Are Republicans Really Dumber Than Democrats?

Max Boot is a prominent and much-published right-wing military historian who was early and consistent in his loud denunciations of Trump and Trumpism. Over the weekend in a NY Times OpEd, How the 'Stupid Party' Created Donald Trump-- but without any reference to the ample evidence of the intellectual dwarfism demonstrated by Democratic leaders like Steve Israel, Rahm Emanuel, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Nancy Pelosi-- he further ratcheted up the pressure from the right against Republican hacks like Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the now completely laughable Peince Priebus.

He defends the early leaders of his party-- Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root and Charles Evans Hughes-- and tries to pinpoint when the Republican Party became the home of morons and the severely ignorant the way it is today, pointing out that by the 1960s, "rather than run away from the anti-intellectual label, Republicans embraced it for their own political purposes," citing Reagan, Nixon, Spiro Agnew, William F. Buckley and, obviously, George W. Bush, who "joked at a Yale commencement: 'To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States.'" Boot claims, though, that until now, the GOP embrace of anti-intellectualism was mostly a put on and that "there is no evidence that Republican leaders have been demonstrably dumber than their Democratic counterparts."

Boot clings to the Beltway trope, though, that a well-scrubbed intellectual lightweight and hack like Paul Ryan is somehow superior to an obvious moron like Donald Trump. Ryan knows the lingo; Trump doesn't. Both of them are all about the same things though-- the same kind of elite reactionary policy agenda that animates Boot himself. Ironically, Trump, a narcissist with no political ideologies he's wedded to, is less doctrinaire about it than either of them!

In recent years, however, the Republicans’ relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and George F. Will. The Tea Party represented a populist revolt against what its activists saw as out-of-touch Republican elites in Washington.

There are still some thoughtful Republican leaders exemplified by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who devised an impressive new budget plan for his party. But the primary vibe from the G.O.P. has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger.

The trend has now culminated in the nomination of Donald J. Trump, a presidential candidate who truly is the know-nothing his Republican predecessors only pretended to be.

Mr. Trump doesn’t know the difference between the Quds Force and the Kurds. He can’t identify the nuclear triad, the American strategic nuclear arsenal’s delivery system. He had never heard of Brexit until a few weeks before the vote. He thinks the Constitution has 12 Articles rather than seven. He uses the vocabulary of a fifth grader. Most damning of all, he traffics in off-the-wall conspiracy theories by insinuating that President Obama was born in Kenya and that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination. It is hardly surprising to read Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for Mr. Trump’s best seller The Art of the Deal, say, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.”

Mr. Trump even appears proud of his lack of learning. He told the Washington Post that he reached decisions “with very little knowledge,” but on the strength of his “common sense” and his “business ability.” Reading long documents is a waste of time because of his rapid ability to get to the gist of an issue, he said: “I’m a very efficient guy.” What little Mr. Trump does know seems to come from television: Asked where he got military advice, he replied, “I watch the shows.”

Mr. Trump promotes a nativist, isolationist, anti-trade agenda that is supported by few if any serious scholars. He called for tariff increases that experts warn will cost millions of jobs and plunge the country into a recession. He claimed that Mexican immigrants were “bringing crime” even though research consistently shows that immigrants have a lower crime rate than the native-born. He promised that Mexico would pay for a border wall, even though no regional expert thinks that will ever happen.

Mr. Trump also proposed barring Muslims from entering the country despite terrorism researchers, myself included, warning that his plan would likely backfire, feeding the Islamic State’s narrative that the war on terrorism is really a war on Islam. He has since revised that proposal and would now bar visitors from countries that have a “proven history of terrorism”-- overlooking that pretty much every country, including every major American ally, has a history of terrorism.

Recently, he declared that he would not necessarily come to the aid of the Baltic republics if they were attacked by Russia, apparently not knowing or caring that Article 5 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty obliges the United States to defend any NATO member under attack. Last week, Mr. Trump even invited Russia’s intelligence agencies to hack the emails of a former secretary of state-- something impossible to imagine any previous presidential nominee doing. It is genuinely terrifying that someone who advances such offensive and ridiculous proposals could win the nomination of a party once led by Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote more books than Mr. Trump has probably read. It’s one thing to appeal to voters by pretending to be an average guy. It’s another to be an average guy who doesn’t know the first thing about governing or public policy.

The Trump acolytes claim it doesn’t matter; he can hire experts to advise him. But experts always disagree with one another and it is the president alone who must make the most difficult decisions in the world. That’s not something he can do since he lacks the most basic grounding in the issues and is prey to fundamental misconceptions.

In a way, the joke’s on the Republican Party: After decades of masquerading as the “stupid party,” that’s what it has become. But if an unapologetic ignoramus wins the presidency, the consequences will be no laughing matter.

Even if we can avoid the calamity of a Trump presidency, however, the G.O.P. still has a lot of soul-searching to do. Mr. Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of the party’s anti-intellectual drift. The party needs to rethink its growing anti-intellectual bias and its reflexive aversion to elites. Catering to populist anger with extremist proposals that are certain to fail is not a viable strategy for political success.

Do Republican Politicians Cause Cancer In The States They Run? Oh, Absolutely

Do you ever listen to crackpots like Trump, Carson, Fiorina, Cruz... ranting and raving, just lying their asses off, and wonder who the hell is stupid enough to listen to these people-- let alone vote for them? Or wonder who's stupid enough to sit and listen to Hate Talk Radio and Fox "News" all day, not as a lark but as a source of "information?" Take a look at this chart of the dozen most obese states-- the states where people, literally, eat themselves to death.

Most of the serious diseases that kill Americans or at lest debilitate their lives substantially-- diseases like cancer and diabetes-- are correlated with obesity, but being a conservative in 2015 means you probably don't believe that, the way conservatives didn't believe that smoking tobacco correlated to disease and cancer just a few decades ago. Those states have among the highest death rates from cancer of any states in America. And they drive up the costs of health care for the rest of us. States, from worst to least bad:

• Kentucky 201.2 deaths per 100,000 residents
• Mississippi 200.0
• West Virginia 191.1
• Louisiana 190.5
• Oklahoma 189.6
• Arkansas 188.6
• Tennessee 187.9
• Alabama 184.8
• Indiana 184.2
• South Carolina 179.0
• Texas 160.6
• North Dakota 150.7

Every one of these states is what you would call a "red state." They all voted overwhelmingly for Mitt Romney against Barack Obama in 2012, Oklahoma, for example, giving Obama only 33% of its vote, West Virginia 36%. And except for West Virginia, all of these obese states have very backward Republican governors. And except for Kentucky-- which has a split legislature-- all these states have gigantic Republican majorities in both houses of their state legislatures. None are friendly towards environmental laws nor towards any kind of consumer protection legislation and almost all of them have-- for sick ideological and political reasons-- refused to expand Medicaid to help their citizens afford health care.

By way of comparison, states where normal people live don't have these large cancer deaths to add to their woes, according to the CDC. California's rate is 151.0; Colorado's is 143.7; Connecticut's is 152.0; and Minnesota's is 155.6. Now factor in these charts below of the top 5 state's in each category and see what you come up with-- aside from a certainty that all of these states will keep electing conservative Republicans who will keep enacting policies that will kill them and their children at a much higher rate than normal states do. They serve the interests of what Bernie calls "the billionaire class," especially the most viciously predatory billionaires like the Koch brothers.

That all said, I want to share an article by Sam Stebbins and Tom Frohlich from USA Today with you that explains that although the cost of healthcare in the U.S.-- covering a wide range of areas, from medical practitioner salaries and costly medical procedures, to pharmaceutical products and hospital administration-- is the highest in the world, the outcomes are certainly not the best. They start with a simple fact: "countries spending the most on health care today allocate between 8.9% and 16.4% of their total gross domestic product (GDP) to health care costs... The United States spends about $8,713 per person on health care annually, by far the most of any country in the world. By contrast, many countries, including Turkey and India, spend less than $1,000 on health care per person annually."

All of the 10 countries on the list spend at least 8.9% of their total GDP on health care. The difference, however, between the No. 1 spender, the United States, and the No. 10 spender, Canada, is quite large. Canada spent 10.2% of its GDP on health care in 2013, which amounted to $4,351 per person, while the United States spent 16.4% of its GDP that year, amounting to $8,713 per person.

According to Francesca Colombo, head of the health division at the OECD, "Higher health sector prices explain much of the difference between the U.S. and other high-spending countries." She added that the health care system in the United States is also fragmented and overly complex, with a larger share of uninsured individuals than is common among developed countries. While every country on the list has near universal health care coverage, only 88.5% of Americans are insured. However, under the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. uninsured rate is on the decline.

People living in the countries with the highest health spending also tend to have better health outcomes. For example, of the 10 countries spending the most on health care, seven have a lower infant mortality rate than the OECD average. Similarly, all but two countries on the list have a higher life expectancy than the OECD average of 80.5 years.

However, the relationship between spending and outcomes, and what causes good health is far from straightforward. A number of behavioral and lifestyle factors have a major influence on health outcomes. Colombo explained that "factors outside the health sector," including nutrition, alcohol consumption, and smoking "are important determinants of health outcomes."

Though the United States spends far more on health care than any other nation, life expectancy of the average American is only 78.8 years, lower than the OECD average and the lowest among the top spending nations. Lifestyle choices in the country may be partially to blame. Slightly more than 35% of American adults are obese, a higher share than in any of the 43 countries the OECD reviewed...

1. United States

• Health expenditure per capita: $8,713
• Expenditure as a pct. of GDP: 16.4%
• Obesity rate: 35.3%
• Life expectancy: 78.8

While higher health care spending generally leads to better health outcomes, this is famously not the case in the United States. The country, which is one of the world's wealthiest, spends by far the most on health care. The United States spends around $8,700 per capita each year on health care, more than double the OECD average and well more than second place Switzerland.

Despite the high spending, Americans are not anywhere near the world's healthiest. More than 35% of Americans are obese, one of the highest rate in the world, and exceptionally high compared with other countries spending the most on health. The United States is also the only top 10 country for health spending where the life expectancy does not exceed 80 years. Also, perhaps as a consequence of poor economic and social factors as well as the inefficient spending, adverse health outcomes such as infant mortality have increased in the United States. While in 2000, the incidence of infant mortality in the United States was lower than the OECD average, today it is higher.

2. Switzerland

• Health expenditure per capita: $6,325
• Expenditure as a pct. of GDP: 11.1%
• Obesity rate: 10.3%
• Life expectancy: 82.9

With universal health care for every citizen, Switzerland spends more on health care per capita than every country except for the United States. Higher spending in Switzerland is accompanied by better health outcomes. The national obesity rate of 10.3% is one of the lowest worldwide. A relatively low obesity rate likely contributes to the Swiss' perception of their own health. Nearly 81% of Swiss adults report being in good or very good health, a higher share than in all but six of the countries reviewed.

With more than 17 nurses for every 1,000 citizens, no country in the world is home to a larger concentration of practicing nurses than Switzerland. Switzerland also has a relatively high doctor to patient ratio with about four practicing doctors for every 1,000 residents. With a low obesity rate and plenty of health care providers, people in Switzerland can expect to live to be about 83, a higher life expectancy than in all but two of the 43 countries examined by the OECD.

3. Norway

• Health expenditure per capita: $5,862
• Expenditure as a pct. of GDP: 8.9%
• Obesity rate: 10.0%
• Life expectancy: 81.8

As in a number of other European nations, health care is universal in Norway. Through an agreement with the European Union (EU), all EU citizens are covered by the system, and undocumented immigrants are permitted free emergency treatment only. Due largely to Norway's centralized medical system, $4,981 of the $5,862 total per capita annual health spending comes from public sources-- the highest public contribution of all OECD nations. The high health care spending in Norway means more health practitioners. There are approximately four doctors and 17 nurses per 1,000 Norwegians, the fourth and second highest concentrations among countries reviewed.

As in other prosperous nations, Norway has a relatively high incidence of cancer at 318 cases per 100,000 people each year. However, this is largely due to the long life expectancy. Norway has one of the longest life expectancies in the world, at 81.8 years. Despite the high incidence, Norwegian cancer patients have relatively high survival rates.

4. Netherlands

• Health expenditure per capita: $5,131
• Expenditure as a pct. of GDP: 11.1%
• Obesity rate: 11.1%
• Life expectancy: 81.4

Residents of the Netherlands, except for conscientious objectors and members of the military, are required to purchase health care by a government mandate implemented in 2006. Only around 1% of country residents do not have insurance. The country's health care expenditure, which at $5,131 per capita trails only three other OECD nations, amounts to 11.1% of GDP, the second largest share after the United States. While residents are required to purchase health insurance, the cost is mostly covered by the government. Out-of-pocket expenses account for just 5.2% of the overall cost, the lowest such share among countries reviewed by the OECD.

Like most other prosperous nations spending the most on health care, people in the Netherlands-- even the elderly-- have a relatively positive perception of their own health. Nearly 60% of country residents 65 and over believe they are in good health, considerably higher than the OECD average proportion of 43.4%.

5. Sweden

• Health expenditure per capita: $4,904
• Expenditure as a pct. of GDP: 11.0%
• Obesity rate: 11.7%
• Life expectancy: 82.0

OECD nations spend an average of $3,453 per capita on health care annually. Sweden spends roughly $1,500 more than the average, the fifth largest sum among OECD nations. In 1970, Swedish citizens had a life expectancy of about 75 years, longer than citizens of any other country at that time. Although life expectancy in the Scandinavian country has increased since then to 82 years, Sweden now has only the ninth longest life expectancy as life expectancy globally has been on the rise over the past several decades.

Despite universal health insurance coverage, Swedes visit the doctor relatively infrequently. With an average of 2.9 physician consultations per person per year, people in Sweden see a doctor less often than people in most other countries reviewed. More than 81% of Swedish citizens report being in good or very good health, a larger share than in all but five nations examined by the OECD. This may partially explain the infrequent doctor visits in Sweden.

6. Germany

• Health expenditure per capita: $4,819
• Expenditure as a pct. of GDP: 11.0%
• Obesity rate: 23.6%
• Life expectancy: 80.9

Older people typically require more medical attention than younger people, and more than a fifth of Germany’s population is 65 and older, the largest share in the world after Japan and Italy. Germany spent roughly 11% of its total GDP on health care in 2013, or $4,819 per capita, each higher than all but a handful of other countries.

Compared to the United States, Germans are very well insured. While slightly less than 89% of Americans are insured through both public and private avenues, nearly all Germans are insured on either public or private plans. The country’s universal health care system likely encourages preventative care visits. On average, a German resident consulted a physician roughly 10 times in 2013, more than double the consultation rate in the United States.

7. Denmark

• Health expenditure per capita: $4,553
• Expenditure as a pct. of GDP: 10.4%
• Obesity rate: 14.2%
• Life expectancy: 80.4

Denmark spent 8.4% of its GDP on health care in 1980, the most of any country that year. Since then, however, health care spending has increased in all OECD nations. So while Denmark’s spending increased to about 10.4% of its GDP, it now spends the seventh most on health care worldwide, both in dollars terms and as a share of GDP. While spending in the Scandinavian nation is near historic highs now, it will likely grow in the future as the population ages. The share of the country’s population 65 and older is projected to rise from about 18.3% in 2014 to nearly 23.8% by 2050.

Though Denmark is one of many OECD countries with universal health care, no nation’s government absorbs more of the cost. The Danish government covers about 84.3% of health care costs compared to an average of 36.9% of total health care costs across OECD nations.

8. Austria

• Health expenditure per capita: $4,553
• Expenditure as a pct. of GDP: 10.1%
• Obesity rate: 12.4%
• Life expectancy: 81.2

As in most countries spending the most on health care, nearly all of Austria’s 8.5 million citizens have health insurance. Though Austrian citizens have some unhealthy habits, health outcomes in the country are generally very good. While alcohol consumption in the Central European nation is the second highest among countries examined by the OECD, only 12.4% of adults in Austria identify as obese, a lower obesity rate than in all but 10 of the 43 countries the OECD reviewed. As was the case in all of the countries spending the most on health care, health expenditure and life expectancy has increased over the past several decades. Austria spent about 7% of GDP on health care in 1980. By 2013, health care spending had increased to 10.1% of GDP. Over the decades from 1970 to 2013, life expectancy increased by over 10 years from 70 to 81, a slightly faster improvement than the OECD average change.

9. Luxembourg

• Health expenditure per capita: $4,371
• Expenditure as a pct. of GDP: N/A
• Obesity rate: 22.7%
• Life expectancy: 81.9

In the small, affluent European nation of Luxembourg, health care spending per capita is among the highest in the world at $4,371. As is nearly always the case, the lion’s share of funding comes from the public sector. Just $762 of Luxembourg’s health expenditure comes from private sources. Luxembourg is quite wealthy. With GDP per capita of $91,048, country residents are the wealthiest in the world. From 2005 through 2013, Luxembourg’s economy contracted by 2.1%, however, unlike all other countries spending the most on health care.

Strong economic conditions and high health care spending help reduce health risk factors and improve medical treatments. Due in part to these improvements, the incidence of mortality from cerebrovascular diseases such as stroke in Luxembourg was reduced by roughly two-thirds since 1990. Only two other countries reported such a strong decline in mortality from cerebrovascular diseases.

10. Canada

• Health expenditure per capita: $4,351
• Expenditure as a pct. of GDP: 10.2%
• Obesity rate: 25.8%
• Life expectancy: 81.5

Canada’s annual health expenditure of $4,351 per capita is the 10th highest in the world. As a share of GDP, health care spending has increased steadily over the past several decades from 6.6% of total GDP in 1980 to 10.2% of GDP in 2013. This compares to an OECD average spending share of 8.9% of GDP. Increased spending in Canada has come with improved health outcomes. Average life expectancy in Canada went from 73 years in 1970 to nearly 82 years in 2013. This was not an especially large improvement compared to many other countries. However, like other wealthy countries, life expectancy in Canada has been among the highest for some time.

Canada is one of a majority of OECD countries with a universal health care system. Universal insurance coverage often increases accessibility to preventative care. As a result, Canadian citizens consult a physician roughly eight times annually on average, a higher consultation rate than in all but nine other countries. Frequent doctor visits may play a role in Canadians’ perception of their own health. Though the measure is somewhat subjective, about 89% of the country’s adults consider themselves to be in good or very good health, a higher share than anywhere else in the world except for New Zealand.

"Gotcha, bitch!" screamed Scott Brown at NH Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. Only the cannonball landed on his own foot, which happened to be in his mouth at the time

"Ooh, gotcha!" apparently thought once and would-be-future Sen. Scott Brown. "Bitch'll never know what hit her!" Maybe, maybe not.

by Ken

Normally the modern blood sport of "gotcha" politics thrives on ignorance and stupidity, a perfect match for the virtually achieved right-wing dream of an electorate -- and a snoozemedia gang -- dominated by people with absolute-zero functional IQs (fIQs). Every now and then, though, this dream of a world where political intercourse is squeezed free of any intelligence quotient encounters a hiccup.

It turns out that in America in the year 2014, it may after all be possible to be too stupid. Today's posterboy is former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, who of course is currently campaigning to be New Hampshire Sen. Scott Brown. And man, did the Scottster ever think he had his eventual general-election opponent, NH Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, set up for one of those "Gotcha!"s that constitute the intellectual core of modern-day policy-making. Except, well, except for that old problem of not having a clue WTF he was talking about.

The Washington Post's In the Loop team of Al Kamen and Colby Itkowitz reports:

Mass., N.H., whatever . . .

Scott Brown’s New Hampshire Senate campaign sent a news release Wednesday questioning why Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) wasn’t appearing with President Obama while he was “in town.”

But Obama was in Worcester, Mass., about 50 miles from the New Hampshire border. The president will then visit Boston to raise money for Senate Democrats.

Brown’s hometown is Wakefield, Mass. And for one term, he served the state as its U.S. senator. He moved to neighboring New Hampshire to challenge Shaheen.

When asked what constitutes being “in town,” Brown campaign spokeswoman Elizabeth Guyton said the statement itself clarified that Obama was “in New England.” Guyton reiterated that Shaheen “wasn’t there, even though the money raised at the event will be used to prop up her race.”

The Senate is in session and had votes scheduled on a health-care bill for veterans and student-loan legislation. Shaheen also attended the state delegation’s fifth annual New Hampshire reception on Capitol Hill in the evening.

Pro-tip for the Brown camp: When your aim is to endear yourself to a new constituency, suggesting that your old and new states are one and the same (it’s all New England, we guess) may not be politically wise.

Gotcha! (At least within the standard right-wing margin of error of 100 percent.)

#

Paul Krugman (et al.) on Marco Rubio: Today, for a Republican, "listening to climate scientists gets you excommunicated"

Antarctic ice sheet past 'point of no return'

Warning: In this clip there's every chance that you may hear from (shudder) a scientist. Just thought you should know, and take the appropriate precautions.

"Once upon a time it was possible to take climate change seriously while remaining a Republican in good standing. Today, listening to climate scientists gets you excommunicated -- hence Mr. Rubio's statement, which was effectively a partisan pledge of allegiance."

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column today,
Points of No Return"

"My refusal to accept the scientific research on climate change is a matter of public record. On this issue and many others my ignorance should take a back seat to no one's."

-- FL Sen. Marco Rubio, quoted by The Borowitz Report

by Ken

As Daily Kos's LaFeminista says, "Paul Krugman is in fine form today" -- "nail[ing] the modern GOP."

Institutionalized stupidity is a subject we necessarily keep coming back to in recent years, since the Rampaging Right has made the worship of ignorance the dominant feature of our political landscape. Not surprisingly it's also been on PK's mind, with unapologetically slimy, slithery pandering whores like Marco "I'm Lovely, Absolutely Lovely" Rubio and Rafael "Ted from Alberta" Cruz staking their claims to "leadership" roles as the 2016 presidential rodeo descends on us.

Just to refresh your memory of the story he's harking back to in today's NYT column, here's how The Borowitz Report covered it:

May 12, 2014
G.O.P. RIVALS QUESTION RUBIO’S IGNORANCE CREDENTIALS
Posted by ANDY BOROWITZ


WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—After claiming on Sunday that human activity does not cause climate change, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) suddenly found his ignorance credentials under attack by potential rivals for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.

“Now that Marco’s thinking of running for President, he doesn’t believe in climate change,” said Texas Governor Rick Perry. “To those of us with long track records of ignorance on this issue, he seems a little late to the rodeo.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) echoed Gov. Perry’s criticism, calling Rubio a “dummy-come-lately” on climate change.

“At the end of the day, I have faith that Republican voters can tell the difference between someone who’s truly uninformed and someone who’s just faking it,” he said. “These comments by Marco don’t pass the smell test.”

By Sunday evening, a defensive Sen. Rubio was pushing back against the attacks, telling reporters, “Any questions about the authenticity of my ignorance are deeply offensive to me.”

“My refusal to accept the scientific research on climate change is a matter of public record,” he said. “On this issue and many others my ignorance should take a back seat to no one’s.”

HERE'S HOW PAUL K STARTS HIS COLUMN TODAY

The column is called "Points of No Return," and begins thusly (lotsa links onsite):

Recently two research teams, working independently and using different methods, reached an alarming conclusion: The West Antarctic ice sheet is doomed. The sheet’s slide into the ocean, and the resulting sharp rise in sea levels, will probably happen slowly. But it’s irreversible. Even if we took drastic action to limit global warming right now, this particular process of environmental change has reached a point of no return.

Meanwhile, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida — much of whose state is now fated to sink beneath the waves — weighed in on climate change. Some readers may recall that in 2012 Mr. Rubio, asked how old he believed the earth to be, replied “I’m not a scientist, man.” This time, however, he confidently declared the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change false, although in a later interview he was unable to cite any sources for his skepticism.

So why would the senator make such a statement? The answer is that like that ice sheet, his party’s intellectual evolution (or maybe more accurately, its devolution) has reached a point of no return, in which allegiance to false doctrines has become a crucial badge of identity.

Drawing on his own field of economics, PK says, he's "been thinking a lot lately about the power of doctrines — how support for a false dogma can become politically mandatory, and how overwhelming contrary evidence only makes such dogmas stronger and more extreme." Apparently it's become a common operating principle in economics, "but the same story applies with even greater force to climate."

He offers as a parallel from economics "the recent history of inflation scares."

More than five years have passed since many conservatives started warning that the Federal Reserve, by taking action to contain the financial crisis and boost the economy, was setting the stage for runaway inflation. And, to be fair, that wasn’t a crazy position to take in 2009; I could have told you it was wrong (and, in fact, I did), but you could see where it was coming from.

Over time, however, as the promised inflation kept failing to arrive, there should have come a point when the inflationistas conceded their error and moved on.

In fact, however, few did. Instead, they mostly doubled down on their predictions of doom, and some moved on to conspiracy theorizing, claiming that high inflation was already happening, but was being concealed by government officials.

"Why the bad behavior?" PK asks. "Nobody likes admitting to mistakes, and all of us -- even those of us who try not to -- sometimes engage in motivated reasoning, selectively citing facts to support our preconceptions."

Bu-ut --

Hard as it is to admit one’s own errors, it’s much harder to admit that your entire political movement got it badly wrong. Inflation phobia has always been closely bound up with right-wing politics; to admit that this phobia was misguided would have meant conceding that one whole side of the political divide was fundamentally off base about how the economy works. So most of the inflationistas have responded to the failure of their prediction by becoming more, not less, extreme in their dogma, which will make it even harder for them ever to admit that they, and the political movement they serve, have been wrong all along.

Does this begin to ring a bell, folks?

The same kind of thing is clearly happening on the issue of global warming. There are, obviously, some fundamental factors underlying G.O.P. climate skepticism: The influence of powerful vested interests (including, though by no means limited to, the Koch brothers), plus the party’s hostility to any argument for government intervention. But there is clearly also some kind of cumulative process at work. As the evidence for a changing climate keeps accumulating, the Republican Party’s commitment to denial just gets stronger.

Think of it this way: Once upon a time it was possible to take climate change seriously while remaining a Republican in good standing. Today, listening to climate scientists gets you excommunicated — hence Mr. Rubio’s statement, which was effectively a partisan pledge of allegiance.

STUPIDITY IS HARDLY A NOVELTY IN AMERICAN POLITICS

We are, after all, a country that can boast in its heritage of a Know-Nothing Party. But the Know-Nothings were a fringe party. Rafael "Ted" and Marco are vying for the leadership of a putatively mainstream party. I think again of that point Dana Milbank made so well in January 2013 in connection with the return to Congress of Texas crackpot Steve Stockman -- "the same [Steve] Stockman I found so entertaining back in the '90s. What's frightening is he no longer sounds like an outlier."

Now, says, PK, "truly crazy positions are becoming the norm."

A decade ago, only the G.O.P.’s extremist fringe asserted that global warming was a hoax concocted by a vast global conspiracy of scientists (although even then that fringe included some powerful politicians). Today, such conspiracy theorizing is mainstream within the party, and rapidly becoming mandatory; witch hunts against scientists reporting evidence of warming have become standard operating procedure, and skepticism about climate science is turning into hostility toward science in general.

"Turning into hostility toward science in general," Paul? Hasn't that turn long since happened?


RUTH MARCUS TAKES NOTE

The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus sounds pretty disgusted writing from her familiar perch in Jane Eyre's attic ("Marco Rubio’s changing climate; more links onsite):

“I’m not a scientist. I’m not qualified to make that decision,” Rubio told the [Miami] Herald in December 2009 when asked whether climate change was the result of human activity. Climate change, by the way, isn’t the only issue on which Rubio punted to scientists: When GQ asked in 2012 how old the Earth is, Rubio demurred, “I’m not a scientist, man.”

Which is it, senator? You don’t know as much as these scientists or you don’t believe them?

Rubio’s shift sadly mirrors his party’s. As Paul Waldman recounted on The Post’s Plum Line blog, in 2012, the leading Republican presidential candidates had “embarrassing flirtations with climate realism.”

The 2016 crowd, by contrast, ranges from skepticism to blanket denial. “The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming,” asserted Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. “The Earth’s 4.5 billion years old, and you’re going to say that we had four hurricanes and so that proves a theory?” offered Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

“Climate is always evolving,” Rubio told ABC. Sadly, it’s not the only thing.

EVEN MICHAEL GERSON TAKES NOTE

The man who takes pride in pretending to bring a voice of moderation to far-right-wing extremism writes about Americans' resistance to science ("Americans’ aversion to science carries a high price"), though he spins like mad to make it seem as if the modern-day worship of ignorance comes primarily from people on the Left, rather than being the centerpiece of the 21st-century right-wing creed, so that his column winds up being a moderate-sounding orgy of lies and imbecilities.

It never seems to occur to a useless blob of protoplasm like Gerson that having spent his career coddling right-wing merchants of imbecility and evil, from which he draws every dollar that finds its way into this pocket, as his admittedly piddling payoffs from the merchants of evil and death, he has been a central enabler of the worship of ignorance. (Whores who sell out relatively cheap don't earn brownie points.)


PK'S TRADITIONAL KO PUNCH IS LYING IN WAIT

And boy, does he land it:

It’s hard to see what could reverse this growing hostility to inconvenient science. As I said, the process of intellectual devolution seems to have reached a point of no return. And that scares me more than the news about that ice sheet.

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"The Number One Thing the U.S. is Subsidizing Is Ignorance" (Lee Camp)

"Most of us don't understand the economy, so Wall Street is allowed to caress it, molest it, and digest it, and then run off with bags of money. Our tax dollars are then used to save these fucking Armani-clad poop farmers when they can't pay their debts."

by Ken

I couldn't resist this newly posted Moment of Clarity from the great Lee Camp, #207.

A couple of nuggets from "The Number One Thing the U.S. is Subsidizing Is Ignorance":

We've subsidized our ignorance. Running out of cheap oil? We begin fracking the fucking frack out of every square foot of the country. What is the consequences? I don't know. You don't know. We don't need to know. Sure, there are reports of earthquakes, and tap water that's now more combustible than Alex Jones sucking helium in a room filled with the parents of Sandy Hook students. "But I've never seen any water catch fire!" And at the end of the day we can run our cars and heat our homes for way cheaper than on the other side of the pond. We've subsidized our ability to ignore reality.

Running out of space to put our garbage? Ship it to people somewhere who would be happy to have our garbage. I mean, that garbage is probably filled with amazing shit! Like clothes that were worn once, and iPods that were thrown out because the color fuchsia isn't popular anymore, and perfectly edible edible underwear -- it's only missing the crotch section. Sure, you'll have to dig through 500 DVD box sets of the Twilight movies before you get to the good stuff, but it'll be in there.

And of course check out the website, leecamp.net, for all matters Lee Camp -- news, interviews, Moments of Clarity, schedule, the book and CDs, and so on.

NOTE: Lee says at the end of MOC #207 that he'll be performing live in the coming weeks . . .

. . . in Boston, Baltimore, and Stowe (VT). Details at leecamp.net/schedule. If you're within striking distance, you'd be foolish not to check it out.

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Why Do Republicans Seem So Stupid? Well... Because They Are

In fact, a more productive question might be to ask why stupid people are attracted to conservatism and to the Republican Party. Digital Journal released the results of a four year study of the Republican base-- Fox News viewers-- and they found exactly what anyone who has spent any time talking to one of them would expect: they're really stupid. Not just ignorant-- which, of course, they are-- not, far worse, incapable of processing abstract thought.

The results of a 4 year study show that Americans who obtain their news from Fox News channel have an average IQ of 80, which represents a 20 point deficit when compared to the U.S. national average of 100. IQ, or intelligence quotient, is the international standard of assessing intelligence.

Researchers at The Intelligence Institute, a conservative non-profit group, tested 5,000 people using a series of tests that measure everything from cognitive aptitude to common sense and found that people who identified themselves as Fox News viewers and 'conservative' had, on average, significantly lower intelligent quotients. Fox Viewers represented 2,650 members of the test group.

One test involved showing subjects a series of images and measuring their vitals, namely pulse rate and blood pressure. The self-identified conservatives' vitals increased over 35% when shown complex or shocking images. The image that caused the most stress was a poorly edited picture of President Obama standing next to a "ghostly" image of a child holding a tarantula.

Test subjects who received their news from other outlets or reported they do not watch the news scored an average IQ of 104, compared to 80 for Fox News viewers.

Lead researcher, P. Nichols, explains, "Less intelligent animals rely on instinct when confronted by something which they do not understand. This is an ancient survival reaction all animals, including humans, exhibit. It's a very simple phenomenon, really; think about a dog being afraid of a vacuum cleaner. He doesn't know what a vacuum is or if it may harm him, so he becomes agitated and barks at it. Less intelligent humans do the same thing. Concepts that are too complex for them to understand, may frighten or anger them."

He continues, "Fox News' content is presented at an elementary school level and plays directly into the fears of the less educated and less intelligent."

The researchers said that an IQ of 80 is well above the score of 70, which is where psychiatrists diagnose mental retardation. P. Nichols says an IQ of 80 will not limit anyone's ability to lead happy, fulfilling lives.

The study did not conclude if Fox News contributed to lowering IQ or if it attracts less intelligent humans.

P. Nichols concludes that he wasn't shocked by the studies' results, rather how dramatic their range. "Several previous studies show that self-identified conservatives are less intelligent than self-identified moderates. We have never seen such a homogeneous group teetering so close to special needs levels."

Last year and again last spring researchers at Farleigh Dickinson University came to the conclusion that people who watch Fox News are the least informed of all TV viewers. If you have a brother-in-law anything like mine, you know that doesn't stop them from loudly and incessantly repeating the nonsense propaganda absorbed by their dull malleable brains. Fox viewers were compared with people who watch no TV, people who watch only The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, people who watch the Sunday morning talk shows and people who get their news and information from NPR. All categories were significantly more knowledgeable about current news events than Fox viewers, including people who watch no TV at all.

Fox News hit out at Farleigh Dickinson. A spokesperson for the network told the Hollywood Reporter, "Considering FDU’s undergraduate school is ranked as one of the worst in the country, we suggest the school invest in improving its weak academic program instead of spending money on frivolous polling-- their student body does not deserve to be so ill-informed."


Although he never mentions how the right-wing army is hollow, lame and incredibly dumb, Bill Kristol does mention in the new issue of The Weekly Standard that the conservative movement's "deep disarray" can be traced directly to the huckerism at its heart-- implying there are sheep too dumb to know they're being shorn over and over and over again.

Reading about some conservative organizations and Republican campaigns these days, one is reminded of Eric Hoffer’s remark, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” It may be that major parts of American conservatism have become such a racket that a kind of refounding of the movement as a cause is necessary.

Yeah-- and with better followers. 

UPDATE: HOAX

The Fox News study part of this post was an elaborate, albeit easy to believe, ruse. Everything else was real.

"The Newsroom"'s Charlie Skinner may not be afraid of dumb people, but the WaPo's credo seems to be: "Hey, dumb people buy papers too!"

Invitation to the Set

"I'm too old to be governed by fear of dumb people."

-- ACN news-division chief Charlie Skinner (Sam Waterston),
in the first episode of HBO's The Newsroom

by Ken

I don't mean to do anything as grandiose as a "review" of the new Aaron Sorkin-written series The Newsroom, despite my enthusiasm for the trailer that HBO put up a couple of months ago. I get the impression that people were lying in wait for the show, which made me a little nervous about watching the first episode, first shown last Sunday, but I finally did, and I thought it was terrific.

For now, I bring it up mostly because of Sorkin's wonderful capture of the present state of dumbness we're living in. For example, I scribbled down that line I've put up above. And I went to the trouble of transcribing the meditation on America's lost greatness by cable news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) which comes after Will has been cornered into admitting -- as the take-no-position member of an otherewise ideologically polarized televised panel on TV news -- that he doesn't actually believe this is the greatest country in the world. (That was in the clip I already posted here; see the link above.)

Sorkin has explained that his original script didn't include the scene of Will's on-air meltdown; it was merely referred to in the scene that takes place three weeks later. It was one of the executive producers, Scott Rudin, who suggested that he have a shot at writing that scene. And here's what comes tumbling out of Will once he's had a chance to collect himself a little:

We used to be. We stood up for what was right. We fought for moral reasons. We passed laws, we struck down laws, for moral reasons. We waged war on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed; we cared about our neighbors; we put our money where our mouths were, and we never beat our chests. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and we cultivated the world's greatest artists and the world's greatest economy. We reached for the stars. Acted like men. We aspired to intelligence, we didn't belittle it. It didn't make us feel inferior. We didn't identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn't scare so easy. We were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. By great men, men who were revered. The first step in solving a problem is recognizing that there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore. Enough?

I think it's important to note that this outpouring, as written by Sorkin and performed by Daniels, isn't a political tract. Sorkin writes people, and Daniels understands wondefully that this is Will scrambling to get control of a situation in which he's already blurted out a bunch of stuff he's been sitting on in the years since he finally accepted the conventional wisdom of his profession, that it's impossible to produce a news broadcast that's simultaneously (a) the most accurate and best understood representation of the news you can manage and (b) commercially viable.

Let's listen again to just this bit:

"We aspired to intelligence, we didn't belittle it. It didn't make us feel inferior. . . . We were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed."

I can't help connecting this to a couple of recent cries for help I encountered -- both, by coincidence, on washingtonpost.com.

I. "[Obama] is a phony and a liar despite all the propaganda
spewing from the white house. You leftists are pathetic."

In a recent WaPo "In the Loop" column, wrote admiringly about his WaPo colleague Dave Maraniss's much-talked-about new book Barack Obama: The Story ("An Obama book the Obamas should read"): "your typical Maraniss book: beautifully written, meticulously researched, a serious effort to understand a complex character."

The goofy political canards of the "Muslim Kenyan" -- so much fun for the fringe for a while -- melt away as Maraniss talks to a teacher at the Catholic elementary school that Obama attended in Indonesia. The "birther" silliness evaporates as he talks to folks who were in Honolulu when Obama was born.

Al goes on to cite Maraniss's correction of "many tales in the president's best-selling memoir, Dreams From My Father" (which Maraniss describes, not as "fiction," but as "literature"). and of "the family lore about his stepfather's dad being killed in Indonesia.

Al ventures:

Obama's dope-smoking days, the constant search for where he fit in, the aloofness, the wariness -- all are explored. His years in school in Hawaii, it would appear, may be the most useful for understanding Obama's approach to dealing with people and situations.

And near the top of the slate of reader comments, washingtonpost.com has been brandishing this one from johnst893:

NUTS. He is a phony and a liar despite all the propaganda spewing from the white house. You leftists are pathetic.

I think it's important to step back and reflect that this outburst, which is far from narrowly held among the citizenry, is "independent of accuracy," to borrow the outrageous political-science euphemism I was horrified to encounter recently. It is in fact based on absolutely nothing that can be observed in the real world. And yet, shamefully, it has been tolerated and even encouraged by lying scum occupying the rightward half of our political spectrum.

II. "In short, Obama has made a difference during
the Arab Spring mostly by not making a difference."

At least that's only a reader comment. I was already stewing over a column written by the Post's deputy editorial page editor, Jackson Diehl, "Is Obama to blame for the Arab Spring’s failures?" In case you're wondering, I'll spare you having to read this pile of imbecilic, lying puke, and break the news that the answer is a resounding YES!!!

Apparently, you can't slip anything past this genius. He has looked up and discovered: "Today the badly misnamed 'Arab Spring”'is beginning to look like an epic mess." As if everyone with a working brain didn't foresee pretty much this exact outcome.

But because our Jackson is both an imbecile and an ideological hooligan, it's apparently all news to him. And so he's been running around to breathlessly pump "experts" to find out what went wrong. "Predictably," he writes, "the answers have been widely varying, and often contradictory. But there are two points of consensus: Of course the United States and its president had an influence on how things turned out; and, for the most part, it was a negative one."

Which already means that he's chosen his "experts" imbecilically, because anyone who actually looked at the situation with a working brain could have seen that while the downsides forecast by all those partisan observers were all correct, none of the upsides had a lick of a chance of taking hold. And you would think the lamebrain would be able to see this from the diametrically conflicting nature of the opinions he has gathered. But no.

Taken together, these disparate comments actually add up to a coherent critique. Obama’s biggest failing in the Arab Spring is not that he chose the wrong side; it is that he has waffled back and forth. He has been consistently indecisive, irresolute and reluctant to act. As a result he has alienated both regimes and revolutionaries, and squandered U.S. leverage.

This is arrant nonsense. And it's no wonder that it leads to one of the stupidest pieces of drivel I've ever read:

In short, Obama has made a difference during the Arab Spring mostly by not making a difference. By failing to decisively use U.S. aid, diplomatic influence and military power to support the removal of dictators and the beginning of democratic transformation, he has helped tip the balance toward the old regimes -- or chaos. No, the mess is not his fault. But he deserves a share of the blame.

But of course there was no point at which the U.S. had any leverage to prevent an outcome of either the survival of the old regimes or chaos. Every action we could have taken would have produced a reaction that would have sped the path to one or the other of those outcomes. It's only because our Jackson went in with an answer to his question of whether it was Obama's fault that he is able to miss this. Well, that and the fact that he apparently doesn't know a frigging thing about the Middle East or the Arab world. He's just a brain-dead thug for hire.

Which brings us to the question of why a supposedly reputable newspaper would be hiring him in any capacity, let alone as deputy editorial page editor and a columnist specializing in foreign affairs. I think it's safe to say that, unlike The Newsroom's Charlie Skinner, the Post is by no means "too old to be governed by fear of dumb people." Apparently at the Post they're not only afraid of dumb people, they worship them.

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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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DWT Quiz answer: Who noticed that things that happen to stupid people keep happening to him?

For today's DWT Quiz, we asked who wondered:

"How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?"

It's a thought that, goodness knows, could or even should have occurred to Chimpy the Prez, GOP presidential pretender Sen. John McCain, Attorney General Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales, and former DCI George Tenet. Alas, it appears that these gentlemen have an even lower level of self-awareness than the person one would have thought the least self-aware (cartoon or otherwise) on the planet:

Homer Simpson


A special nod to reader "me" for nailing this one:

"While this could easily have been spoken by any of them, only Homer is smart enough to know that he's dumb."