brainiac conspiracy

Brainwashing

I know it's kind of a "loaded" term with a lot of pejorative implications, but something very much like it does happen to some people when they're exposed to too much wingnut rhetoric. I know this because it happened (to a lesser extent) to my own father, too. He was in his younger days a New Deal Democrat, and in his old age he became a cranky reactionary who was prone to send out easily debunked e-mail messages about the horrors of government to everyone he knew. Ironic since the stepfather who raised him spent his entire career working for the Federal government! I don't fully understand how the transformation happens, or why it only affects certain people---I mean, I can listen to Beck and Hannity for hours and think nothing besides, "Who would believe any of this nonsense?"---but it does happen, and considering that this 'washing has affected roughly a quarter of the voting-age population, it doesn't bode well for the future of the Republic. At least that's how it seems from here.

---Baron V

The United States of Somalia

Nobody---well, almost nobody---like to think that this is our Republic's likely future, but when an armed mob can run off a government agency performing its legally appointed rounds . . . well, with a liberal policy establishment that seems so frightened of scaring the sensibilities of a group of insane people, you really have to wonder if things in this country aren't going to get a helluva lot worse before they start to take a turn for the better. I'd love to be proved wrong here, but looking back over the last decade or so, putting your chips on worst-case scenarios has been, as a rule, the least risky play.

---Baron V

Why It Was a Bad Idea

Yeah, I know it was a dicey situation, but as mentioned the other day, allowing a bunch of gun-toting lugheads to force down federal agents charged with enforcing land-use law was only going to encourage these people to ratchet up the rhetoric---and if they keep doing it, someone is bound to get hurt. The've been whining and pining for a fight with Washington for years, and sooner or later, they will need to be spanked. I know it's not "in our nature" for lefties to propose the use of force, but these people are afflicted with mass psychosis---and they have guns. For the safety of the commonweal, they need to be disarmed, one way or another.

---Baron V

Bet It'll Happen Again

There are some people in this world who can't be counted on to play well with others. Whatever the reason, they're just pathologically antisocial, and usually, more than a bit hostile. We generally---and rightly---relegate them to society's fringes because of the corrosive effect they exert on our national psyche, and also because we know that letting them run the show is akin to rewarding antisocial behavior. This is bad enough, but rewarding antisocial behavior under threat of violence strikes your humble blogger as, well, utter madness. We've only encouraged them to escalate the conflict.

---Baron V

Can Sort-Of Understand Why They Did What They Did

I mean, it's a potentially explosive situation out there, and they can't afford to keep an Interstate highway shut down forever, but I still think it's problematic to appease a bunch of right-wing bullies, even if they are packing firepower . If the last five years have taught us anything, it's that giving them what they want is only going to encourage more bullying!

Put another way: these people have been spilling for a fight with Washington since Barack Obama was sworn into office. They want a fight? Give it to them, then, because they will never stop agitating for armed revolt until they have been ground into dust and their lands sown with salt.

---Baron V

Saturday Night Music Blogging

Because blogging has been exceedingly lame today since I slept in this morning, and spent a couple of hours finishing my taxes in the afternoon. I owe some money to the Feds but I'm not mailing them anything because "freedom" means being able to decide which laws I want to obey.

---Baron V

Godless Communism

Outside of the crazy factory, it hasn't played a role of any significance in our political discourse for decades. But things weren't always that way! Time was, it was a factor in elections, and while very few communists/socialists were ever elected to office, they were a constituency that the people who governed us needed to serve---especially after the collapse of '29 and the Great Depression, when (if memory serves) membership in the Communist Party was over 1 million people. Of course, the best way to neutralize a potential adversary is to co-opt his/her agenda as your own and implement the most popular parts of it, and that's what our leaders did during the 1930s. The minimum wage, Social Security, collective bargaining rights---they were all Communist Party positions before Team Democrat embraced them. And amazingly, they were popular with voters! I guess what I am trying to say here is, given the intellectual bankruptcy of Team Democrat at present, we sure could use a new CPUSA, no?

---Baron V

Got an Easy Answer For That

Odds of an impeachment vote approach 100 percent.

Too bad we didn't make better use of those supermajorities when we had them. Oh well!

---Baron V

The Not-So-Greatest Generation

Being an older white guy who holds leftist political views can be lonely sometimes. Sure, I know there are plenty of others out there---most of my friends, in fact---but there have been more times than I can remember over the past ten years (especially in a professional/career setting) where I looked around a roomful of people who were talking politics and wondered in silence if I was the only white man over the age of 40 in America who hadn't been driven utterly berserk by crackpot media. The same thing happened to my own father (to a less malign extent), and it has always baffled me how seemingly well educated and sensible people like my dad can be suckered into buying the snake oil from obvious grifters like Beck and Hannity and Palin. Is it based in white people's Fear of a Black Gay Muslim Wetback Transgender Planet, or is it grounded in something else? I really don't know the answer, though I don't suppose it much matters. We've always had our share of reactionaries---they've just got their own media-industrial complex now, so their braying is louder than ever.

---Baron V

No One Could Have Possibly Predicted

That Team Democrat would be blamed for every glitch in America's health-care system:

[T]here are deluded, angry, lying and sometimes totally justified constituents out there who are going to publicly confront Democrats for quite some time and these Democrats are going to have to have a strategy for dealing with it. They certainly can't demean or contradict these voters. So, what do they do? It's not a simple problem. And I don't have the answer.

I do. It's called "Medicare For All." Maybe the next time we have a Democrat in the White House and big majorities in both houses of Congress, we'd consider enacting it into law. It would certainly be preferable to constantly having to defend a piece of legislation that's easy to demagogue, difficult to understand, and which arbitrarily picks winners and losers based on age and income. Sure, it will, over time, make our terrible, overpriced health-care system slightly less terrible and less overpriced, but Team Democrat had to know that once they'd waded into the morass, they would be blamed for everything real or imagined that's been affected by the Goldberg Act. (Not to say they did know ahead of time; incompetence is always a possibility!) Besides being smarter policy, Medicare For All is smarter politics too since it puts the Republicans on the defensive by having to explain why we shouldn't be allowed to enjoy the same level of health care that our parents and grandparents do. At least we could discuss it!

---Baron V

Random Observation

I will never understand these people.

I mean, I don't think it's only about pissing off liberals, though I think that impulse certainly animates them to a degree. There's something else that's almost pathological about this all-consuming fear they have that they are in imminent danger of being violently attacked by the liberals, the blahs, the illegals, the feminazis, etc., in a kind of endless inner Kristallnacht of their own devising. I guess the reason I'm prattling on about it is, these people have been trending in this direction for a long time, and you really have to wonder how the smartest guys in the room at the White House could ever have thought that they'd be able to sit down and bargain with them in good faith. Not smart!

---Baron V

True Believers

Via Digby today, a helpful reminder for Team Democrat:

Have you ever noticed how conservatives who say the most controversial things imaginable think no one actually disagrees with them?

They will admit that, yes, people might claim to disagree. But they will explain, if pressed, that those who do so are lying, or nuts, or utter the non-truths they utter out of a totalitarian will to power, or are poor benighted folks cowed or confused by those aforementioned totalitarians . . . A genuine right-winger will be so lacking in intellectual imagination—in cognitive empathy—that imagining how anyone could sincerely reason differently from them is virtually impossible.

I encountered this attitude repeatedly at my last corporate job, where the workforce was comprised of a disproportionate number of unregenerate dittoheads. They could utter the most absurd things---which they likely got from Fox or the radio---and if you tied to get them to reexamine their views, they'd look at you as if you were mad. As an example, I remember a conversation with a senior-level colleague who, remarking about a wealthy industrialist who was enthusiastically backing Hillary Clinton for President, said, "I can't believe a guy like that would be supporting such a radical leftist." When I told him that I thought a more accurate description of Hillary would be "center-left corporatist," he gave me a look like I'd just committed blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. I'm only bringing this up because it's the main reason why the administration's attempts at meeting Republicans halfway was doomed to failure from the start---and still is if they insist at attempting it. There's no compromising with people who see you as a Hitler at worst, or as a Chamberlain at Munich at best. People like these see only two possible outcomes to any political struggle: Victory or death. Give them what they deserve next time.

---Baron V

No, Not Everything is a Partisan War of Ideas

But in the Village, opinions forever differ:

When it comes to increasing partisanship in the United States, it seems no issue is immune. And that includes evolution.

A new Pew Research Center poll shows a widening political gap over theories about how humans came to be, with Republicans growing increasingly skeptical about the idea that humans evolved over time.

It's an insult to our intelligence to frame the question about evolution---more accurately, Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection---in terms of what we "believe" about it. Darwin's theory doesn't rely on faith, or "belief", to be confirmed. It relies on scientific evidence, or "facts" that can be observed. So in other words, we either know Darwin is correct, or we don't. What we believe is irrelevant. As it turns out, science has confirmed the general outline of Darwin's theory many times over, and if we practiced honest journalism in this country, the headline of this article would read: "Republicans' Grip on Reality Grows More Tenuous." But we don't value honest journalism in this country because if we did, we wouldn't be entertaining the notion that willful ignorance is just another type of informed opinion:

You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist"---out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest.

---Baron V

They Never Really Went Away

One of the things---and there are many---that's most maddening about our political discourse is the historical amnesia so many people, especially in our media, seem to suffer from. Every time some Astroturf sugar daddy coughs up a billion dollars to kick-start a new improved Legion of Angry White People, they're treated as if they're symptomatic of some contemporary populist phenomenon and not as the same old racist grifting operation they've always been. It's been this way for my entire lifetime, and at this late date, it's amazing so many people are still unable to connect the dots.

---Baron V

Credit Where Due

I've always been lukewarm on the idea of filibuster reform, but given what they've been up against the last four years, I'm not sure Team Democrat could have done anything differently. So, good on them.

---Baron V

Random Thought

One of these days---probably in the distant future---we will all share a laugh in amazement that we ever allowed so many of our pubic-policy debates to be hijacked by a gang of cranks, crackpots and conspiracy theorists peddling snake oil for money and ratings. You only have to wonder how many more people need to die before we have that epiphany, and decide to do something about it.

---Baron V

Why We Have Elections

People have disagreements---many times, quite understandable ones---over policy. We argue and debate which policies will best solve whatever social problem the nation is facing, or which policies will improve the quality of people's lives. People then get to vote their choice of policies in the form of a particular candidate for office. The candidate/party who gets the most votes can be said to have earned the right to implement his or her policies, and, as a rule, it's incumbent upon the losing candidate/party to offer some concessions or compromises in order to avoid being shut out of the policy discussion; their constituents, after all, deserve to be heard if not acceded to. That's the ways politics has always run in this country---at least, until very recently, when the winner offered concession after concession on all manner of policy to the losers, even when the losers were in no position to exact any favors. The result, as we now know, was disastrous for both the winner and his party, and four years later, here we are. I guess the point I am trying to make is, you try to reinvent the wheel, expect a bumpy ride.

---Baron V

Tuesday Night Music Blogging

Because if the Republic is about self-immolate, we might as well do it in classic style.

---Baron V

Monday Night Music Blogging

Because the answer to everything is to meet the crazy people halfway.

---Baron V

Hate to Break The News

But it would be most helpful---edifying, in fact!---if our nation's media scribes would stop treating the "Republican Party" and the "Tea Party" as though they were two distinct entities when they are simply two brand names for the same exact product. If there were any "mainstream" Republican "moderates" left, they would have voiced their opinions by now. They haven't, because for all practical purposes, there aren't any. I realize it's difficult for a lot of people in the Washington policy establishment to wrap their brains around the idea that one of our two major political parties has been commandeered in toto by a gang of racist grifters and psychotics, but that's the reality of our time, and continuing to portray the current legislative standoff in Washington as The GOP At War With Itself is not contributing to anyone's understanding when the actual conflict is The GOP At War With The 20th Century.

---Baron V