Newt: Giving Iowans What They Want

There is a theory being espoused by conservative and liberal pundits alike that one of the factors powering Newt Gingrich in the polls is the idea among Republicans that “the Professor” could wipe the floor with Barack Obama in a debate.  Paul Waldman explains the idea here:

If you aren’t tuned in to conservative media – the radio shows, television shows, and websites where the base Republican voter lives – you might not be aware of how powerful this impulse is.  Many conservatives are positively obsessed with the idea that contrary to all appearances, Barack Obama is kind of a dolt.  There’s lots of talk about how Obama only got into Columbia and Harvard Law School because of affirmative action (you may remember noted highbrow intellectual Donald Trump making this claim), and endless jokes about Obama overusing teleprompters, with the idea that he’s too dumb to give an extemporaneous speech sometimes implied and sometimes stated outright.

So many conservatives have a fantasy that if they nominate their own smart guy, he’ll show the world that they’ve been right all along, that Obama is really a numbskull whom people only believe is smart because the liberal media sing his praises . . . .

. . . . [T]o many Republicans, Newt offers the opportunity not just to defeat Obama but to expose him as a fraud.

It makes sense to me that a sizeable chunk of the Republican base would believe this about President Obama, and that it would be important to them to win the election by humiliating Obama and the Liberals as much as possible.  Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that these voters care more about humiliating Obama and the Liberals than about actually winning the election in the first place.  As mentioned here, and here Republicans don’t debate political ideas, Republicans wage war against political demons.

(Bonus Romney quote from last night’s debate:  “There are Democrats who love America.”  This should not go unremarked.  Romney delivered that line like he was saying something revelatory, like it would surprise his audience to learn that there are at least some Democrats who are not actively working to destroy the United States of America.  I tell you, the entire GOP is barking, staring mad.)

And for those Republican voters looking for assurances that Newt Gingrich might just make their dreams of domination and humiliation come true . . . well, Newt turned in a pretty good performance last night.  I’m sure that any doubts such voters may have been harboring on that score were put to rest.

Rick Perry's Ad Signals Republican Ragnarok

Surely by now you’ve seen the Rick Perry YouTube ad that is the latest faceplant his campaign has engineered for him.  The rocket scientists in charge of his run at the Oval Office forgot to turn off the YouTube “like/dislike” button, and so far the odious thing’s received the second most “dislikes” YouTube ever has recorded. The only thing the American public hates more than this Perry ad is Justin Bieber’s video for “Baby.”

(In all honesty . . . I think that is the correct call.)

The ad features Perry, all saddle-faced and aw-shucksin’ it in an outdoor scene shot somewhere in Deutschland, explaining that he loves him some Baby Jeebus and he hates him some gays.  He especially hates them military gays that volunteer to fight and risk their lives for America.  Just thinkin’ ‘bout them gays makes him shudder and feel all icky inside.  The thing might almost be a Stephen Colbert parody but Perry apparently intended for it to be taken seriously, so others have been forced to provide the parody for which the thing so desperately cries out.  The meta-parody, as it were:

A Conscientious Objector in the War on Christmas

During The Daily Show’s first segment last night, Jon Stewart went after Fox News for again turning the Holiday Season into a trumped up culture clash that Fox insists on describing as “The War on Christmas.”  Once again, blogger doesn’t seem to be able to embed video from The Daily Show but you can watch it here.  (It really is very funny.)

As always, right-wingers’ complaints about their so-called ‘War on Christmas’ devolve to an assertion that “America is Christian nation” and – when called upon to defend this patently untrue statement – they point to the Pilgrims, who settled in New England seeking ‘religious freedom.’ 

(For the record, Americans may be a Christian people – by and large – but that does not make us a Christian nation.  The First Amendment makes clear that the government is to neither establish a religion nor to interfere with its citizens’ religious observances.  Our governing document, in other words, is religion neutral.  Of course, being ‘neutral toward’ religion is not the same as being ‘hostile toward’ religion.)

But hearing this sort of stuff always sticks in my craw, because it is very, very stupid.  I can never help but think that the people who make this argument betray that they never acquired more than a Fourth Grade education of American history, and that they should by all rights be embarrassed by their own ignorance.  So let me get just a few things off of my chest:

Hoffa Got "Ahmadinejadized"

UPDATED BELOW


The insane amount of tsuris and pearl-clutching that has arisen out of Teamsters’ President James Hoffa’s Labor Day speech and whether an apology is in order, or whether President Obama should distance himself from those comments is . . . well, insane.  This is an entirely manufactured scandal, the outrage exhibited by Teabaggers and the Fox News chasing media having been conjured out of thin air. 

Unfortunately, this is also nothing new.  Manufacturing outrage by misquoting a political speaker in order to make it appear that speaker was advocating violence is an old way to demonize one’s enemies.  When that occurs in connection with domestic politics, as here, it is just a sad commentary on the state of our discourse and how easily the Republican Wurlitzer can mislead a large swathe of the American public in order to gin up the GOP base against their political enemies.

But when it occurs in the context of talking about – say – Iran, it becomes something much more dangerous, because it provides grist for the warmongers among us who are still so very, very anxious to march on Tehran.

Fox Viewers Are Not Confused

Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly had a quick post up yesterday (completely with video clip and everything) pointing out that just a few weeks ago, when Conservatives were downplaying the threat involved in downgrading the nation’s credit rating, you could find people like Neil Cavuto, Fox’s vice president of business news, saying things like “I would welcome a downgrade.  I really would.  I think it would be the pain from which we have a gain.”  And yet now that Standard & Poor has in fact downgraded the U.S. debt Fox is telling its viewers that this “is a tragedy that must be blamed on the White House.”  Benen concludes with the observation that “[t]here’s a good reason Fox viewers seem so confused so often.”

Benen’s conclusion is correct, of course, but only because it includes the word “seem.”  Fox viewers seem confused to people in the Reality-based community, but the fact remains that they are not confused at all.  Not if you define “confused” as I do, to mean “uncertain, unsure or puzzled.”  I live in a red part of a Red State, and there are plenty of loyal Fox News viewers around here.  Something you cannot call these people is “uncertain, unsure or puzzled.”  At any given time they have an understanding of their world that is breathtaking for its clarity, and a commitment to that understanding that brooks no doubt or indecision.  The only reason their understanding “seems confused” to people in the Reality-based community is because that understanding changes constantly and fluidly as necessary to adapt to whatever change in circumstances presents itself.

How Roger Ailes's Solipsism Might Doom the GOP

I’ve long been fascinated by the kind of mental blinders we get saddled with, or we saddle ourselves with, as we go through life.  It always has seemed to me that one of the greatest difficulties we humans have with accurately understanding the World around us is that by the time we start actively contemplating that World we already and subconsciously have filtered it into various mental constructs that inform our understanding of it.  And those unconscious constructs are not necessarily accurate.

One of the biggest such unconscious filters is the implicit assumption that most people understand the World and their relationship to it the same way we each do.  We have a strong tendency, whenever we meet somebody new or we abstractly contemplate what “the people” think, to believe that a new person or “the people” think pretty much along the same lines that we ourselves do.

Very probably, at least some of this results from the fact that “[w]e are cursed by the limits of our own perception to see ourselves as the center of the Universe.”  It is simply impossible for us to understand our unique experience of the World other than with ourselves at the center of it because that is how we are forced to perceive it.  This is what is meant by the lament that it is impossible to really place yourself in the position of anyone else.  If you try hard you might be able to imagine what somebody else is experiencing or thinking, but you can’t really know.

Then there is that cliched phrase “the fish will be the last to discover water.”  This is generally true for each of us.  Immersed as we are in the necessarily singular and exclusive point of view we each are saddled with, we assume that of course everybody experiences the World the same way we do, and forget that in fact nobody experiences the World precisely same way each of us do.