Life Of Illusion (The Director's Cut)

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[Note: this is the unedited version. The one in the paper eliminates the first paragraphs because the editor was afraid the Party of Love might firebomb the newspaper office.] 

So now, at long last, the election is over, and President Barack Obama will have his second term. Before we get to our discussion of what happened and why, let me just take the time to say: HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!

Ahem. On to the post-election analysis.

I’ve said before that Mitt Romney was destined to be the John Kerry of the Republican Party. Each man was a rich, entitled Massachusetts moderate trying to convince his party's skeptical base he was one of them, despite having once supported the thing that that base purported to despise most (the Iraq War in Kerry's case, the individual mandate in Romney's). Both Kerry and Romney ran against controversial incumbents, with a central message that amounted to “I’m not him.” And both fell short. But Mitt Romney fell much shorter than Kerry. Why? Perhaps because the “him” Romney was running against didn’t exist.

The imaginary Barack Obama that the Republicans were running against bore little or no resemblance to the actual man in the White House. Imaginary Obama was a scowling, far-left radical, a socialist, a fascist or a communist, depending on who was yelling into the mike at the time. Imaginary Obama was simultaneously an evil schemer who was plotting 24/7 to destroy America and a guy who was too dumb to get into college without affirmative action or to speak without a teleprompter. Imaginary Obama was a divisive, harshly partisan figure, hated by all, even his former supporters. Worst of all, he was an incompetent, a miserable failure at absolutely everything he touched.

The problem with this strategy is that the actual Barack Obama that non-delusional people could see was a smart, calm, moderate with good likability ratings who’d brought the unemployment numbers down at a steady if sometimes maddeningly slow pace, saved the auto industry, and brought Osama bin Laden to justice. People heard the Right dismissing every bit of good news, crying doom and gloom, and insisting “everything’s getting worse,” looked around, and went, “hmmm, it really isn’t.”

Then along came Sandy. The quick Presidential response to the hurricane and the grateful reaction of Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who only a few weeks before had been savaging Obama at the GOP convention, blew away any lingering doubts non-delusional voters may have had about both the President’s competence and his ability to work with Republicans.

As the polls showed the President pulling further and further ahead in crucial swing states, Republicans began pulling the blanket of delusion over their heads. Pundits like Dick Morris, Karl Rove, Michael Barone and even the usually sane George W. Will predicted a Romney landslide, with Will predicting 321 EVs for Romney.

 One expects this sort of thing from hacks like Morris, Barone and Rove, but Will really should have known better. The polls were “skewed,” they insisted, because they assumed that Democratic voter turnout would be the same in 2012 as it was in 2008. That wasn’t going to happen this year, they asserted with the all the misguided and uninformed bravado of a latter-day George Armstrong Custer.

Actually, had you asked earlier in the year, I might have said you had a point. There were a lot of disaffected Democrats, particularly on the Left. (Anyone who says liberals all think the same has clearly never been around any). But that was before the GOP, some of its prominent supporters, and its candidates began taking extreme radical positions on things like abortion, contraception, gay rights, and immigration, and saying things that frightened, offended or ticked off Latinos, LGBT people, African-Americans, and especially women. That fired up the very constituencies the GOP had told themselves would stay home.

So thanks, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachmann, Todd Akin, Rick Santorum, John Koster, Richard Mourdock, etc.! You fired liberals up and damaged the GOP brand with moderates, probably for years. And right wingers, dwelling as they do in their tightly woven cocoons where only Fox News and talk radio can penetrate, never even saw it. They still don’t. But numbers really don’t lie.

Now that the Republican leadership has failed in their stated number one goal of making Barack Obama a “one term president,” what will they do? Will they actually start pushing bills other than futile grandstanding attempts to “repeal Obamacare”? Will they actually deal in good faith on the budget?

Well, we live in hope. But first they’re going to have to do is stop deluding themselves that everyone hates the President and the Democrats as much as they think they do and that they’ll be rewarded for obstructionism. Reality, it’s said, has a well-known liberal bias, but it’s still reality. 

Thanks For the Reminder, Mr, Mourdock!

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I think we all owe a great debt of gratitude to Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock. No, really. I mean it. At a time when it was looking like people might start actually believing flimflam artist Mitt Romney's transparently false attempt to shake his Etch A Sketch and "tack to the center," someone like Mourdock comes along to remind us of what the Republican Party really stands for.

I've got to tell you, if I were Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, I'd have sent out a memo months ago telling every GOP candidate for every elected office, from president to prom king: "For God's sake, if anyone brings up rape, change the subject!" Because it seems that anytime the subject comes up, some far-right ideologue manages to say something (a) stupid; or (b) downright horrifying.

Problem is, the difficult topic of rape keeps coming up. It forces the right to face one of the thornier problems of its stance against a woman's right to choose: Would you force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest?

Different candidates have dealt with this question in different ways. A few weeks ago, you had Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, who dealt with the question by denying scientific reality and essentially making up his own. He claimed that he'd heard from doctors that pregnancies from rape are "really rare" - that "if it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

This led to a firestorm of indignation and well-deserved derision. While some on the right, particularly Mike Huckabee and the Family Research Council, defended Akin, the bulk of the party decided to back away from defending the idea that you could separate sexual assault into "legitimate" and "illegitimate" categories, not to mention the completely bogus notion that a woman's body provides a magic shield against becoming pregnant by rape if it's "legitimate."

At least they did at first. Now, it seems, some conservative Super PACs, such as Sen. Jim DeMint's Senate Conservatives Fund, are deciding to try to raise money for the guy who believes in "legitimate rape."

Just as the Akin furor was dying down and Mitt was playing at being a moderate once again by claiming, "There's no legislation with regard to abortion that I'm familiar with that would become part of my agenda" (after claiming he'd be a "proudly pro-life president" and promising to defund Planned Parenthood), along comes Mourdock.

Asked if there'd be any exception to his anti-choice stance, Mourdock allowed as how he'd graciously let a mother choose to live if her pregnancy might kill her. As for rape or incest, he said, "I think that even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen."

Really? A woman gets raped, her rapist makes her pregnant, and that's all part of God's perfect plan?

In addition to "legitimate rape," we're now supposed to believe in "rape with pregnancy intended by God"? I'm glad that, while I do believe in God, he's not a God that thinks women being made pregnant against their will is just what he intended. Such a God would be some kind of sadistic cosmic psychopath.

Mourdock, however, isn't getting the Akin treatment. The party is still sending him cash. No doubt the leadership reasoned, "Hey, if we start throwing every nutball under the bus after he says something stupid or offensive to women, pretty soon we won't have any candidates left."

Honorable John McCain said Mourdock should apologize, but then walked the demand back the very next day. As for Romney, even though spokeswoman Andrea Sauls asserted that "Gov. Romney disagrees with Richard Mourdock's comments, and they do not reflect his views," Lord Romney, the High Sheriff of Flip-Flopshire, has endorsed Mourdock.

He's even cut a campaign ad on his behalf that's running in Indiana right now. This is called "trying to have it both ways." It's also called "transparently cynical and unworthy of a man who claims he's a leader." Among other things.

So thank you, Mr. Mourdock. Thanks for reminding us, once again, of what the GOP really is: the home of right-wing religious crazies who try to parse and partition various "kinds" of rape, and the alleged moderates who have to grit their teeth and embrace them for political gain.

Meanwhile, I just voted for the president who says unequivocally, "Rape is rape," and that we don't want "politicians, mostly male, making decisions about women's health care decisions."

Bring Me Binders Full Of Women!

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It’s odd sometimes how the things you think are going to end up being a big deal aren’t, and the things that end up being a big deal are the ones you wouldn’t have suspected.

This was recently illustrated in the aftermath of the latest debate between President Barack Obama and Lord Mitt Romney, the Earl of Etch A Sketchington, and how a comment by His Lordship made “binders full of women” an Internet sensation.

When asked by a member of the audience how the candidates would deal with the issue of gender inequality in the workplace, in particular pay inequality between men and women, Obama noted that the first bill he signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which increases the ability of women to seek recourse against discriminatory pay practices.

He mentioned education, particularly Pell grants, which allow both men and women better access to education. He promised enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.

When it was Lord Mitt’s turn, he began with a recollection of how he’d hired a bunch of women for Cabinet positions when he became governor of Massachusetts:

“Well, gosh,” he said, “can’t we — can’t we find some — some women that are also qualified?” He went on to relate: “I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks,’ and they brought us whole binders full of women.”

Now, I confess, I didn’t pay much attention to that phrase when Romney said it. It went right by me, probably because I was too busy griping that Romney hadn’t done squat to answer the actual question. But hoo-boy, did some people, mainly women, notice it.

“Minutes after” the fateful phrase was uttered, it was “lighting up Twitter and had already spawned a new website,” according to the L.A. Times. The website  mocked Romney’s phrasing in typical online fashion, with references to various other Internet memes and sarcastic pictures.

It didn’t end there. Someone created a Facebook page that immediately garnered more than 200,000 positive votes (“Likes,” in Facebook parlance). USA Today dubbed “binders” its “Obama-Romney Word of the Day.” It seems a lot of people found the image of Mittens paging through “binders full of women” more than a little creepy.

You knew the phrase was really taking hold when conservative pundits started whining that the Obama campaign was “trivializing” the issue by bringing up the words their candidate actually used. Pro tip: When they’re whining, you’re winning.

Then people who were actually around in Massachusetts at the time Romney took office began to speak up, and — surprise! — it turns out that he was playing fast and loose with the truth. Again.

Romney’s former lieutenant governor noted that the “binders” were prepared by a group called the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus, through a program they called MassGAP. In a statement from that group released Wednesday, spokesman Liz Levin noted that Romney hadn’t come to them after the election; they’d come to both him and his opponent, Shannon O’Brien, before the election even took place, and that “both campaigns made a commitment” to work with them on hiring more women.

And while they applauded Romney’s initial commitment, which resulted in women filling “42 percent of the new appointments made by the Romney administration,” they noted that “from 2004-2006 the percentage of newly appointed women in these senior appointed positions dropped to 25 percent.”

But the initial question, and the big issue, wasn’t about whether Romney’s a good guy for perusing “binders full of women” to find candidates for Cabinet posts. It was about gender inequality in the workplace. So what did Lord Romney or his campaign have to say about the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which, as noted above, increases the ability of women to seek redress for income discrimination in the workplace?

Well, according to Romney spokesman Ed Gillespie, Romney opposed the passage of the bill, but would not repeal it.

Then, the very next day, Gillespie performed one of the flip-flops that have become such a regular part of the Romney campaign that no one in the mainstream media even seems to comment on them anymore: Romney, Gillespie told the political blog Talking Points Memo, “never weighed in on [the Act]. As president, he would not seek to repeal it.”

Once again, Mittens displays the breathtaking ability to take up to three positions on a single issue within the space of 24 hours: He doesn’t support it, takes no position on it, but won’t repeal it.

Awkward, out-of-touch, and condescending remarks, lies and shameless flip-flops, followed by whining about what people are quoting what the candidate actually said. Just another day on the campaign trail for His Lordship.

Insanity Is The Most GENEROUS Explanation

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Thirty-three times in 18 months.

 That’s how many times the Republican-controlled House has voted to repeal all or part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (which they call “Obama-care”), even though they know that such a measure is doomed to fail in the Senate.

Even if such a bill through some miracle managed to somehow survive the Senate, it would certainly be vetoed by President Barack Obama. The most recent vote came this past Wednesday.

I’ve often said that a key quirk in the wingnut psyche is the absolutely unshakeable conviction that if something fails repeatedly, it’s because they just didn’t ram their heads against the wall hard enough. “The economy crashed despite big tax cuts? That just means we need more tax cuts to grow the economy!” And so on.

There’s a fine line between perseverance and insanity, and Cryin’ John Boehner and his merry band of fools crossed that line so long ago that they can’t even see it in the rearview mirror anymore.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that this wasn’t some form of mental illness on the part of the Prince of Orange and his crew. There are some cynics who say that the Republican leadership knew the measure, like the 32 before it, was doomed to fail. There are some who even say that the whole thing was a political stunt.

They say the whole thing’s a ploy to get House members staked out on their positions on the health care reform bill so that those votes could be used against them in the upcoming election, when those impressive voiceover announcers who only seem to surface at election time will be intoning “Congressman Schmendrick voted with Obama” with the type of voice-of-doom gravitas that suggests that they equate that voting record with unqualified support for child molestation.

But that’s hard to believe, don’t you think? I mean, that would make the Republican leadership seem like a bunch of completely politicized hacks who would take one of the 42 remaining days they’ve allotted themselves until the end of the year to address the people’s business and use it for the sole purpose of creating sound bites.

That would be a crassly cynical act by a party that’s decided to abandon the idea of addressing any real progress on jobs, immigration, national security, energy independence or any substantive issue at all, a party whose one and only priority is not governing, but winning.

That can’t really be it, can it? I mean, I know that’s what Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said was his party’s “No. 1 priority” a while back, but he was joking, right? Because that would make them seem pretty useless to the average American.

No, I’ve got to go with insanity here. Another indicator that the Republicans are suffering from some sort of mental breakdown is the things they say about the ACA that are completely divorced from the reality of the actual bill.

Quotes like Mitt Romney’s assertion that “Obamacare puts the government between you and your doctor.” Or his claim that “Obamacare means 20 million American will lose the health insurance they have and want to keep.”

Or the oft-repeated claim, most recently seen in an ad from one of those shadowy anonymous SuperPACs attacking Florida Sen. Ben Nelson, that the health care law’s cost will be $2 trillion, “double what we were promised.” Or the claim from Florida Gov. Rick Scott that a company with 20 employees “could go out of business” because of the law’s requirement to buy insurance (even though companies with fewer than 50 employees are exempt from that requirement).

All of these assertions have been rated “false” by the nonpartisan fact-checking site Politifact. The “business with 20 employees” canard from Scott was given the lowest rating for truthfulness: “Pants on Fire.” And yet Republicans keep repeating these and other proven falsehoods over and over and over again.

Now, some people would insist that that means they’re all a pack of liars who have such complete contempt for the American voter that they think you’ll believe anything.

To believe they’re not seriously delusional would mean that they believe, as Adolf Hitler stated in “Mein Kampf,” that “in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility … for the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world.”

And that can’t be right. They can’t really think that way. Can they?

Romney Shaking That Etch a Sketch Just As Hard As He Can, To No Avail

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Last week, conservatives of all stripes were handed a great big steaming pile of disappointment when the Supreme Court voted 5-4 that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") was constitutional. In particular, the Supremes upheld the "individual mandate," which requires most people to buy insurance or pay a penalty.

The reaction was pretty much what you'd expect from the unhinged right, for whom Obama Derangement Syndrome is the new normal. There were calls for the impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts. Someone briefly changed Roberts' Wikipedia page to brand him "Chief Traitor of the United States."

Former Michigan GOP spokesperson Matt Davis went even further: "[H]as the Republic all but ceased to exist?" he wrote on the Michigan Capitol blog. "If so, then is armed rebellion today justified?" When pressed for clarification, he refused to back down: "You can't have people walking with lattes and signs and think the object of your opposition is going to take you seriously. Armed rebellion is the end point of that physical confrontation."

Later, however, he did amend his remarks to say he'd "take out the part about armed rebellion." Whew. Good thing. Else someone might think the right wing was made up of, you know, radical traitors.

Some conservatives did paw through the wreckage of their hopes for a black eye for the president, trying to salvage something. They found it, or so they thought, in Chief Justice Roberts' opinion that, while the mandate could not be upheld as an exercise of the Constitution's Commerce Clause, it did fall within their power to levy and collect taxes, because of the penalty provision. They seized upon the idea of a "tax" and began waving it about with glee.

"The biggest tax increase in the history of the world!" trumpeted Rush Limbaugh. (Wrong, as usual. As noted by numerous sources, even if you accept it as a tax, it comes in 10th in U.S. history, behind Bush the Elder's 1990 tax increase and far behind that of Saint Ronnie Reagan in 1992.)

But calling the mandate a tax increase, while it handed the Republicans in Congress a new talking point, handed their presidential candidate a ticking time bomb. Mitt Romney's health care plan in Massachusetts, which he's on video touting as a model for the country, contained a nearly identical health insurance mandate. But Romney's insisting he didn't raise taxes in Massachusetts.

So, when campaign spokesman Eric Fehnstrom (who gave us the notorious "Etch A Sketch" quote) told NBC that Mitt "disagreed with the ruling of the court. He agreed with the dissent written by Justice Scalia, which very clearly stated that the mandate was not a tax," he really didn't have any choice.

Or did he? If you're Mitt Romney, you always have a choice, if you regard directly contradicting what you just said as a choice. Wednesday, Mitt raised that Etch A Sketch above his head and shook with all his might to try to wipe out his campaign's stated position of the day before.

"While I agreed with the dissent," Romney said, "that's taken over by the fact that the majority of the court said it is a tax, and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There is no way around that."

Now, one could view this not as a contradiction, but as a nuanced statement that Romney still doesn't think it's a tax, but that it's legally one now, so we have to live with that. But that hands Romney another set of problems:

First, Republicans don't do nuance. Nuance is what they beat John Kerry to death with in 2004. The second problem is similar: The rubes, racists and rageaholics of the Republican base hate the president so much, they will completely disregard anything Romney says or does and pull the lever for him anyway.

Romney could kill a kitten with a hammer at the podium during a campaign stop and by nightfall, right-wing bloggers, Republican talk radio and Fox News would be flooded with pundits insisting the kitten had it coming, and it'd be an article of faith among the Rabid Right by the weekend.

But to independents and undecideds, saying, as Romney did in a CBS interview, "It wasn't a tax when I did it, but it is when it's in Obamacare," makes you look like a weasel. Romney is just that, of course, but this particular act of weaseltude may be the one he can't wiggle away from.

If Romney Ads Just Told the Truth

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The 1990 movie "Crazy People" stars Dudley Moore as an ad executive who suffers a nervous breakdown and starts writing ads based on honesty about what the products are really about.Ads like: "Metamucil: It Helps You Go to the Toilet. If You Don't Use It, You'll Get Cancer and Die." And "Jaguar: For Men Who'd Like [sex] From Beautiful Women They Hardly Know."

After his bosses have Moore's character committed to an insane asylum, the ads accidentally get released to the public and become runaway hits. The bosses, after finding out that they can't replicate Moore's success, turn to him and his fellow inmates to create ads for the new "honesty in advertising" craze.
I think about that movie a lot when watching political ads. I wonder what would happen if "honesty in advertising" took hold in the Romney campaign:

VOICEOVER: Mitt Romney. Some liberals call him a flip-flopper. He was for a path to citizenship for illegals, then he was against it. He opposed amendments to define marriage as between one man and one woman, then supported them. He supported a universal mandate for people to buy health insurance, then called it socialism. He said he was a moderate "through and through," and now he says he's "severely conservative." Sometimes, even he can't remember what his positions are.

ROMNEY: "I'm not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was."



VOICEOVER: But there's one thing Mitt Romney is consistent about and always has been. He's a Republican. Barack Obama isn't a Republican. So there.

BANNER: Mitt Romney. Vote for him. Because he's the Republican.

ROMNEY: I'm Mitt Romney, and I approved this message. At least for now.

Or how about this one:

VOICEOVER: Some liberals say Mitt Romney has a problem with the truth. He's claimed that Barack Obama didn't say it was unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon and that military options were still on the table.

OBAMA: "When I say we're not taking any option off the table, we mean it. ... I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say."

VOICEOVER: He's claimed that his position on the auto industry bailout was "exactly what President Obama followed." But in 2009, he wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times urging lawmakers to "let Detroit go bankrupt."

VISUAL: Picture of newspaper headline: "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt by Mitt Romney."

VOICEOVER: He claimed that Barack Obama never mentioned the deficit or the debt in the State of the Union Address when he mentioned it six times.

VISUAL: Clips of President Obama talking about the deficit and the debt in his Jan. 24, 2012, State of the Union Speech. Fade to the Politifact website's "Pants on Fire" symbol.

VOICEOVER: But there's one thing you can trust about Mitt Romney: He, you know, looks like you. And Barack Obama is ... well, you know.

BANNER: Mitt Romney. Vote for him. He may be a liar, but he's not ... well, you know.

ROMNEY: I'm Mitt Romney, and I approve of this message. If you don't, then you're just calling everyone racist who doesn't agree with you.

Or this:

VOICEOVER: Some liberals, like the ones who write The Wall Street Journal's "Market Watch," say that Massachusetts under Mitt Romney was 47th in the nation in job creation. That during his tenure, Massachusetts' job growth was at 0.9 percent, far behind the national average of more than 5 percent. Some other liberals have said that Romney's top economic adviser has said that outsourcing American jobs to other countries is a "good thing." Meanwhile, under President Obama, we've had two years of positive job growth after suffering massive losses under the last Republican president. Liberals say these things, and ... well, yeah, they're true. But you should ignore all that and vote for Mitt Romney anyway, because he knows how to create jobs. Because he says he does.

BANNER: Mitt Romney. Never mind the facts. He'll create jobs this time. Really.

This is, after all, the essence of the messages I keep hearing from so-called conservatives turned born-again Romneyites: "Yeah, we don't really like him, but he's not Obama." Why not be up front about it?

Don't Bother Them With the Truth

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One of the online spots I visit regularly is the blog of Dr. David Brin. Dr. Brin is not only a crackerjack science fiction writer who's won every award in the genre, but also an honest-to-goodness rocket scientist in his day job, with degrees in astrophysics, applied physics and space science. His blog topics run a fascinating gamut from musings on our future in space to appreciation of the "metaphysical irony" of Three Stooges films. Clearly, this fellow is no dummy.

However, I had to respond to a recent post in which Dr. Brin proposed what he called the "wager challenge" as a way to deal with wingnuts, science deniers and other infuriating yay-hoos of the "ignorant and proud of it" school.

Dr. Brin's solution? "Make it a matter of money." In other words, demand that wingers back up assertions like "illegal immigration is worse under Obama" or "abstinence-only policies are the way to prevent teen pregnancies" or "we're being taxed worse than ever" by pulling a Mitt Romney: demanding that they bet on it, like Mitt did when debating poor, hapless Rick Perry.

Unlike Romney, most of us aren't vulture capitalists who can afford to put up 10 grand, but you get the idea. In fact, it's been shown that because of the slowing U.S. economy, Mexicans returning to their country, beefed-up funding for the Border Patrol, and other factors, illegal immigration has balanced out and is now at "net zero."

It's also a fact that states with abstinence-only education policies have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and STDs, and that most Americans, particularly the wealthy, pay less in federal taxes than they have in 60 years. These are provable facts.

So you'd think asking people who blithely assert the opposite to put up or shut up would be a way to make them, well, shut up. Sadly, no. As I responded in the comments to Dr. Brin's post, there's one problem with the plan, namely that there's no way to settle the wager. Right-wingers steadfastly refuse to accept any source that contradicts them as valid because anyone that contradicts their narrative is, ipso facto, part of the "liberal conspiracy."

For example, a recent article in USA Today reports that President Obama leads Mitt Romney 5-1 in campaign contributions from people identifying themselves as service members or Department of Defense employees, and a wingnut who clings to the fiction that "our troops hate Obama and love the GOP" will simply ignore the fact that the story is based on actual analysis of campaign finance reports and dismiss it out of hand, since it comes from the "lamestream media."

Of course, if you're a Republican in the N.C. legislature, you could simply use your majority to try to enact laws to actually make science that disagrees with you illegal. As reported in The News & Observer, when a state-appointed science panel warned that sea levels could rise as much as a meter by the year 2100 (a change which would flood many coastal counties), Republican legislators decided to try to "win" the scientific debate by legislating it out of existence.

They circulated a bill that would require scientists to use only "historical data" and "linear projections" to predict rising water levels. In other words, they're required by law to make calculations based only on the way things have always been, ignoring the fact that changes don't often move in straight line - they increase faster and faster, like a snowball getting bigger as it rolls downhill.

This, as an article in the online Scientific American points out, "is exactly like saying, do not predict tomorrow's weather based on radar images of a hurricane swirling offshore, moving west toward us. Predict the weather based on the last two weeks of fair weather."

Facts, it's often been said, have a liberal bias. It's meant as a wry joke. But wingnuts have apparently taken it to heart, but in the wrong way. Rather than adjust their world view to fit the facts, they choose to dismiss and mock any factual source that disagrees with them - or kill politically incorrect (and economically inconvenient) theories via legislation.

The Republican-led North Carolina legislature is acting like the church hierarchy that tried to suppress Galileo's idea that the Earth moves around the sun by fiat and intimidation, because it didn't fit the established narrative. And we all know how well that worked. I'd like to believe that actual science might prevail in this case, too. But I'm not betting on it.

27 Percenters: Still Crazy After All These Years

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There's been a lot of talk lately about the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. But there's another number that's at least as important in American political discourse these days. That number is the "crazification factor": 27 percent. 

The crazification factor was first noticed by, of all people, television writer John Rogers. He first wrote about it as far back as 2005 on his blog, titled "Kung Fu Monkey." He'd observed the 2004 Illinois Senate election, in which Barack Obama ran against Alan Keyes. Keyes, as you may remember, was trotted in from out of state a mere 86 days before the election after the campaign of the Republican nominee, Jack Ryan, imploded because of a bizarre sex scandal.
Keyes was clearly a sacrificial lamb, a guy no one expected to win; not only did he have no base in Illinois, but he was also, as Rogers put it, "plainly, obviously, completely crazy ... head-trauma crazy."Both candidates were black, so race wasn't a factor. And yet, Rogers noted, Keyes still got 27 percent of the vote in Illinois.

"They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever, ahead of rational judgment," he said. "Even 5 percent of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behavior. I think you have to assume a 27 percent crazification factor in any population."

It seemed like a joke to me at first. But then I noticed that that 27 percent figure kept cropping up more and more, in poll after poll. Give or take a couple of percentage points, pollsters often find about 27 percent of Americans who believe in things that are against their own self-interest or that are just mind-bendingly ridiculous.

For instance, in the darkest days of the 2008 economic meltdown, after the bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers, the federal bailout of AIG and the collapse of Merrill Lynch, approval ratings for President George W. Bush were still at 27 percent, and hovered around that figure for quite some time before taking their final nosedive.

(Yes, He Who Must Not Be Named, and not Barack Obama, was president when the economy tanked, with his beloved tax cuts firmly in place, something you probably won't learn from watching Fox News.)

After Sarah Palin flamed out in spectacular fashion and took John McCain's presidential campaign into the ground with her, 27 percent of people surveyed in one poll still thought she would have made a good president.

A poll in January of this year on the subject of gridlock in Congress found that 60 percent of those polled believed that President Obama was trying to work with Republicans; 27 percent believed that Republicans in Congress were trying to do the same. In January, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 27 percent of people still supported the tea party.
Give a couple of points margin for error, and crazification becomes more obvious. After the 2008 election, 26 percent of those polled believed that it had been stolen for Barack Obama by ACORN, even though there wasn't evidence of a single fraudulent vote actually being cast as a result of a few registration workers boosting their paychecks by signing up nonexistent voters. (No, Mickey Mouse did not try to vote, something you probably won't learn from listening to Rush Limbaugh.)

During the health care debate, when polled as to what kind of reform bill should pass, 26 percent of respondents told a CBS poll "no bill at all."

Note well: We aren't talking about people who simply don't agree with the administration. That figure is, of course, higher than 27 percent. We're talking about people who do so for reasons that are completely and incurably crazy, people wedded to "facts" that simply aren't true and opinions with no support in reality.

They're immune to persuasion. They're aided by right-wing media outlets that reject the idea of objective facts and objective proof; any evidence you care to provide that does not fit their narrative is, to them, the product of "bias" or an "agenda," no matter how unimpeachable the source. That's one of the hallmarks of true delusional thinking: It's immune to reality, and so are the 27 percenters.

So what can you do? Well, if you're one of those people who roll their eyes at the idea that President Obama is going to send federal agents to check on your light bulbs, or who shake your heads in disbelief when people, after all this time, still put up billboards and bumper stickers asking "Where's the Birth Certificate?" - then you need to get out and vote.

Because the crazies surely will.

Beware the Girl Scout Conspiracy!!

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Beware: When you bought those Girl Scout cookies last month, you may have been inadvertently helping to finance the liberal homosexual aborto-fascist agenda.

At least that's what Indiana state Rep. Bob Morris seems to be afraid of.

Morris recently refused to join in a resolution in the Indiana State House to honor 100 years of Girl Scouting. In a letter to his fellow Republicans, he explained why: "After talking to some well-informed constituents, I did a small amount of Web-based research, and what I found is disturbing."

(Note: When someone confidently cites "a small amount of Web-based research" as his basis for an opinion, get ready for big laughs ahead).

The Girl Scouts (and their British cousins the Girl Guides), Morris' "research" revealed, "have entered into a close strategic affiliation with Planned Parenthood," though "you will not find evidence of this on [their] website - in fact, the websites of these two organizations explicitly deny funding Planned Parenthood."

Well, of course. The fact that they deny an association is just more proof that there is one. Anybody who knows enough to make himself a tinfoil hat knows that.

Wait, it gets better.

"Abundant evidence," Morris reports, "proves that the agenda of Planned Parenthood includes sexualizing young girls through the Girl Scouts, which is quickly becoming a tactical arm of Planned Parenthood."

Wow. I didn't know that Planned Parenthood had a "tactical arm." The whole thing raises the specter of fresh-faced, heavily armed, pre-teen girls in sashes fast-roping down from black helicopters to round up our helpless womenfolk and force-feed them RU-486 abortion pills and lesbian porn.

"Tagalong Actual, this is Thin Mint 6. We have secured the perimeter. Operation Baby Bust is under way. Over!"

Morris cites the fact that the "radically pro-abortion" first lady of the United States, Michelle Obama, serves as the honorary national president of the GSA. Of course, so has every first lady since 1917, so I guess they were all in on the conspiracy too. I'm so disappointed in Laura Bush, but you know, I always did think Bess Truman was up to something. Now I know she was probably pushing the radical pro-abortion agenda while Harry wasn't looking.

Within a few days after Morris' letter was printed in the The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, it was obvious that he was feeling a little heat, and by "heat," I mean widespread derision, even from his own party. House Speaker Brian Bosma, also a Republican, responded to Morris' lunacy by bringing Girl Scout cookies into the House floor and passing them out.

When finally cornered by reporters, Morris defiantly refused to back down. In fact, in classic wingnut fashion, he doubled down on the crazy. Asked why he thinks the Girl Scouts support abortion, Morris proved that he'd learned from his time on the Internet. He trotted out one of the classic dodges of the dishonest debater when asked for proof of a wild accusation: "Look it up yourself." Also known as, "I'm not your Google monkey."

People, said Morris, should "get on the Internet, do some research, contact the Girl Scouts of America on a national level and ask them that question." When someone pointed out that the stated position of the Girl Scouts is neither pro- nor anti-abortion and that such issues are "best left to the girls to talk with their families about," Morris uttered this jaw-dropper: "They're not against it. If you're not against it, you're for it."

Based on this logic, the U.S. Postal Service, the Army and NASCAR are all pro-abortion, because they haven't taken a clear position against it.

In the end, the resolution to honor the Girl Scouts passed, with only one vote against it, after which Speaker Bosma asked all of the female House members who had been Girl Scouts to stand and make the motion to adjourn. According to USA Today, "nearly every female member stood." Asked about the controversy later, Bosma described his attitude this way: "I've been to the carnival before, and you don't walk into every sideshow tent."

Good for you, Mr. Speaker. It's nice to find at least one corner of the Republican Party where they don't let the clowns run the circus. Someone ought to nominate him for national GOP chairman.

Humpty Dumpty: Wingnut

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'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master, that's all.”

-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

It’s hard not to be constantly reminded of that quote when you’re listening to what passes for political discourse these days. Humpty Dumpty, in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass,” was an absurd, pompous, self-important buffoon who had a fine disdain for the actual meanings of words. These days, he’d be a politician.

Take, for example, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s recent address at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. At several points during the speech, he referred to conservatism as the “majority view” in the United States and the country as a “majority conservative” country.

The fact-checking website Politifact, which should know better and usually does, rated Rubio’s claim as “mostly true,” while admitting that the 2011 Gallup poll found that only 40 percent of Americans identified themselves as “conservative.” Another 35 percent, according to the poll, identify as “moderate,” while 21 percent consider themselves “liberal.”

Now, I’m just a simple country lawyer, and it’s been (mumblemumble) years since I took high school civics, but I seem to recall that a “majority” meant over 50 percent. Forty percent is what they call a … let me think … a plurality. Calling 40 percent a majority isn’t mostly true; it’s completely false. It’s like examining the statement “two plus two is five” and calling it “mostly true.”

On the other hand, when Ron Paul stated that a majority of Americans favored a return to the gold standard, Politifact pointed to a poll that showed 44 percent support for that plan, and labeled the claim “false.”

So 44 percent is not a majority, but 40 percent is. Through the looking glass indeed.

(Of course, to the American right, everyone not hard-right conservative is not only liberal, but “leftist” — which does not, as it turns out, mean “any political opinion with which I do not agree,” no matter how angry they get when you point that out.)

Another word that no one seems to know the meaning of anymore is “amnesty.”

Recent attempts at immigration reform that include some sort of path to citizenship for people who are here illegally frequently run into a firestorm of hysteria over granting “amnesty to illegals.” As another famous fictional character once said, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Amnesty, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, means “the act of an authority (as a government) by which pardon is granted to a large group of individuals.” Pardon, in the same dictionary, means “the excusing of an offense without exacting a penalty.”

Not a single immigration reform plan submitted or supported by either party contains anything like amnesty, as it’s defined. The Immigration Reform Act of 2007, for example, allowed those here illegally to apply for U.S. citizenship after paying $5,000 in fines and $2,000 in processing fees and passing a background check. A more recent plan demands the payment of fines and back taxes, as well as community service, for illegals to be able to eventually get citizenship.

Believe me, if you were in court and I told you “Congratulations! You got amnesty! Just pay five grand in fines and two grand in court costs and do a hundred hours of community service and we’re good to go,” you’d most likely fire me on the spot. And rightly so, because I’d clearly have no freakin’ idea what that word means.

And yet the so-called “liberal” media — people who are supposed to be in the word business — let immigration opponents toss the word around without questioning anyone about such a blatant misuse.

Maybe, like Alice in the story, they’re just so puzzled and confused by the looking-glass world of political rhetoric that they can’t think of what to say. Or maybe they’ve just given up.

After all, when you’re dealing with people who can look at a health insurance reform plan that leaves the vast majority of the insurance market in the hands of very large, very wealthy corporations and call that plan “socialist” with a straight face, you’re clearly dealing with people who, like Humpty Dumpty, not only don’t know what words mean, they just don’t care.

The Party of (Conditional) Love

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As you know, I call the Republican Party the "Party of Love," since it's an article of faith with them that it's the liberals who are filled with hate.

Unlike, say, Republican state delegate and Senate Candidate Bob Marshall of Virginia, who said recently that children with disabilities are God's punishment on women who have had abortions. (Sarah Palin has been notably silent on that particular insult to her Down syndrome baby.)

Or the Republican speaker of the Kansas House who urged people to pray to God, in the words of Psalm 109:8, that President Obama's "days be few, that his children be fatherless and his wife a widow." Some enterprising Republican entrepreneurs have even made this a bumper sticker.

Yes, the right is filled right to the brim with love. But it seems that right-wing love is a conditional thing.

- Right-wingers love the troops, unless they turn out to be gay, or report war crimes, or start speaking out against a war the right wing loved and cheered for.

At least they loved the war until a Democrat became president, at which point the war they cheered for becomes that president's fault and something that should have been ended yesterday.

- Right-wingers love the Constitution, except the parts that grant citizenship to people who were born here.

They also aren't all that crazy about the parts that give the right to counsel or to a jury trial to people accused of crimes, or the parts that don't allow the government to just read your mail or tap your phones without any oversight whenever they feel enough concern about your activities. Unless the president is a Democrat, and then they're suddenly very, very concerned about these things.

But they still don't want jury trials for cases where someone was injured by a doctor's or a corporation's negligent acts. Those juries are "out of control."

- Right-wingers love free speech and the right of free assembly, so long as it's exercised by older white people wearing teabags on their hats. Anyone else is either an anarchist or a dirty, flag-burning hippie who needs to get one of those jobs they say don't exist because it's the president's fault.

- Right-wingers love the idea of cutting government spending, unless it's cuts to money spent on them, which they don't consider spending at all.

- Right-wingers love the idea of cutting taxes, but only if you're talking about cutting taxes on the wealthy. A tax plan that raises taxes on the poor and middle class is just fine with them. In fact, one of the right's biggest gripes now is that not enough poor people are paying federal income tax.

- Right-wingers love "family values" and demand that politicians practice marital fidelity. But only if the politicians are Democrats. Republicans who conduct years-long affairs with staffers, and who ditch their wives because "they're not young or pretty enough, and besides she has cancer," are fine.

In fact, even bringing up those affairs is "appalling," because, after all, Bill Clinton had affairs. The fact that Bill Clinton had affairs, however, is itself so appalling that it must be brought up at every opportunity.

- Right-wingers love the rich and successful and think they deserve credit for their hard work and innovation. Unless those rich and successful people are George Soros, Warren Buffett, or anyone who made their money in the entertainment industry who doesn't vote Republican. Those people should just shut up.

George Orwell, in his novel "1984," described a party that maintained its grip on power by a rigorous adherence to the principle called "doublethink."

Doublethink was described as "the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary."

Well, it certainly has become indispensable to the American right wing. No wonder so many of them go crazy.