From Friday, October 27, 2005, John and Tyrone discuss the crazification factor. This is required reading.
John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval. I feel much less like Kevin McCarthy screaming in traffic. But I wonder what his base is —
Tyrone: 27%.
John: … you said that immmediately, and with some authority.
Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.
John: Objectively crazy or crazy vis-a-vis my own inertial reference frame for rational behaviour? I mean, are you creating the Theory of Special Crazification or General Crazification?
Tyrone: Hadn’t thought about it. Let’s split the difference. Half just have worldviews which lead them to disagree with what you consider rationality even though they arrive at their positions through rational means, and the other half are the core of the Crazification — either genuinely crazy; or so woefully misinformed about how the world works, the bases for their decision making is so flawed they may as well be crazy.
John: You realize this leads to there being over 30 million crazy people in the US?
Tyrone: Does that seem wrong?
John: … a bit low, actually.
Tyrone: (shrugs) Probably right, then.
The rest of it is pretty amusing, too. What’s interesting is that Congress is less popular than Bush ever became. It appears that little more than a third of our crazy people approve of the job Congress is doing. If you dive into the numbers (pdf), you will discover that the Republican Party as a whole has a 62% disapproval rating, and Congress has an 87% disapproval rating. And these numbers are from the week before the government shut down.
I am reminded of the scene in the movie Das Boot when they take their u-boat to such a depth that the pressure causes the rivets to explode and become deadly ricocheting projectiles of hot steel. Suddenly, people are driving their cars into Secret Service agents and lighting themselves on fire on the Washington Mall.
The crazification factor may be small, but it’s taking a toll on us.
Open the government. Do your job.
62 + 27 = 99 Looks like the 27% factor is still correct. 62% disapprove of the (R) party and the rest are crazy.
62+27=89…
Doh! I KNOW I’ve been working too hard today!
Some of that Karl Rove math there???
(Blush)
Yet another reason for edit or delete. Oh well, all of us have pushed that button only to realize that we had just shot ourselves in the right temporal lobe…
11% are being spoon-fed Yankee beans by Elaine Benes.
If the government stays closed long enough, maybe enough of the crazy will have self-deported from this mortal coil and we can actually run this country in a good way.
Maybe we should let this play out a little while longer. We can start up a collection of kerosene and matches to send to Tea ParyTM Americans so they can show us just how pure they really are.
Avogadro was nothing and pi almost useless compared to the power of this universal constant.
http://www.dailykos.com/comment/1241595/51449517#c8
I lived in IL during 2004 when Keyes was brought in. That was a crazy crazy race. The first guy to run as an R was Jack Ryan. His wife was Jeri Ryan, better known as “7-of-9” on Star Trek: Voyageur. She was the hottest little number to wear a catsuit since Diana Rigg. She was actually Jack’s ex-wife. And that’s the story. Somebody in the Obama camp was sniffing around, and found out why they got divorced – it was because Jack wanted to have public sex with Jeri in a sex club. Once that came out, he was dumped in about a week, and that happened in August or so.
I remember driving around various places in Southern Illinois and all you could see in the rural areas were Keyes signs. I myself could not believe it. Keyes is and was a hateful lunatic who turned his own daughter out of his house and disowned her because she came out as a lesbian. What a hateful prick, honestly. It makes you realize that Portman, even though he is a conservative, is not a piece of crap in that he can change his mind after learning about his own gay son. But every house out in the country had the Keyes sign.
Politicians to become president have to be good, have to have the gift, and most importantly they have to be lucky. Obama has all of these, but most importantly, he has always been lucky. He became a state senator because his opponent filed a bunch of bad nominating petitions and Obama challenged them. He got lucky with Ryan’s incredible sex weirdness and Alan Keyes as a hateful piece of crap. Then in the presidential race, he got McCain, and McCain turned a strong hand into moldy oatmeal. Luck. Obama has the luck.
It’s the luck of the Irish.
Remember this?
There’s no one as Irish as Barrack O’Bama
yes, remember and love it; together with this one
“y hasta con plan de salud”!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fd-MVU4vtU&oq=viva%20obama&gs_l=youtube..0.5j0l2.14272.18009
.0.21518.10.10.0.0.0.0.93.621.9.9.0.eytns%2Cpt%3D-30%2Cn%3D2%2Cui%3Dt.1.0.0…1ac.1.11.youtube.r2Q9M
pOL1mg
thanks for posting – definitely a good way to start the day
Obama has been lucky to be sure, but I think it sells him a little short. A lot of his “luck” isn’t quite an accident. He’s a truly impressive man and quite eloquent, and that freaks his opponents out. I’m from Illinois and the people I know were buzzing about Obama long before Ryan self-destructed; he would have won that race easily even if Ryan hadn’t been…bizarre. But he so freaked out the Illinois Republican Party (who up until that point had been reasonably moderate and fairly sane) that they imported a certifiably crazy man from Maryland(!) to replace Ryan; they would have been less embarrassed if they’d picked someone off the street of downtown Cairo (at least he would have been an Illinoisan). I mean, a yellow dog would have beaten Alan Keyes. McCain picked Palin because he determined that he was going to lose unless he did something big, and then he totally freaked out when the financial crisis hit while Obama was calm and steady. Obama has freaked out the Republicans in general to such an extent that they have simply checked out of reality so much that Romney had no idea he was losing so badly and Congressional Republicans failed to notice that they had finally pushed the Democrats too far (although I think the Senate Republicans had an inkling after the situation with the filibuster over appointees and judges).
He’s Republican kryptonite. Unfortunately, they still have enough power to do a lot of damage while they run around screaming incoherently, tearing their hair out.
In both the Senate race and the 2008 Presidential race Obama benefited from a Republican blind spot. They thought he appealed to Illinois voters only because he was black, so run another black guy against him and it will nullify his advantage, right? Uh, no. Then they thought Hillary Clinton appealed to her primary voters only because she was a woman, so McCain could peel them off with a woman running mate, right? Both Keyes and Palin insulted the intelligence of the voters they were meant to appeal to.
As for luck:
“Luck is the residue of design.” — Branch Rickey
Or another quote “Chance favors the prepared mind”.
Obama’s state senate race is the best example. His opponent filed invalid petitions (and that is amazing period). Obama had to find this out, and use it to his advantage. I don’t know details of how he did this. If he was not ready and willing to use this situation, it would not have helped him. He was prepared.
Isn’t it obvious. A black guy with the middle name Hussein, who had an atheist Kenyan for a father runs for president in a post 9/11 world and blows out Democratic royalty in the form of Hillary Clinton and then kicks the ass of a revered white war hero. How could it be anything other than luck? You’d have to be brain dead to thing hard work and skill had anything to do with it.