Musing's musings

Wingnuttery: The gift that keeps on giving

So I was digging around on Thomas this morning (the Library of Congress's interface where anybody with an internet connection can go to look up what's been going on in the legislative branch), trying to find some summary or, better still, the actual legislative language, of the congressional budget estimates for 2010. I was going through the Congressional Record's daily digest pages for the House of Representatives when I stumbled upon this lovely tidbit:

By Mrs. BACHMANN (for herself, Mr. HENSARLING, Mr. PRICE of Georgia, Mr. SHADEGG, Mr. KIRK, Ms. FOXX, Mr. PITTS, Mr. BARTLETT, Mr. MCCLINTOCK, Mr. GINGREY of Georgia, Mr. WAMP, Ms. FALLIN, Mr. FLEMING, Mrs. BLACKBURN, Mr. BROUN of Georgia, Mr. AKIN, Mr. ISSA, Mr. KING of Iowa, Mr. BURTON of Indiana, Mr. GOHMERT, Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania, Mr. LAMBORN, Mr. PAUL, Mr. CULBERSON, Mrs. BIGGERT, Mr. BROWN of South Carolina, Mr. JONES, Mr. POSEY, Mr. ROE of Tennessee, and Mr. CONAWAY):

H.J. Res. 41. A joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to prohibit the President from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States; to the Committee on the Judiciary.

This, after I lay in bed this morning listening to way too much Republican whining, whinging, and hand-wringing about the budget--this is what our Republican "friends" (to use the appropriate legislative phrase) think it's important for Congress to be spending time on? Making sure we don't inadvertently join the Euro zone?

Never mind that the euro has been outperforming the dollar for most of the ten years since it was first introduced--or that the euro zone, considered as an entity unto itself, is the second largest economy in the world. And never mind that, as is apparent to virtually anyone with a brain over the age of about seven years, the U.S. economy (along with those of most of the rest of the world) is hanging, Wile. E. Coyote-like, in the air after running itself off a cliff. While we're waiting to see if its forward momentum will be enough to carry it more or less safely to the other side of the chasm and back on to safe ground, and while the president and the Democratic majority in Congress are working together to get us out of the tremendous messes left for us by the previous (Republican) administration, all the Republicans in Congress seem to have on offer is a lot of hyper-partisan (and scathingly, blindingly, typically short-sighted and forgetful) carping--and this piece of crap.

To quote Dr. Johnson, that the Republican party is still functioning is much like a dog walking on its hind legs: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." If they keep this kind of crap up, I think we can reasonably and confidently predict that they will very shortly fall over and be unable to get up again.

In which, yet again, I prove to be anomalous

Via Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com, I came across the Center for American Progress's new interactive quiz. Nate's analysis found that there wasn't really much of a pattern in the answers given by conservatives and progressives/liberals--which is somewhat odd, given that the two groups are normally conceived of as being, if not exactly mirror images of one another, at least at opposite ends of the spectrum from one another. It would seem, however, that there's a bigger mushy middle than we had imagined.

Then there's me. I've always thought of myself as being liberal, but not ultra-ultra anything. The CAP quiz has a possible score of 400, out of which I scored 350. According to them, that makes me "extremely progressive." The average (by which they mean "mean") score for all Americans is 209.5. The average score for Catholics is 210.8; for people with a post-graduate education, 227.0; for progressives, 237.6; for Democrats, 237.7; for liberals, 242.3; for 2008 Obama voters, 244.0; and for liberal Democrats, 247.1. I'm a hundred points more liberal than liberals, Obama voters, and liberal Democrats. I'm almost a hundred and fifty points more liberal than the average Catholic, and around a hundred and thirty points more liberal than the average person with a postgraduate degree.

By contrast, the average score for conservative Republicans is 160.6; for Republicans, 168.4; for 2008 McCain voters, 169.0; for conservatives, 177.9; for Baptists, 196.4; for whites, 203.7; for men, 204.3. I find it interesting that apparently the average McCain voter is a little more conservative than generic conservatives, and a little less conservative than self-described conservative Republicans. I'm also intrigued to note that Republicans seem to be out-conservativing their traditional base (white men)--which does not bode well for them making any kind of a real comeback anytime soon, since if you ask Republicans what they need to do to get back into power, they say it's to be more conservative, more ideologically pure rigid, and less open to compromise (which I'm not sure it's possible to be).

I'll be interested to see what else Nate has in store after chewing on these numbers a bit more.

I'd call it cognitive dissonance, except...

...In order for there to be cognitive dissonance there has to be actual, you know, cognition, and that seems in very short supply among Republicans lately.

It appears that some of the bloviating blockheads at Fixed Noise are doing that most Republican of things, making an "enemies list." Not surprisingly, lib'ruls and the sites they frequent are pretty high thereon:

BERNIE GOLDBERG: Number three is the Daily Kos. And they are very significant in this current media world in which we live. They have one of, if not the biggest left wing political web sites. They are rabidly anti-conservative. Yet, its founder Markous Moulitsas has so much clout that not only does he get on the most mainstream of shows, Meet the Press, to talk politics but the Democrats who are running for President of the United States went there and made speeches to the Daily Kos convention. That’s how afraid they are of offending the Daily Kos.

BILL O'REILLY: And it’s about as hateful as you can possibly...You can’t get a more hateful web site than them.

GOLDBERG: They started this rumor that Sarah Palin’s child with Down Syndrome may not have been her child, but the daughter’s. It’s just terrible, terrible stuff.

My, oh, my, where to start?

Let's hit the Wayback Machine and set it to, um, last week. Remember all those Republican "leaders" kowtowing before the Great and Powerful Rushbo? Funny how it seems to have escaped the notice of the Republican media machine.

I can't speak for Daily Kos, but I think "anti-conservative" is an accurate description of the prevailing philosophy there. And perhaps some folks there are hard on conservatives once in a while. But Goldberg's frothing at the mouth would look considerably less foolish if he and his fellow conservatives hadn't been spending most of the last decade pissing all over every liberal they could find an excuse to mention, and making scads of money from their followers doing it. Anybody else remember these conservative blockbusters yawners?

• Michael Savage, Liberalism is a Mental Disorder
• Ann Coulter, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)
• Michael Savage, The Enemy Within: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on our Churches, Schools, and Military
• Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism
• Ann Coulter, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans
• Sean Hannity, Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism
• Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism
• Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terror

Those are just the "best of" selections that struck me as I perused a few "people who bought this also purchased..." links at Amazon.com. And while I wouldn't soil my hands with any of the preceding titles, and tend to doubt that any reasonable human being, considering them objectively, would be able to find in them even a shred of a cogent or coherent argument, that didn't stop them from raking in the bucks. Three of those eight books made it to the top of the New York Times best seller list at least once: Coulter's Godless, Goldberg's Liberal Fascism and Hannity's Deliver us From Evil. Neither should we forget that Coulter, Hannity, Michelle Malkin, and dozens of other conservative, um, pundits, routinely call for liberals to be killed, stripped of their civil rights, exiled, tortured, imprisoned, and the like.

And if O'Reilly is convinced that Daily Kos is the most hateful website out there on the intertubes, perhaps he should spend a little time dredging his way through the hate-filled sewer that is Little Green Footballs, or the Free Republic before he makes such an absurd claim. Threats of violence get very short shrift at Daily Kos. They're a staple in trade at most of the conservative websites out there--and instead of being castigated, they're regularly applauded.

Yes, there were some disturbing allegations made about Trig Palin at Daily Kos: by a tiny fraction of the community there. They were universally decried by the rest of the community; a fact which Goldberg conveniently omits to mention. Apparently he was unaware of the smear campaign (widely believed, and probably with some justice, to have been promoted by the Bush campaign) directed against John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary when, among other accusations, it was alleged that McCain was the father of an illegitimate black child. Then there was the time when Rush Limbaugh (the Face and Voice of the Republican Party, according to all of its leaders) compared a teen-aged Chelsea Clinton to a dog.

In short, the take-home message seems to be that Republicans can do anything to anyone and no one dares to take offense. But let anyone do anything even remotely critical of Republicans, and it's the end of the world as we know it, a sign of the moral decay of American society, and imputable as guilt to absolutely every liberal on the planet and anybody who has ever even thought about voting for a Democrat. As for being put on the conservacons' enemies list, I'd say that was more of a badge of honor than something to be ashamed of. Or, to quote the immortal Molly Ivins, apropos of the Limboob, it's "...an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn't actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle."

Planes, trains, and automobiles

I think we can take it as a given that there are some issues with our current preferred modes of transportation in the United States. First off, obviously, our automobile-conscious (or should I say "automobile-fetishization"?) culture comes at a tremendous penalty to our balance of trade, given the hundreds of billions of dollars each year we send overseas for the sole purpose of buying the oil to turn into the gasoline to fuel those automobiles. Then there's the fact that fewer and fewer of them seem to be built here at home, with concomitant declines in our manufacturing sectors that make the sorts of things car manufacturers need to put into our cars.

There's also, of course, the huge environmental costs--in terms of pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, the amount of space in landfills taken up by junked cars or car components, etc. Those costs are further complicated by the need to transport the raw materials for our fuels (and the fuels themselves, once they're distilled from crude oil) to our shores, and thence from the refineries to where we buy our gasoline and oil and whatnot. For cars that aren't made here, we also have to transport those vehicles to our shores from wherever they were put together.

Those salient facts are complicated, however, by the fact that we've more or less engineered ourselves into a corner on this issue. Beginning after the Second World War, the phenomenon of suburban sprawl has reigned unchecked for the better part of three full generations, as more and more people moved farther and farther away from city centers in search of a nice home with good schools and low taxes. (I won't bother to do more than point out the obvious inconsistency of such criteria here; that can be another post, someday when I have more time.) Even as we moved out into the sticks and started to pave them over to make them car-friendly, we started tearing up our rail lines and cutting back on passenger rail service. Why take the train, we seem to have thought, when it's so much more convenient to drive?

Except that it isn't, always. Case in point: when I was a sophomore in college, one of my cousins got married back home in the Chicago suburbs. She asked me to be in the wedding, which meant that I had to be there for the rehearsal, a day ahead of the actual ceremony (which, if memory serves, was to be on a Saturday, with the rehearsal on a Friday). I didn't have a car of my own at the time, and my alma mater really didn't encourage students to bring their cars onto campus even if they had them, and the folks couldn't come and get me. Ergo, I had to find another means of getting home.

My first thought was that I'd take the bus back. It was only about 120 miles from school back home, so that shouldn't have been an onerous trip, and a bus ticket should be affordable even for a starving undergraduate's bank account. Just one tiny fly in that ointment: Galesburg was served by Trailways; DeKalb was served by Greyhound. There was no direct bus from where I was to where I wanted to be. Still not too much of an issue, I thought: until I looked at the schedules. I had to be in Elmhurst for the wedding rehearsal by 5:30 p.m. on Friday (if memory serves; this is 25 years ago now!). The Trailways bus left Galesburg early-ish in the morning, made the short hop to Rock Island--where I would then have to wait three hours to catch a Greyhound to DeKalb, which would get in at just about 5 p.m.--not nearly enough time to get me to the church on time, as 'twere. It would only cost me around $12--but instead of having to miss just one day of classes to go, I'd have to skip two.

Time for Plan B. Fortunately, Galesburg is a railroad town. Originally served by both Burlington Northern and Santa Fe, it's now a one-line town since the two lines merged in 1996. It's also still an Amtrak stop, with two trains a day heading for Chicago, and two coming back. Fortunately for me, there was an intermediate stop at a suburban station (I want to say it was in Aurora or thereabouts) that was reasonably convenient both to my home at the time and to the place I needed to be--and the train trip only took a couple of hours. The ticket cost about twice what I would have paid for the bus--but I didn't even have to miss a full day of classes. I paid the fee, happily--and grew to like traveling by train. For the remainder of my time in school, whenever I needed to go back home and didn't have the opportunity to wait around for someone to pick me up, I took the train.

I'd like to make a few suggestions...

...for additions to the "For Dummies" series of books. We can start with The Constitution for Republicans, since it does not appear that many of them have ever actually read it--or if they have, they've failed to retain any of the salient points. As evidence, I present the following, from the peroration to Rush Limbaugh's closing plenary address to the Conservative Political Action Public Asshattery Convention, last Saturday in Washington, D.C., in which he was attempting to argue that President Obama's policies represent a "bastardization" of the Constitution:

We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. [Applause] We believe that the preamble to the Constitution contains an inarguable truth that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life. [Applause] Liberty, Freedom. [Applause] And the pursuit of happiness. [Applause]

For the purposes of comparison, I herewith present the actual Preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Sorry, Rush, but of the words you thought were in there, only "Liberty" actually appears--and not in the context you wanted. What you were looking for was the Declaration of Independence, which, of course, you also got wrong. Here's the pertinent passage in the original:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

"Freedom" is not in there, guys. But note that "Government" is. Ooops. The Limboob, and all the boobettes who stood and mindlessly cheered his pompous pontifications at CPAC should all have to go back and retake high-school civics. Oh, and the leaders of the Republican Party might want to rethink all that groveling at his feet they're doing, lest they embarrass themselves even further than they already have.