Wouldn’t it be nice if we could figure out how to have more days on which Republicans discover, once and for all, that they are wrong about stuff?
“Today’s Republicans cocoon themselves in an alternate reality defined by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and only on rare occasions — like on election night — encounter any hint that what they believe might not be true.” – Paul Krugman
Too bad there can’t be a day when it is revealed that, yes, evolution, plate tectonics, and climate change are real. But at least we know the truth about the polls.
For all their yammering about revelation, even if there was a day that it was revealed they would still miss it. Volcano research for example (remember that day of revelation? Was that Bobby Jindal or some other anti-science nutcake?) Evolution they won’t understand because that untreatable strain of virus will kill them off. Climate change, by definition, lacks a particular day; it depends on which consequence you want to focus on. Most likely that epiphany occurs when they no longer have that beachfront home on that nice barrier island.
The underlying problem is that the GOP has linked its very essence to the south, for the last 50 years.
The south’s bizarro-world has stood for 150 years, and shows no signs of lessening. This is why they’re 3rd world.
When the GOP hitched its horse to the south, it was only a matter of time before the same happened to them – despite the short term victories they got out of it.
Be more specific about which parts of the South are third world. Because it’s a very complicated geography economically.
And actually these days “third world” is a bad metaphor. “Banana republic” comes closer in that the high wage areas are the Bank of America plantation, the Mercedes plantation, the Nissan plantation, the BMW plantation, the Monsanto-Bayer-BASF plantation. the Coca-Cola plantation, and several information plantations.
But that mindset has infected Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri as well by now—not to mention no small bit of non-coastal California.
In 1968, the GOP hitched its horse to the South on one hand and the Louise Day Hicks-inspired urban ethnic Catholics on the other. In 1978, Falwell, Ralph Reed (on behalf of Pat Robertson), and anti-abortion Catholics formed the religion backbone that unified these otherwise hostile groups.
Interesting how the left is obsessive about reality based, evidence based policies; most comfortable when challenging and tweaking research no matter where it comes from in the Universe.
But the Right habitually scorn evidence based arguments and will clawback with every fibre of their being to the comfort of opinion.
Having an ongoing battle with a relative of mine who decries evidence and will just pushback all the harder every time the evidence debunks his argument. For him, in the end, to admit to evidence and forego opinion will mean he loses his very identity. I call it his Twinkie HoHo argument because his opinions are sooo instant gratification and empty calories. But he fights on to preserve his Twinkies and denounce accountabilty.
The fundamental problem here is that regarding humanoids, experience does not always produce learning.
I’m reminded of a story Hunter Thompson told in his 1967 accounting of his time spent with the Hell’s Angels biker group.
Full disclosure: i read this when it came out, i was in high school, and that was a very long time ago.
Nevertheless, the story went like this, as best i can remember:
The boys were on their way to a “bike meet” or similar language to describe a gathering of their tribe. This required crossing the southern California desert.
As (bad) luck would have it, along the way, they passed a dead fox. This caught somebody’s attention, who announced to the others that it would “show class” to “cook it and eat it”.
Regarding the concept of “class” and its display among bikers, i will only say read the book.
But getting back to the story, cook and eat the dead fox they did, after which they became, surprise, violently ill.
Asked later on, upon release from some hospital, what lesson was learned from the experience, one spokesbiker replied (i paraphrase):
Regarding Republicans, faced with similar learning opportunities that go no-where, if nothing else, it’s always enjoyable to watch them squirm.
Good story. My puppy has much the same philosophy. There’s no connection between over ripe yummy deer parts found on the trail and the lightning bolt of results a few hours later.
Totally off topic: A couple weeks ago I predicted that Obama’s 4.7% margin in Colorado would top 5% after the provisional ballots were counted. Today in FiveThirtyEight:
Mr. Obama’s margin in Colorado has expanded to 5.5 percentage points from 4.7 percentage points as more ballots have been counted, however.
Vote counting is not done yet. That’s a margin of almost 140,000 votes:
http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/CO/43032/113253/en/summary.html
Many of our wingnut parasites are hallucinating that the election was “stolen” due to vote fraud from hoards of dark-skinned voters who appeared at the polls to vote illegally. If you assume that each busload of hypothetical illegal voters can hit as many as 5 precincts in one day that would require 28k voters just for 140,000, or at least 40k voters if you assume that at least 200k votes were switched . 40k voters, approximately 800 busloads of people being transported around to different voting places all day and requiring food and lodging in the process. And no one noticed. Well, except that one guy in Maine, where Obama obviously needed busloads of dark skinned people to win a state that even UnSkewedPolls.com conceded to Obama. I tell you, it’s just amazing how effective the Obama operation was.
Yeah, all very plausible, until you figger the amount of fried chicken and watermelons that would be needed. Then where are you at?
Don’t know about that accountability stuff. I’m just waiting for the outrage about how the communists named a whole Friday after Those People.