his execution created a new, imaginary Salman Rushdie who bore pretty much no resemblance to himself except that the name "Salman Rushdie" appeared as the author of the novel The Satanic Verses. (I assume it's for this reason that Rushdie writes about himself here in the third person, which takes some getting used to, especially when the story involves other male persons who may also be referred to as "he.")

What's so terrifying about this story is the extent to which the actual contents of The Satanic Verses had nothing to do with the furor. Rushdie writes nostalgically of the early weeks of the book's publication, when the discussion it provoked, often heated, both pro and con, was at least literary -- it was about the book and what was actually in it and what it amounted to.

Even at the time I think it was abundantly clear that the loony old Ayatollah Khomenei, clinging to power as his own powers were fading and his regime's hold on Iran was slipping in the wake of the disastrous (and ultimately pointless) war with Iraq, not only had never read a word of the book, he had literally no idea what was in it -- as was the case of virtually everybody who, for assorted reasons of their own, made a religious crusade out of it. In case anyone has forgotten the nature and extent of that furor:

Bookstores were firebombed -- Collets and Dillons in London, Abbey's in Sydney. Libraries refused to stock the book, chains refused to carry it, a dozen printers in France refused to print the French edition, and more threats were made against publishers. Muslims began to be killed by other Muslims if they expressed non-bloodthirsty opinions. In Belgium, the mullah who was said to be the "spiritual leader" of the country's Muslims, the Saudi national Abdullah al-Ahdal, and his Tunisian deputy, Salem el-Behir, were killed for saying that, whatever Khomeini had said for Iranian consumption, in Europe there was freedom of expression.

Rushdie writes of an interview he did with CBS the morning after the issuing of the fatwa, Valentine's Day 1989 (again, writing of himself in the third person):

On air, when he was asked for a response to the threat, he said, "I wish I'd written a more critical book." He was proud, then and always, that he had said this. It was the truth. He did not feel that his book was especially critical of Islam, but, as he said on American television that morning, a religion whose leaders behaved in this way could probably use a little criticism.

Rushdie was always rankled by the ayatollah's pronouncement in the fatwa "that the author of the Satanic Verses book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death." His old self, he recalls (someone who was dealing with the already-apparent unwinding of his second marriage, and the approach of the ninth birthday of his son from his first marriage), objected at the time that "this was not a sentence handed down by any court that he recognized, or that had any jurisdiction over him." But his new self understood that it didn't matter, that there was a new, invented Salman Rushdie who "was the person in the eye of the storm."

I realize that the English Wikipedia Administrator would undoubtedly insist on secondary sources for all of this. I'm glad to have Rushdie's account. There's even a comic moment on that first post-fatwa day -- though he cautions that "after that, there was no comedy."

In addition to the CBS interview, for which a car had been sent to bring him to the studio, his schedule included a memorial service for his writer friend Bruce Chatwin. By the end of the interview, his wife warned him that there were 200 journalists outside their house," so he had her pack a bag and meet him at his literary agency. His British agent, Gillon Aitken, accompanied them to the memorial service. (Again, remember that "he" is Salman R.)

When it was over, they pushed their way toward him. Gillon, Marianne, and Martin [Amis, the novelist] tried to run interference. One persistent gray fellow (gray suit, gray hair, gray face, gray voice) got through the crowd, shoved a tape recorder toward him, and asked the obvious questions. "I'm sorry," he replied. "I'm here for my friend's memorial service. It's not appropriate to do interviews."

"You don't understand," the gray fellow said, sounding puzzled. "I'm from the Daily Telegraph. They’ve sent me down specially."

Salman appeals to Gillon, the agent, for help.

Gillon leaned down toward the reporter from his immense height and said, firmly, and in his grandest accent, "Fuck off."

"You can't talk to me like that," the man from the Telegraph said. "I've been to public school."

Salman appeals to Gillon, the agent, evidently a tall fellow, for help.

Gillon leaned down toward the reporter from his immense height and said, firmly, and in his grandest accent, "Fuck off."

"You can't talk to me like that," the man from the Telegraph said. "I've been to public school."

And that, as I mentioned, was the end of the comedy. Out on the street he found hordes of journalists and photographers.

He stood there blinking and directionless, momentarily at a loss. There was no chance that he'd be able to walk to his car, which was parked a hundred yards down the road, without being followed by cameras and microphones and men who had been to various kinds of school and who had been sent down specially.

TOMORROW: "JOINING THE REALITY-BASED COMMUNITY"

Which brings us to a stimulating and stirring "Tomgram" brought to us by Tom Engelhardt's TomDispatch.com, "Jeremiah Goulka, Confessions of a Former Republican" (which I first encountered in its posting by Nation of Change as "Joining the Reality-Based Community") and a 2010 Tomgram to which Jeremiah harks back, "Andrew Bacevich, How Washiington Rules." I can't imagine more suitable material for a 9/11 post tomorrow.

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Death is too important a subject to be left to the mercy of rampaging, reality-defying numskulls

UPDATE: New gloss on the eternal question:
Are they liars or just morons?

What was old is new again: Since the "death panels" lies are back, it seems only appropriate to bring back this offering by the great R. J. Matson from last year's holiday season.

by Ken

I know we're supposed to make nice to those poor misunderstood Teabaggers, and bow before the legitimacy of their grievances. It's just kind of hard when, besotted by their newfound power, they're off on a screaming rampage, wildly wielding their weapons of psychotic destruction against every vestige of reality and human decency caught in their path.

Since, on a scale of zero to a gazillion, they know less than nothing about life (I'm deducting points for the preposterous wrongness of nearly everything they think they know), and have chosen to devote their lives to a relentless war on reality, it's hardly surprising that they're both totally ignorant of and in denial about death. The only clue these wacko scumbags may ever get about the subject is likely to come at the very "moment of." If then.

To the extent that the human race has a lick of sense, death is something we attempt to incorporate into our lives, to understand the reality of it and, as best we can, plan for the eventuality that none of us can avoid. But again, just as the Teabagger spit on life, they defecate on reality, and will do everything in their power to eradicate it.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that back to the "death panels" lies. Now personally, I don't give a damn how clueless these people wish to remain about their own deaths, and I can only wish them the speediest possible encounter in the hope that something may perhaps penetrate those seemingly impenetrable skulls. But when they screech and foment and wield their bloody axes to prevent other people from attempting to cope with reality, they go too far.

Of course it served the demagogues of the Right only too well to pretend to go along with what even they surely knew was a conspiracy of cretinousness, that there was something insidious about the sane, sensible provision included in the health care package to enable people who so wish to avail themselves of professional counsel in anticipating and preparing for death. But apparently for people who believe that they have the right and power to turn back reality, this incredibly modest proposal is intolerable.

More power to Media Matters' Jamison Foser for trying to blow the whistle on the media enablers of the big lie:

If Media Won't Correct The "Lie Of The Year," What Will They Correct?

December 26, 2010 8:01 pm ET by Jamison Foser

If you thought the New York Times' write-up of a Medicare regulation about advising patients of end-of-life care options was bad, wait until you see the Associated Press. The Times article invoked Sarah Palin's 2009 claim that a similar provision constituted "death panels," while explaining only that Palin's (deeply false) claim was "unsubstantiated." The AP didn't even offer that caveat. Here's how the wire service's report handles Palin's lie:

[T]he practice was heavily criticized by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and some other Republicans who have likened the counseling to "death panels." . . .…

Prominent Republicans singled it out as a glaring example of government overreach. Palin's use of the phrase "death panels" solidified GOP opposition to the health care bill.

That isn't even "he said, she said" reporting (which is bad enough.) That's just "she said." But what she said was false. That's worth mentioning, don't you think?

Nobody should be surprised when Palin lies -- after all, she knows news organizations like the AP will just type up what she said and pass it along to their readers, without lifting a finger to correct the record.

It's an interesting question, of a thumb-suckingly intellectual sort, as to whether someone like Princess Sarah knows better and is simply being conveniently cynical or is sincerely befuddled when she spews nonsense like this. Right now it doesn't make a heck of a lot of difference. Those of us left behind in what the Bush regimistas referred to sneeringly as the reality-based community have to stick together to insist on, at the very least, equal time for reality.


UPDATE: SO TELL US, CONGRESSMAN-ELECT
JOHNSON, ARE YOU KIDDING OR WHAT?

From Morocco Howie passes on a post from Modernesquire on Plunderbund, citing the case of incoming Rep. Bill Johnson of Ohio, who early this month made a great show of announcing his refusal to accept Congressional health care benefits as an expression of his outrage at the newly enacted national health care package. As the Ohio Free Press reported:

“Lincoln famously put forth the notion that government should be of the people, by the people and for the people,” Johnson said. “This is one substantial way I can show that my commitment to the people of Eastern and Southern Ohio is to help them, not to gain exclusive benefits for myself.”

Johnson said Congress must focus on repealing Obama Health Care and instead adopt patient-based, market-driven health care solutions.

“I oppose ObamaCare because government-controlled health care will create more debt and huge bureaucracy,” Johnson said. “We need to reverse the government takeover of our health care, and we should adopt common sense, patient-centered, private sector solutions like making health care portable from job to job and state to state, tort reform, and promoting health savings accounts.”

Does this man know how to do "self-righteous," or what?

The only wee problem, as Modernesquire notes via the Youngstown News's Windy.com blog, is that the congressman-elect left out a tiny bit of the picture. In foregoing congressional health care coverage, which actually is provided through private insurers, he isn't exactly falling back on a "common sense, patient-centered, private sector solution." As a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, Johnson "has and will continue to receive federal health-care benefits from that branch of the military."

The point is not -- as lame-brained, similarly fake-self-righteous apologists for the congressman-elect have blustered -- that he didn't earn that coverage. The point is that he has declared himself unalterably opposed to "exclusive benefits" for himself and to "the government takeover of our health care." The reality is that his much-derided "ObamaCare" is provided entirely by market-driven private insurers, whereas his military health care is in fact government-run health insurance.

So there's no question that Congressman-elect Johnson is a 100 percent raving hypocrite. The only remaining question is: Is he really that stupid, or is he just another right-wing pathological liar?

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On a sultry August Friday night, can we cope with reality? Good news! Tom Tomorrow says we don't hafta!

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

by Ken

I keep going back and forth about that scumbag Robert Gibbs and the rest of the doodybrains in the Obama administration. And mostly what I keep circling around is: Do they actually believe they've accomplished all they claim? Is Gibbs, for example, so drug-addled that he is sincerely unaware of the thousands of ways in which Obama administration policy is literally a continuation of Bush regime policy? (If I know it, how can he possibly not know it?) Or are they all just big fat liars?

Can they possibly not be aware that just because you call, say, a putrid pile of hopelessly compromised giveaways to the megacorporate oligarchs "health care reform" doesn't make it actual health care reform? Not even if it contains a few sops in the direction of health care reform. They might as well start passing stuff like the Everybody Gets a Pony Act of 2010?

And then there's the growing question, are these people simply screeching incompetents? When you start by giving up half of your original "ask" in exchange for nothing, and then keep giving away more while you're searching for someone to negotiate with, and besides, when you can't even get your offices staffed. Sure, there's all that Republican obstructionism, but it's squaring up against Democratic fecklessness.

I don't know, and it's Friday, and I don't want to think about.

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Have you seen this jolly cartoon? It does seem to sum up the relationship of the modern-day Republican Party to the truth

The cartoon was passed on to me by a friend with the heading, "If George Washington was a Republican . . . " -- and I considered using it to launch a diatribe about the modern Republican Party's wholesale abandonment of the quaint old Truth Standard. In fact, I did launch such a diatribe. It's not that Democrats are unvarying paragons of truthfulness, but at least the standards hasn't been abandoned. (Remember when we learned from Ron Suskind that the Bush regimists derided us fogies who tried to hold them to some standard of truth as "the reality-based community"?)

Let's come back to that another time. For now, why don't we just enjoy the cartoon?

(Of course we can't ignore the subject of GOP lies forever. As a matter of fact, in just a few minutes we'll be returning to the subject of Bush lies.)

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