The Reality Free World of Trump's Base

A piece in New York Magazine looks at the Kool-Aid drinking supporters of Donald Trump who continue to argue that any news stories - or anything else that reflects poorly on their Dear Leader  - is "fake news."  It's understandable that many find it difficult to admit that their were played for fools or allowed their baser - and racist - instincts to lead them into voting for an unfit individual who increasingly appears to have colluded with an enemy foreign power.   The levels of denial are mind boggling. Indeed, driving back from a court appearance for a client yesterday, I caught a portion  of Michael Smerconish's radio show where he was taking calls from Trump supporters.  Let's just say the abuse showered by some of the callers was shocking.  One caller even welcomed collusion with Russia and said that Putin "was our friend" and that the Russians were "Christians."  Here are highlights from the New York Magazine piece:

With the New York Times breaking the story of a June 2016 meeting involving Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort with a Russian lawyer (according to Trump Jr. himself) who claimed to have damaging information on Hillary Clinton, the excitement is again mounting among Trump critics that (as an ABC headline put it) “fire peers out from Trump-Russia smoke.” 

But, as the various stages of reporting on the meeting in June 2016 have played out, the reaction from Trumpland’s corner of the news media has not betrayed any fear that the president’s own family might have been caught colluding with an agent of a foreign power who sought to tamper with a U.S. national election. The New York Post’s Michael Walsh called the story a “big yawn” and an effort to revive a “resentful smear cooked up in the immediate aftermath of Clinton’s stunning defeat last fall.” . . . . Fox News is focused on undermining the idea that Veselnitskaya was a “Kremlin crony” at the time of the meeting. Kellyanne Conway answered a question from Chris Cuomo on CNN about the new revelations with the deeply entrenched Trump countercharge that his enemies have created the Russia story to distract attention from the administration’s brilliant successes. . . . What bothers me is, there does not seem to be any type of disclosure about Team Trump and Russia that shakes its aggressive self-confidence. And that may be because it had done such a good job of convincing its political base that all criticism is maliciously partisan. At Vox, Lindsay Maizland reports how deeply Trump’s “fake news” charge about the Russia investigation has been absorbed by his fans in precisely those heartland rural and small-town areas that did so much to lift him to the presidency: When I recently visited my hometown and one other small town in Michigan that went for Trump, I talked with residents about the investigation. Nearly every single person I spoke with said the same thing: The media just needs to leave Trump alone, and the Russia investigation is a distraction.

A message of total disdain for media reporting is certainly falling on receptive ears. As a survey from Pew Research records, among self-identified Republicans the approval/disapproval ratio for “national news media” is 10/85. . . . . This gives him, at least among “the base” and its own allied media outlets, an extra layer of heavy insulation against bad news. In Trumpland, to a considerable extent, bad news is by definition fake.

So how does one explain this embrace of ignorance and refusal to see objective reality?  In one of a series of special reports, The Economist looked at Trump supporters and found a sort of "group think" as part of the explanation  The piece is here. Another piece here found that racism had in fact player a role in the behavior of Trump supporters.  Here are highlights from the first piece:

“IT’S A WONDERFUL day under President Trump! Please leave a message,” chirps the answerphone at the Palm Beach Republican Club, which sits on a palm-tree-lined avenue with a crossroads at one end and the turquoise Atlantic at the other. If Mar-a-Lago is Versailles, then this is its local village, whose inhabitants get occasional glimpses of the royal carriages. 

Palm Beach is about as different from rural Kansas as it is possible to be, yet the way the president’s supporters talk about him in both places is much the same: he’s a businessman, he’s trying to do the right thing, Congress is getting in his way, the media are painting him as a bad man which he’s not, and anyway the country was a disaster under Obama. In the time your correspondent spent in West Virginia, Kansas, Georgia, Alabama and Florida talking to mayors of small towns, local Republican Party bosses and ordinary folk who voted for the president, nobody spontaneously raised the lingering scandal over Russian meddling in the presidential election, and hardly anybody showed buyer’s remorse.

Go back 50 years, and if you knew someone’s income, you could predict, with reasonable accuracy, how they would vote. That is no longer true (see chart). From Florida’s golf courses to rural Appalachia, from Midwestern blue-collar suburbs to California’s bougainvillea-lined driveways, where some of the most prominent pro-Trump intellectuals grew up, the tribes that make up the president’s support are bound together by something powerful that has little to do with their economic fortunes.

To be fair, not everybody in America thinks it’s a wonderful day under President Trump.  Plenty of people have . . . . concluded that this president is a threat to the republic.

This special report is not about them. Rather, it is about the roughly 40% or so of voters—some 50m Americans—who have lived through the same events and like what they see. . . . . If you understand how they think about politics and what can change their minds, you can sketch the boundaries of the president’s support or, as his detractors might put it, what he can get away with.

The first thing to note is that most voters pay little attention. Those who follow politics tend to assume that everyone else does, too, but they are mistaken. According to the American National Election Study (ANES), a large survey run by Stanford and the University of Michigan and published in March, 94% of Trump voters did not attend a single political rally, speech or meeting last year. 

So how do the vast majority of voters change their minds? Not by taking each issue, deciding what is important to them, determining which candidate is closer to their preferences and then voting accordingly. In “Democracy for Realists”, the most influential recent book on voting, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels show that the opposite often happens: people may well decide which candidate they like and then ascribe policies they approve of to him or her, often incorrectly. 

Most voters make political choices based largely on what people like them are doing, and rarely change their minds. For example, it is hard to think of two more different candidates, in temperament, style and policy, than Mitt Romney and Donald Trump, yet more than 90% of those who voted for Mr Romney in the presidential election in 2012 also voted for Mr Trump this time, according to the ANES. . . . Those who expect Republican voters to desert Mr Trump each time a scandal breaks should bear this in mind.

This kind of groupthink is so powerful that it shapes the way people see the world around them. Right after the election, and more than two months before Mr Trump took office, Republicans told pollsters that their personal finances were in much better shape than they had been the week before the ballot. Democrats said the opposite. The question had nothing to do with politics, and yet the answers given were somehow conditioned by the election. 

LA Times Editorial Series Savages Trump

The Los Angeles Times has been running a six-part editorial series on Der Trumpenführer that is brutal in every way, yet totally honest and truthful in evaluating the malignant narcissist who inhabits the White House.  The titles speak volumes in and of themselves:  "Our Dishonest President," "Why Trump Lies," "Trump's Authoritarian Vision," "Trump's War on Journalism," "Conspiracy Theorist in Chief,' "California Fights Back."  If you have not read the series, please do so.  In today's editorial, the Times explains why it felt compelled to do the series.  Here are excerpts:

Why now?  That question cropped up repeatedly, from President Trump’s supporters as well as his critics, after we launched our six-part series of editorials about the 45th president.

The answer is simple. Even though we’re only 11 weeks into the Trump presidency, there is good reason to believe that rather than grow into the job, he’ll remain the man he was on the campaign trail — impulsive, untruthful, narcissistic, ignorant of the limits on presidential power and woefully unprepared to wield it. Rather than wait until the public grew inured to the lies, the undermining of democratic institutions, the demagoguery and bluster, we decided to lay out our concerns at length and in detail.

Although we strongly disagreed with many of Trump’s proposals, that wasn’t what made him so uniquely dangerous. It’s the man himself, his character and temperament, that set him apart from his predecessors. So we decided to write instead about how Trump’s erratic, impulsive, narcissistic personality manifests itself in his actions in ways that pose a threat to our democracy.

[W]e’ve grown increasingly doubtful that Trump will lead any responsible efforts to reform immigration policy, grow the economy, improve healthcare or achieve other shared goals. His Cabinet choices and budget proposals show he’s more interested in dismantling federal agencies and programs than improving their effectiveness.

Here is a sample from "Why Trump Lies":

The insult that Donald Trump brings to the equation is an apparent disregard for fact so profound as to suggest that he may not see much practical distinction between lies, if he believes they serve him, and the truth.

His approach succeeds because of his preternaturally deft grasp of his audience. Though he is neither terribly articulate nor a seasoned politician, he has a remarkable instinct for discerning which conspiracy theories in which quasi-news source, or which of his own inner musings, will turn into ratings gold. He targets the darkness, anger and insecurity that hide in each of us and harnesses them for his own purposes. If one of his lies doesn’t work — well, then he lies about that.

If we harbor latent racism or if we fear terror attacks by Muslim extremists, then he elevates a rumor into a public debate: Was Barack Obama born in Kenya, and is he therefore not really president?

If his own ego is threatened — if broadcast footage and photos show a smaller-sized crowd at his inauguration than he wanted — then he targets the news media, falsely charging outlets with disseminating “fake news” and insisting, against all evidence, that he has proved his case. . . .

He is dangerous. His choice of falsehoods and his method of spewing them — often in tweets, as if he spent his days and nights glued to his bedside radio and was periodically set off by some drivel uttered by a talk show host who repeated something he’d read on some fringe blog — are a clue to Trump’s thought processes and perhaps his lack of agency. He gives every indication that he is as much the gullible tool of liars as he is the liar in chief.

He has made himself the stooge, the mark, for every crazy blogger, political quack, racial theorist, foreign leader or nutcase peddling a story that he might repackage to his benefit as a tweet, an appointment, an executive order or a policy. He is a stranger to the concept of verification, the insistence on evidence and the standards of proof that apply in a courtroom or a medical lab — and that ought to prevail in the White House.

There have always been those who accept the intellectually bankrupt notion that people are entitled to invent their own facts — consider the “9/11 was an inside job” trope — but Trump’s ascent marks the first time that the culture of alternative reality has made its home at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Totally Out of Touch HRC Says Obama Should Nominate an LGBT to SCOTUS

The seemingly clueless Chad Griffin

Recently I wrote about Michelangelo Signorile's frustration over the cluelessness of self-anointed leaders in the LGBT rights movement who have no plan as to how to counter the anti-gay legislation sweeping many states in the wake of the Supreme Court's gay marriage ruling in Obergefell.  Now, in an op-ed in The Advocate, HRC president Chad Griffin proves he is truly delusional in my opinion by urging Barack Obama to nominate an out LGBT nominee to fill the vacant seat on the U.S. Supreme formerly occupied by Antonin Scalia.  One would think that anyone not living in a complete fantasy world would realize that an out LGBT nominee has probably ZERO chance of approval by the U.S. Senate.  Rather, Obama needs to nominate a gay-friendly judge from a lower federal court who has previously passed Senate approval by a wide approval margin in order to make it far more difficult for Republicans to make good on their planned obstructionist efforts.  

Reading Griffin's piece which ignores any shred of political reality, in my view, he apparently puts "boldness" ahead of President Obama securing the approval of an LGBT ally on the Court.  Instead, Griffin would rather run the risk that such an Obama nominee would be blocked by the GOP controlled Senate leaving the door open so that, if a Republican wins the White House in November, LGBT Americans are utterly screwed when 1 to 3 conservative justices end up on the Court over the next few years.  Of course, Griffin  is among the LGBT elite who lives in gay friendly Washington, D.C. and doesn't need to worry about the anti-gay legal framework that many of us face on a daily basis.

I'd argue that it is time for Griffin to get his head out of his ass (pardon my French) - or even better, resign from his position as HRC president so that someone living in objective reality can take the helm.  As of tomorrow, my HRC bumper sticker is coming off of my car and and the donations to HRC stop completely.  I am frankly over HRC and its failure to advocate for things that will realistically help a majority of LGBT Americans while its leadership very lives comfortably in gay-friendly Washington, D.C. (Griffin made $429,411.00 in 2013) and calls for things that are utterly unrealistic based on my nearly 25 years of political activism.

I hope President Obama ignores ever word of Griffin's, in my view, lunatic op-ed piece.

Washington Post Slams Sanders' Denial of Reality

In a stinging main editorial, the Washington Post has slammed Bernie Sanders and, in my view, correctly accused him of denying reality.   That reality being the limited ability a president has to force through change given the divided nature of the federal political structure that requires Congress to enact legislation to solidify change and the fact that presidential executive orders have their limits in what they can accomplish.  As noted before, Sanders and Donald Trump have great sound bites that they like to use, but where are the detailed policy positions, and can any of their proposals realistically be put in place without Congress' support?  Similarly, can sound bites win them the general election.  Here are editorial highlights:

“MADAM SECRETARY,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said to Hillary Clinton at Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate, “that is a low blow.” But was it? Ms. Clinton had just finished pointing out that Mr. Sanders has at times strongly critiqued President Obama. While she made his criticisms out to be more personal in nature than they were, her core point was nevertheless true: Mr. Sanders is running a campaign based on a blistering — and simplistic — critique of the status quo under this Democratic president.

Ms. Clinton, pointing out that Mr. Obama had to fight tooth-and-nail even for relatively centrist solutions such as the Affordable Care Act, draws the lesson that the next president must have a strong sense of practicality and realism; big rallies cannot wish away the complex politics of Congress. Mr. Sanders, by contrast, claims that Mr. Obama had insufficient revolutionary zeal. That’s why he proposed that the incumbent Democratic president be challenged by a primary opponent in 2012.

Of course, Mr. Sanders’s rejection of realism didn’t start when Mr. Obama stepped foot in the White House. At another point in Thursday’s debate, Ms. Clinton pointed out that the senator from Vermont voted against a 2007 immigration reform bill, a bipartisan deal brokered by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), that would have made the country’s immigration system a little more rational. Mr. Sanders replied that the guest-worker program it envisioned would have been “akin to slavery” and that groups such as the AFL-CIO and the League of United Latin American Citizens opposed it. Such kowtowing to interest groups and indulgence in hyperbole are not uncommon for senators, who are rarely held accountable for failing to get results. But they would make for a disastrous presidency.

Mr. Sanders regularly assures his audiences that he respects Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton. But he attacks the pragmatism they have built their legacies on, even though they had no other option. The system — and by this we mean the constitutional structure of checks and balances — requires policymakers to settle for incremental changes. Mr. Obama has scored several ambitious but incomplete reforms that have made people’s lives better while ideologues on both sides took potshots. A key question in the Democratic race is which candidate would duplicate the president’s work and which would settle for rock-throwing.

Ouch!!

The GOP - the Time Loop Party

If one watches and listens to the Republican presidential candidates, you can close your eyes and in many respects what you hear being said bears little difference from what one heard 36 years ago.  Other than tax rates, the goal is to return to the 1950's or perhaps early 1960's before the country began to rapidly change with both the sexual revolution and the acceleration of a much more diverse demographics.  That world is gone forever, yet the GOP continues to cling to the same mantras that have been proven wrong by experience and objective fact over and over ago.  A column in the New York Times looks at this disconnect from reality which seemingly is only getting worse as the GOP increasingly looks as if it is one huge insane asylum.  Here are column excerpts:

By now everyone who follows politics knows about Marco Rubio’s software-glitch performance in Saturday’s Republican debate. . . . .  Not only did he respond to a challenge from Chris Christie about his lack of achievements by repeating, verbatim, the same line from his stump speech he had used a moment earlier; when Mr. Christie mocked his canned delivery, he repeated the same line yet again.

In other news, last week — on Groundhog Day, to be precise — Republicans in the House of Representatives cast what everyone knew was a purely symbolic, substance-free vote to repeal Obamacare. It was the 63rd time they’ve done so.

Mr. Rubio’s inability to do anything besides repeat canned talking points was startling. Worse, it was funny, which means that it has gone viral. And it reinforced the narrative that he is nothing but an empty suit. But really, isn’t everyone in his party doing pretty much the same thing, if not so conspicuously?

The truth is that the whole G.O.P. seems stuck in a time loop, saying and doing the same things over and over. And unlike Bill Murray’s character in the movie “Groundhog Day,” Republicans show no sign of learning anything from experience.

Think about the doctrines every Republican politician now needs to endorse, on pain of excommunication.

First, there’s the ritual denunciation of Obamacare as a terrible, very bad, no good, job-killing law. Did I mention that it kills jobs? Strange to say, this line hasn’t changed at all despite the fact that we’ve gained 5.7 million private-sector jobs since January 2014, which is when the Affordable Care Act went into full effect.

Then there’s the assertion that taxing the rich has terrible effects on economic growth, and conversely that tax cuts at the top can be counted on to produce an economic miracle.

This doctrine was tested more than two decades ago, when Bill Clinton raised tax rates on high incomes; Republicans predicted disaster, but what we got was the economy’s best run since the 1960s.

Oh, and there’s also the spectacular failure of the Kansas experiment, where huge tax cuts have created a budget crisis without delivering any hint of the promised economic miracle.

But Republican faith in tax cuts as a universal economic elixir has, if anything, grown stronger, with Mr. Rubio, in particular, going even further than the other candidates by promising to eliminate all taxes on capital gains.

Meanwhile, on foreign policy the required G.O.P. position has become one of utter confidence in the effectiveness of military force. How did that work in Iraq? Never mind: The only reason anybody in the world fails to do exactly what America wants must be because our leadership is lily-livered if not treasonous. And diplomacy, no matter how successful, is denounced as appeasement.

So how did this happen to the G.O.P.? In a direct sense, I suspect that it has a lot to do with Foxification, the way Republican primary voters live in a media bubble into which awkward facts can’t penetrate. But there must be deeper causes behind the creation of that bubble. 

[Rubio] he wasn’t the only person on that stage spouting canned talking points that are divorced from reality. They all were, even if the other candidates managed to avoid repeating themselves word for word.

As I note repeatedly, one of the deeper causes of the descent of the GOP into insanity is the party's embrace of the Christofascists - who are by definition living utterly detached from reality.  That sickness has now spread across the GOP as sane and rational people have fled the party and ugly elements such as white supremacists have replaced them. 

The GOP has Become Increasingly Reliant on Reality-Defying Paranoia

There have always been out of the mainstream paranoid conspiracy theorists, but generally they have been a tiny minority and have been viewed as crazy by larger society.  With the rise of the Christofascists and their Tea Party first cousins in the  Republican Party, the paranoid fringe became mainstream - at least in the GOP.   The result is the lunacy that we now see writ large in many of the GOP's policies and fear mongering.  A piece in Salon looks at how crazy became the norm with the GOP base.  Here are highlights:

In the 1960s, William F. Buckley tried to banish organized conspiracists from the conservative movement with his crusade against the John Birch Society, which tellingly organized itself secretively, just like the Communists that it believed were everywhere. In a 2008 article in Commentary, Buckley told the story of how he, writer Russell Kirk, AEI’s William Baroody, and Barry Goldwater met in 1962, and discussed “the need to excommunicate the John Birch Society from the conservative movement,” so that they wouldn’t derail a Goldwater presidential bid in 1964. As Buckley described Robert Welch, founder of John Birch Society:

His influence was near-hypnotic, and his ideas wild.

 John Stormer’s “None Dare Call It Treason,” promoted as detailing “the communist-socialist conspiracy to enslave America,” sold 7 million paperback copies, mostly during Goldwater’s campaign, at the same time that Phyllis Schlafly’s “A Choice, Not an Echo,” another multimillion-seller, gave the campaign its most memorable slogan, while promoting the conspiracy theory that the Republican Party was secretly controlled by members of the Bilderberger banking conference, who were also in cahoots with global communism. It was these us-vs.-them conspiracist narratives that pulled together the conservative movement on the ground.

[T]he Buckley/Kirk/Goldwater strategy kept the conspiracists in line, in the background, as far as D.C.-based politics were concerned, and that was key to conservative success—keeping up the appearances of being a rational, factually informed political movement. 

[T]he real story was about how Ronald Reagan became the Republican nominee—and that was very much a story about how he managed to mobilize the conspiracy-minded GOP base to secure the nomination.

In short, conspiracism was never anywhere near being excommunicated from the conservative movement or the GOP. It was, however, generally kept in line, which is why sanitized stories like Rauch, Buckley and Maddow’s can plausibly be told.

Now, however, conspiracism is virtually all the GOP has left, and it’s not just a sudden development with the emergence of Donald Trump. The attacks on Planned Parenthood were based on a multilayered conspiracy theory view of what Planned Parenthood does, with no relation to reality. Its actual purpose—providing family planning services and healthcare—seems utterly impossible for its enemies to grasp. Instead, it’s made out to be a sinister criminal enterprise . . . 

The birther response to Obama’s election is another major example of conspiracism, as is the whole parade of so-called Clinton scandals, which we’ll return to below. Neither Clinton nor Obama was a traditional liberal, much less a left-winger, so fantasy-laced conspiracy narratives had to be concocted to justify treating them as beyond the pale of reason.

In short, this kind of politics has been a big part of the GOP for quite some time now, despite all efforts to pretend otherwise. And that’s what makes Trump more of a logical development, part of a broader pattern, rather than—as he would like to be seen—as a unique figure signaling a radical new direction.

Conspiracism is surely a key element in the rise of Donald Trump. His portrayal of Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, and disdainful dismissal of anyone who questions his lack of data, are right out of the conspiracist playbook. 

In the end, their beliefs become “self-sealing,” so that any conclusive evidence disproving their suspicions is treated as evidence that the conspiracy is even larger than previously thought.

All this systemically distorted reasoning suits the GOP just fine—they’ve used it to attack presidents Clinton and Obama virtually nonstop for their whole terms in office—only now, they can no longer control the dynamic. 

But conspiracist narratives aren’t about facts, except in the most selective of ways. They’re more about painting a picture of the world as people want it to be—not the best possible world, but the most satisfying one, given the reality of their known hopes and fears. A detailed study published in 2011 shows that FoxNews.com and Newsmax were the two most important Internet sites in propagating the term “anchor baby” from 2007 to 2010, when it moved from anti-immigrant fringe into mainstream usage. It’s no more of a commonsense term than any ethnic slur you can think of. It exists specifically to invoke a conspiracist narrative of how our country is under sneak attack. 

In the real world, there’s simply no foundation for Trump’s scaremongering. Crime has declined dramatically over the past two decades. According to the FBI data for 2013, the most recent full year for data, the violent crime rate is just 367.9 per 100,000, compared to 713.6 per 100,000 in 1994—a reduction of 48.4 percent. The murder rate is also down by 50 percent. Similarly, as data from Pew shows, the number of unauthorized immigrants has declined since its pre-recession high, while the number of those deported under Obama is the highest ever.

What’s really going on here is white conservative identity politics. Their share of the electorate is in long-term decline, and their ability to define political reality is inevitably waning. . . . Trump is offering a way for them to imaginatively deny reality—much like the Ghost Dance movement promised Native Americans in the 1890s . . 

Just don’t expect him [Trump] to stop spouting conspiracist nonsense. By now, it’s become the conservative’s lingua franca, and he speaks it like a native son. Like a birthright citizen, even. There is no other language left for any of today’s conservatives to speak.

Are Today's Republicans/Conservatives Reactionaries?

Once upon a time conservatives respected education, science, and knowledge and did not daily deny objective reality if it collided with mythical religious belief.   Those were the types on conservatives I grew up with in the Republican of yesteryear.   Now, to be a Republican means joyously embracing ignorance, rejecting science, and sticking one's head in the sand in the face of measurable evidence.  What caused the change?  From my perspective, the rise of the Christofascists in the GOP.  Anything and anyone that doesn't conform to their fantasy world religious beliefs must be rejected and attacked no matter how negative the consequences.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

Evidence doesn’t matter for the “debate” over climate policy, where I put scare quotes around “debate” because, given the obvious irrelevance of logic and evidence, it’s not really a debate in any normal sense. And this situation is by no means unique. Indeed, at this point it’s hard to think of a major policy dispute where facts actually do matter; it’s unshakable dogma, across the board. And the real question is why.

Before I get into that, let me remind you of some other news that won’t matter.  First, consider the Kansas experiment. Back in 2012 Sam Brownback, the state’s right-wing governor, went all in on supply-side economics: He drastically cut taxes, assuring everyone that the resulting boom would make up for the initial loss in revenues. Unfortunately for his constituents, his experiment has been a resounding failure. The economy of Kansas, far from booming, has lagged the economies of neighboring states, and Kansas is now in fiscal crisis.

So will we see conservatives scaling back their claims about the magical efficacy of tax cuts as a form of economic stimulus? Of course not. If evidence mattered, supply-side economics would have faded into obscurity decades ago. Instead, it has only strengthened its grip on the Republican Party.

[W]e have evidence that the number of Americans experiencing financial distress due to medical expenses is also dropping fast.  All this is utterly at odds with dire predictions that reform would lead to declining coverage and soaring costs. So will we see any of the people claiming that Obamacare is doomed to utter failure revising their position? You know the answer.

And the list goes on. On issues that range from monetary policy to the control of infectious disease, a big chunk of America’s body politic holds views that are completely at odds with, and completely unmovable by, actual experience. And no matter the issue, it’s the same chunk.
The question, as I said at the beginning, is why. Why the dogmatism? Why the rage? And why do these issues go together, with the set of people insisting that climate change is a hoax pretty much the same as the set of people insisting that any attempt at providing universal health insurance must lead to disaster and tyranny?

Well, it strikes me that the immovable position in each of these cases is bound up with rejecting any role for government that serves the public interest.

And why this hatred of government in the public interest? Well, the political scientist Corey Robin argues that most self-proclaimed conservatives are actually reactionaries. That is, they’re defenders of traditional hierarchy — the kind of hierarchy that is threatened by any expansion of government, even (or perhaps especially) when that expansion makes the lives of ordinary citizens better and more secure.

[W]e’re living in a political era in which facts don’t matter. This doesn’t mean that those of us who care about evidence should stop seeking it out. But we should be realistic in our expectations, and not expect even the most decisive evidence to make much difference.

Quote of the Day: Andrew Sullivan on the Insanity of the Neocons and GOP

By any objective standard, the War in Iraq was an unmitigated disaster unless, of course, you were/are a Halliburton shareholder like Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  Hundreds of thousands of civilian dead, thousands of American service members dead and the U.S. budget blown through the unfunded war.  Moreover, the neocon fantasy that Iraq could become a stable democratic nation has proved to be just that: an utter fantasy.  Yet the neocons and many Republicans are rushing to blame the current fiasco on Barack Obama and utterly disregard the fact that the current Iraq disaster is the direct outcome of Bush/Cheney and GOP decision to lie to the American public and take America into war that lacked any valid justification.  Oh, and did I mention the fact that the geniuses in the Bush/Cheney regime totally ignored the sectarian powder keg that was going to be unleashed?  Andrew Sullivan takes to task the lunatics who got us into the Iraq War and who now want to repeat that disaster.  Here are the money quotes:

What do you do with near-clinical fanatics who, in their own minds, never make mistakes and whose worldview remains intact even after it has been empirically dismantled in front of their eyes? In real life, you try and get them to get professional help.

In the case of those who only recently sent thousands of American servicemembers to their deaths in a utopian scheme to foment a democracy in a sectarian dictatorship, we have to merely endure their gall in even appearing in front of the cameras. But the extent of their pathology is deeper than one might expect.

Most people are aware that relatively few of the architects of a war have fully acknowledged the extent of their error – let alone express remorse or even shame at the more than a hundred thousands civilian deaths their adventure incurred for a phony reason. No, all this time, they have been giving each other awards, lecturing congressmen and Senators, writing pieces in the Weekly Standard and the New Republic, being fellated by David Gregory, and sucking at the teet of the neocon welfare state, as if they had nothing to answer for, and nothing to explain.

it is shocking; it is, in fact, an outrage, a shameless, disgusting abdication of all responsibility for the past combined with a sickening argument to do exactly the same fricking thing all over again. And yes, I’m not imagining. This is what these true know-nothing/learn-nothing fanatics want the US to do.

 Last time, you could ascribe it to fathomless ignorance. This time, they have no excuse. ISIS is not al Qaeda; it’s far worse in ways that even al Qaeda has noted undermine its cause rather than strengthen it. It may be strategically way over its head already. And the idea that the US has to fight both ISIS and Iran simultaneously is so unhinged and so self-evidently impossible to contain or control that only these feckless fools would even begin to suggest it. Having empowered Iran by dismantling Iraq, Kristol actually wants the US now to enter a live war against ISIS and the Quds forces. You begin to see how every military catastrophe can be used to justify the next catastrophe. It’s a perfect circle for the neocons’ goal of the unending war.

The sooner that these people are driven completely from the halls of power - or even near access to power - the better off the nation will be.  What I find equally upsetting is that the neocons care nothing about civilian deaths since, in their minds, non-white, non-Christians do not even count as humans.

 

Millennials Prepare to Destroy GOP

There is no doubt in my mind that the Republican Party in its current incarnation that is dominated by religious extremism, racism, greed and bigotry needs to be destroyed.  The GOP has simply become something incredibly ugly and it all traces, in my view, to the rise of the Christofascists within the Party.  This element despite it feigned piety is comprised of people who simply are not nice and decent.  Sadly, they see others as things rather than living, breathing human beings and display a callousness towards others that is reminiscent of the way the Nazis dehumanized the Jews of Europe.  Thankfully, a new study by the Pew Research group suggests that the Milennial generation may be poised to destroy today's GOP.   Here are highlights from the Daily Kos:

Millennials (those born roughly since 1980 or so, depending on your definition) are the most progressive generation since FDR.

That's the headline from this fascinating infographic from Pew, which examines the voting preferences of various generational cohorts over the last two decades.  We've heard this before of course.  Pew grouped voters into categories not based solely on birth year, but also on the year in which a voter turned 18 -- noting under what President this occurred (fascinating concept).  They then looked across the last 10 elections to see where deviations from the national average occurred.

Takeways --

1) The obvious lede -- every election Millennials have voted in, they've skewed Democratic. Almost as important?  Ditto for young Gen Xers (who turned 18 under Clinton) -- in every election except 2004 (when they skewed GOP) and 2000 (when they tracked with national averages), they skew Democratic as well.  

2) Millennials and young Gen Xers deviated from the norm in 11 of 12 opportunities.

3) . . . . the Clinton group (today age 30-37) skewed Democratic in 5 of 7 elections and skewed Republican in only one.  Powerful argument that this is the fault line: voters age 37 and younger, vs. those 38 and older.  Not Gen X vs. Millennial.  Everyone born after Star Wars came out is basically a Democrat.

4) The idea that young, idealistic, naive voters tend to side with progressives until they age into mature, worldly realists and start voting for conservatives seems to be (at least partially) debunked by this chart.  Only the Reagan/Bush Gen Xers exhibit anything like this behavior.  Other groups were either a) more consistent over time, or b) inconsistent but in unpredictable ways, not just "older = more conservative."

In short, this chart seems to confirm much of what we've been talking about for years -- Millennials seem to consistently prefer progressive ideals, and predictably vote for Democratic candidates that (theoretically) espouse those ideals.  This is not changing, and it's a bit of an historical aberration.

If you were a Republican strategist, this is just more heartburn.

Yet despite this demographic reality, the GOP continues to pander increasingly to an aging voter pool that is literally dying off.  And in the process, the GOP is alienating the younger generations that are repulsed by the GOP's racism, homophobia and rejection of modernity.  Long term, it is political suicide.  But then, of course, the Christofascists are utterly detached from reality, so perhaps this phenomenon should be no surprise.

The Virginia GOP - Still Drink the Kool-Aid

While Ken Cuccinelli said that he would not be running for office at the just passed "Republican Advance," indication are that the Republican Party of Virginia remains lost in fantasy land and unable to grasp that the world - and areas outside of the redneck, Bible beating hinterland of Virginia - is moving into the future.  Meanwhile, the Virginia GOP remains mired in the past, longing for the days of Jim Crow and when gays remained closeted.  A piece in Politico looks at the denial that continues to reign among the Kool-Aid drinkers who see the Virginia GOP's problems as only "cosmetic."  Here are excerpts:

Virginia Republicans suffered a drubbing last month, losing all three statewide races (though a recount is impending in one). A year earlier, it was pretty much the same story as Mitt Romney got swamped and the party unexpectedly lost ground in the Senate.

But to hear GOP leaders in this once reliably red state tell it, this is no time to panic. No hint of discouragement is betrayed. Just as many party activists insisted after Romney’s loss, key figures here said that their shortcomings are cosmetic — that the problem is largely about campaign mechanics and how the conservative message is being delivered, not the message itself.

So if the Commonwealth, sure to again be a top battleground in 2016, is a microcosm for the broader Republican Party, the GOP faithful here weren’t showing much interest in the kind of soul-searching many in the GOP believe is necessary if they want to win big elections again.

They blamed the loss on a failure and inability to more aggressively push back against Democratic Gov.-elect Terry McAuliffe’s avalanche of negative ads. They argued that more money, not having a third-party candidate in the race and a scandal-free governor would have made the difference.

For the first time since 1969, the GOP probably won’t control any of the five statewide offices. For the first time since 1973, the party that won the presidential election the year before also won the governorship.

Several conservative loyalists expressed contempt for moderate Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, who dropped out of the Republican race for governor after Cuccinelli maneuvered to change the way the nominee would be picked from a primary to a convention. Bolling stayed officially neutral but maneuvered behind the scenes to help McAuliffe.

Bolling, who did not attend the gathering, wrote an op-ed for the Richmond Times-Dispatch last week that laid out five steps to revitalize the GOP. One of them was to stop selecting nominees at party conventions, which tend to settle on more conservative candidates.

“While such conventions might empower a few thousand of the most strident voices within our party, they effectively lock out other voices that should be heard,” he wrote. “They too often result in the nomination of candidates who simply can’t get elected when judged by a broader Virginia electorate.”

Many from the Bolling wing of the party cite the 10-point loss of E.W. Jackson, who came out of nowhere to win the nomination for lieutenant governor at a May convention despite a history of controversial remarks, as reason to return to a primary system for picking nominees. But there is not currently the support for such a move on the state central committee.

Far Right Flips Out (Again) Over Gay History Month

As with anything that challenges their house of cards belief system or counters their deeply loved prejudices - be it climate change, demographic changes, the growing aversion of institutional religion in the under 30 generations - the far right/Christofascists' approach is to demand that no facts or information be disseminated that shows that they are in fact living in a fantasy world detached from objective reality.  And nothing upsets these folks more than being reminded that gays have existed throughout history, often accomplishing notable things and having an impact on the course of history.  With October being gay history month, the usual eruption of anti-gay batshitery is in full swing and spewing from many of the usual demagogues.  Towleroad looks at the verbal diarrhea spewing forth:

October is LGBT History Month and schools across the nation are educating their students on key historical figures and events such as Stonewall and Harvey Milk. Right on cue, mouthpieces of the far right are engaging in histrionics with Liberty Counsel's Mat Staver claiming that the "innocence of our children is under assault."

If parents think our school children should be focused on science and math, not sex and murder, they need to talk to teachers, principals, and school boards to ensure that this program is stopped.

The funny thing about sex and murder is that they make up a very, very substantial part of history. Black History Month, for example, would have to go because black history in America is riddled with the rape and murder of slaves, as well as the murders of many prominent black leaders who fought for equality. History is not pretty, but it must be examined warts-and-all to be learned from.

Over at the Cherokee Tribune, Roger Hines similarly bemoans Georgia's Kennesaw State University embracing LGBT History Month. Rather than claiming assault on children, he says that the university is "instead of honoring the hand that has fed it, has taken a cultural stand that is anathema to those who foot its bills." Because evidently not a single LGBT person or ally has paid taxes or tuition to the university, ever. The crowning moment in his piece is when, in the middle of defining each of the letters of LGBTIQ, he says:

“I” is for intersex. Don’t ask me about this one, and if you know, don’t tell. I don’t want to know.

Nothing adds to one's credibility in the debate of a social issue quite like open and proud ignorance worn as a medal of accomplishment. Hines snidely concludes that he hopes that KSU provides services for conservative Christians amidst all their inclusivity . . .

Right Wing Attacks GOP's Rubio on Immigration

Few things spark as much fury among the angry white men and the Christofascists who make of the core of today's Republican Party base than immigrants and gays - two groups that tin contrast are  finding growing support among the majority of Americans.  For Republicans who seek to be viable in a national election, moderation on the issue of rights for both groups is needed even though they are anathema to the GOP base.  Hence the tight rope that Senator Marco Rubio finds himself on.  As Talking Points Memo notes, Rubio is under attack from the wingnut crowd for his efforts to support an immigration bill that will make need reforms.  Here are some article highlights:

With the release of the “Gang of 8“‘s bipartisan immigration bill today, conservative opponents of reform now have a juicy 844-page target to attack instead of just a set of talking points. Mindful of the risk, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is responding rapidly to rumors and innuendo on the right in the hopes he can shut them down before they spread.

First on the list: the “Marco Phone.” Conservative bloggers immediately seized on portions of the bill funding expanded cell phone access along the border as evidence Rubio was supplying free phones to undocumented immigrants. Some commentators connected it to the “Obama phone,” a popular meme on the right last year about a program that provides discounts on phone service to the poor. 

Rubio himself was confronted with the claim on Wednesday in an interview with conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham, who quoted from a blog post that read “Move over Obama phone, this is the amnesty phone.”

“That’s false,” Rubio said. “That’s not for the illegal immigrants. That’s for U.S. citizens and residents who live in the border region so that they can have access to calls. One of their complaints - that’s actually part of the Kyl border bill that we adopted. And what it does is it provides communication equipment to people who are living in the border region so they can report illegal crossings because many of them either don’t have phone service or don’t have cell phone service and they have no way of calling.”

Soon after the interview, Rubio’s press office sent out a release debunking the “Marco phone” attack, one of several statements that day branded as “myths vs. facts” updates on the bill. Rubio press secretary Alex Conant also noted that the senator’s multiple conservative radio appearances on Wednesday were explicitly designed to “knock out misinformation.”

Even before the bill’s release, Rubio pushed back against efforts by Rep. Steve King (R-IA), a leading reform opponent, to tie immigration legislation to the Boston marathon attack based on early (and inaccurate) reports that the bombing suspect was a Saudi male on a student visa. On Wednesday, the conservative Hispanic Leadership Network confronted another terrorism-related claim by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), who suggested Islamic terrorists are training to “act like Hispanic” in order to infiltrate the country.

There’s some irony to Rubio’s predicament. Conservative commentators derived a multitude of conspiracy theories from misreadings of health care reform bills in 2009 and 2010. The most prominent and ugly claim was that it would create “death panels” that could fatally withdraw care from the elderly and disabled, an outrageously false charge that many national Republicans encouraged, either tacitly or explicitly. Rubio, who became a national star in tea party circles around the same time, is surely well aware just how powerful a rumor can be once it spreads among the conservative base. 

No one is more detached from reality nowadays than the GOP base - thanks largely to the large number of Christofascists in the GOP grassroots.