republicans are stupid

you might not realize this, but republicans are very, very stupid. they win elections, yes. but, their iq’s tend to be pretty low. you can tell how bad they are at logical thinking if you go to republican political websites and read the crap they post online. ok, you say, i am making absurd generalizations about a large group of people without sufficient justification. who cares? here is some circumstantial evidence to back my claim:

“I can't tell you how many people are beleaguered with seemingly insurmountable problems. ... What to do? ... How obvious it all is. And yet so many of us miss it all the time. ... It is all so simple: Ask and you shall receive. It does indeed work. ... All you have to do is talk to God; explain your situation simply and then ask God for help. Period. Then relax and forget your problem and stop worrying because worrying does not help anything or anyone. ... It is indeed simple. Too bad so many people miss this essential key to a happy life. If you think you are missing out, take the plunge and try talking to God. He will hear you - and He will help you. Guaranteed.”
- John LeBoutillier, at newsmax.com

my response: ok, so you talk to your magical genie and tell him what you want, and all your problems magically disappear? wow! great! it must be fun for you, living in a fantasy world. so you could just ask god to pay off your credit card debt, and god would pay the bill? you can just ask for god to end the problem of terrorism and make the world peaceful? i wonder what the world would look like if god granted all the wishes people prayed for... a lot different than it looks like now. so, it looks as if your little god either does not exist, or is deliberately ignoring your requests. why is it that small-minded religious folk always have to come up with a supernatural explanation for everyday occurrences, things that can be explained rationally and scientifically? it is so mind-bogglingly ridiculous, i can’t believe anyone takes religion seriously in this day and age.

“Opinion polls, of dubious veracity themselves, are allowed to go unchallenged, thus becoming their own self-fulfilling prophesies that the president is going down the pipes. The leftist "mainstream" media have abandoned all pretext of accuracy and objectivity, now daily making up bogus anti-Bush stories, trying to outdo one another in venality. While all that's been going on, what counterpunches has the president landed? None that come to mind.”
- John L. Perry, at newsmax.com

my response: ok moron, first of all, you right-wingers never questioned the validity of opinion polls back when bush had sky-high approval ratings after 9/11. when the public agrees with you on an issue, you go around bragging about it to everybody. newsmax.com conducts its own unscientific opinion polls all the time, of which almost all the respondents are ultra-right-wingers who frequent that site on a regular basis, and then tries to get major media outlets to broadcast its dubious poll results. but then there are dozens of independently done nationwide polls that all reach very similar results, and are done in a much more scientific fashion, and some newsmax.com blowhard like you is hypocritically saying that those polls are somehow wrong. well then get your own website to stop doing unscientific polls, if you are so concerned about the issue of polls being invalid. and if you knew statistics, and were mathematically literate, you might have a better understanding of the scientific and statistical basis for polls, and why they are indeed quite accurate (rarely if ever off by more than 5 percentage points). but it looks like you are just some hare-brained conspiracy theorist who thinks all the pollsters are liars and liberals in disguise, who have it in for the president, which is the most ridiculous conspiracy theory in the entire world. do you have any idea how hard that would be, to have a conspiracy of the type you are discussing, of all the pollsters? that shows that you have no grip on reality. and you think the mainstream media is left-wing. oh great. so does that include fox news or right-wing talk radio? how about abc? remember how abc put out that pro-bush anti-clinton movie about 9/11? and cbs? so far, katie couric has been a pro-bush right-wing apologist, and has given free airtime to rush limbaugh of all people! and how about nbc and its sister networks msnbc and cnbc? well cnbc, the financial news network, is unabashedly pro-free-markets and pro-republican. msnbc gave mike savage, a far-right-wing extremist, his own show, where his blatant racism was so over-the-top, it got him fired; they also cancelled a show hosted by liberal phil donahue, in their first experiment with having a liberal host, despite it having higher ratings than anything else on their network. and msnbc still has more right-wing hosts like tucker carlson, joe scarborough, and pat buchanan, than liberals like keith olbermann. and how about cnn and headline news? well, headline news is giving a 1-hour show every night to glenn beck, a folksy right-wing man of the people with a positive demeanor; headline news putting a friendly face on right-wingers and conservatives is a free gift to the republican party. there was only really one show on cnn that featured people who were partisan liberal democrats who spoke their mind; it was called crossfire, and gave equal time to conservative republicans too. and it was cancelled, after jon stewart, of all people, criticised it for dumbing down tv and lowering the level of political discourse. so apparently dan rather at cbs may have been a bit liberal, so the right-wingers tarred and feathered him, and got rid of him. yet people like ann coulter who openly call for mass murder are still allowed on tv and sell millions of books. yeah... what a liberal media. a guy named eric alterman wrote an entire book debunking the myth of the liberal media, by the way. i read it. very factual. unlike the drivel you find by conservative pundits who post on newsmax.com.

well, so far i have just talked about newsmax.com. umm. ok. where else? how about littlegreenfootballs.com? that is another horrible little right-wing site. littlegreenfootballs.com is basically a blog for rabid right-wingers who think everything is a conspiracy, and who really really really really really really really hate muslims. every so often, they “unmask” a “conspiracy”, like at this link, where they talk about this guy that they nicknamed “green helmet” who was allegedly a relief worker in the qana massacre in lebanon, where the israeli defense forces dropped a bomb and killed a large number of innocent civilians (i am not sure of the precise figure, and don’t really feel like looking it up right now, but i think it is somewhere around 30 or something like that). yeah, and they have a video of him supposedly acting like a movie director in some kind of cynical media manipulation, to make the massacre look more horrific, or something like that. this is what they are reduced to. originally they were trying to claim that the qana massacre was a hoax, or that the victims were purposefully planted in that building by the terrorists, or some other such nonsense, to escape from the reality that their beloved israel had just killed a bunch of innocent people, because that reality was too horrifying for their precious little minds to bear. so, they were going around, grasping at straws, trying to find some kind of conspiracy, any kind of conspiracy, just to try to put the blame on anyone but the israelis for what happened in qana. eventually they decided to pin the blame on this guy who is dressed as a relief worker and tells people he is a relief worker, who, they are convinced, is actually a hezbollah operative who engages in cynical media manipulation to make israel look bad and hezbollah look good. yeah. so what? so what if hezbollah had some guy trying to manipulate the media? does that change the fact that israel bombed a bunch of innocent people to smithereens? hell no! and guess who else engages in media manipulation? the united states! (not 100% sure that article i just linked to is accurate, but nothing is certain in life, and anyway, our government does media manipulation whether that article is true or not.) so, we are supposed to be able to do media manipulation, but not let any of our adversaries use the same propaganda tactics? propaganda is reserved for us and not them? is that it? if right-wingers are so opposed to media manipulation and propaganda, as they evidently are in the case of this “green helmet” dude, why don’t they ever get upset when our own government manipulates our own media, such as in the run-up to the war in iraq?

and here is some stupidity from the national review. they think that for “fairness”, we need to index the capital gains tax to inflation, i.e., basically they are just trying to pass another tax cut for the rich. now, how about a reality check? since the republicans came to power in congress in 1994, they have passed tax cuts for the rich, time and time again. every time, it was a tax cut that would mainly benefit those who are extremely wealthy, and have little to no impact on the vast majority of americans. bill clinton veoted those tax cuts for the rich, but george w. bush signed them all into law, and the republicans’ never-ending greed forces them to keep passing more and more tax cuts for the rich, all the time. the estate tax, the capital gains tax, the income tax, and a whole lot of other lesser-known taxes, all of them are targeted if they take any sort of significant bite out of the pockets of our wealthiest citizens. now is a time when we are in a deep financial hole as a country, with sky-high national debt and deficits. and who is bearing the cost of this? the poor! the wealthy are making more money than ever, with the forbes top 400 now entirely composed of billionaires. ceos of companies can basically name their own price when it comes to salary, and the sky is the limit. meanwhile, for ordinary people, for the median family, the standard of living has constantly gone down throughout the years of the dubya regime. hardly any of the tax breaks affect ordinary people. ordinary people mainly pay sales taxes and payroll taxes, both of which are regressive taxes. regressive taxes are not cut; in fact they are often raised by republicans. instead, republicans cut progressive taxes like the progressive income tax, in order to make sure rich people pay as little taxes as possible. now, the math of this is quite simple. the federal government costs a certain amount of money each year, and this is paid for through taxes. some of the tax revenue comes from the poor, some from the middle class, and some from the wealthy. republicans systematically have been reducing the share paid by the wealthy and increasing the share paid by the poor, which has resulted in greater poverty as well as more super-wealthy people. all very predictable results. you see, taxation is a zero-sum game. you cannot help one person without hurting someone else. so, in this time when our wealthiest citizens are doing ridiculously well, with hundreds of billionaires out there, why can we not simply have some common decency and ask the billionaires to pay their fair share? it is not like they need the money! sure, they might devote it to philanthropy, but then again, they might not. the only way we can know for sure what happens to the money is if we take it and spend it ourselves, which is why we ought to do exactly that. republican efforts to eliminate the estate tax (which they call the “death tax” in a creepy use of orwellian new-speak) are even worse, because they not only want people to be able to make unlimited amounts of money, but to be able to pass it on for unlimited numbers of generations without being taxed at all. basically what this means is, they want to create a hereditary aristocracy like that which existed in europe during the feudal ages. in fact, such an aristocracy already exists (witness the spectacle of paris hilton or of our president to see the effects of aristocratic inbreeding). this is because republicans sincerely believe that rich people are better than everyone else, and are entitled to keep all of their money, as some sort of fundamental right handed down from on high, that we are never supposed to question. they do not believe in equality, but rather in some sort of caste system, where the rich are the highest caste, and the poor are the lowest caste. why is bush trying to implement a guest-worker program? for cheap labor! now indexing the capital gains tax to inflation could save rich people money, so why don’t we index the minimum wage to inflation? republicans would never index the minimum wage to inflation, because they want inflation to continue to reduce the value of the minimum wage, until it is essentially worthless. republicans view people who work at the minimum wage as inferior and somehow subhuman, and do not think they are worthy of being paid any more than what they are being paid now. the fact is, they are being paid so little because of competition from cheap labor overseas. human labor is extremely cheap now, thanks to overpopulation and the international free trade agreements. “pro-life” republicans do not think that every person deserves enough money to live their own life. would they ever implement universal health care? hell no! they think poor people deserve to die if they get sick, and do not want to have to pay a penny if it would go towards helping anyone less fortunate than themselves. such is the greed of the republicans. what is stupid is how obvious they make it to everyone. i mean, in their medicare prescription drug law they passed (by bribing and bullying their own congressmen), it prohibited the government from negotiating lower prices for drugs it purchased in bulk from pharmaceuticals. what the hell is more retarded than that rip-off? i can go to the local store and by one can of soda for 99 cents, or a 12-pack of cans of soda, for 5 bucks (those are rough estimates). you get a better deal if you buy in bulk. that is, if you aren’t a complete retard. but the republicans prohibit the federal government from getting any sort of bulk discounts from pharmaceuticals, even though everyone other than the federal government can negotiate whatever sort of bulk discount deal they want. no wonder private corporations are more efficient than the government! republicans pass laws prohibiting the government from being more efficient or cutting costs, and refuse to allow anyone to pass any laws that would improve things in the slightest! the government is not inefficient because it is a government; it is inefficient because its leaders want it that way. they overcharge the taxpayers for government services, siphoning off the extra money into large corporations. corporate profits are inflated for all companies doing business with the government, because there are always sweetheart deals to defraud taxpayers and send our tax dollars into the pockets of the ceos rather than the poor people who need the money. just look at all the no-bid contracts in iraq, for halliburton and other companies! it is such a scandalous system, corrupt to its very core. and republicans are stupid because they think the american people are dumb enough to fall for their bullshit, again and again, one election after another, and never learn to put 2 and 2 together. they think we are all morons, and we will fall for anything they say! well guess what! some of us are less moronic than others! and i am one of them! the less-moronic ones, i mean. i don’t mean that i am not moronic at all, because as a human, i am prone to human fallibility, and we are really all morons at some level. but, i consider myself less of a moron than the average bloke.

ok, anyway, so if republicans are dumb, how come they still win elections? well, i think one of the main reasons is religion. it is plain as day that all religions are false, yet billions of fools continue to believe in them. this shows that the vast majority of people have severe difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality, fact and fiction. religion teaches people to be irrational and not develop any critical thinking skills, and if someone does develop some critical thinking skills, they are taught to strictly limit the scope of what they are allowed to apply their critical thinking skills to. only apply critical thinking skills to things you already disagree with, people learn. but people are not taught to doubt what they themselves believe; instead they are taught to have the intellectual arrogance to claim that they know what is true and that all who disagree are clearly wrong. now of course, i have this same sort of intellectual arrogance, but in my case, it is well justified, because i can back up the things i believe in with logical argument, and i can demolish any argument by those who disagree with me, with my superior logic. but most people are quite illogical, and i must admit, i am quite illogical too, at least from a behavioral standpoint, even if i can make logical arguments that sound cogent. now when someone criticizes my behavior, oftentimes i have no recourse than to resort to tomfoolery, to change the subject, to use flawed or illogical arguments because there are no logical ones that would work. it is rather embarrassing and unbecoming of one with the gift of logical argument, to have to resort to saying such illogical things. but, my gift only works sometimes and not at other times, apparently, and i do not have much control over the on/off switch. i suppose that is what it is like, for any person. but when the facts are not on my side i am often forced to resort to emotional appeals, or to at least have an emotional outburst of my own, since i am pretty ineffective at manipulating the emotions of anyone else. emotions are the most illogical part of the human psyche, and it is regretful that i continue to be so childish in my behavior. i suppose there is nothing that can be done, other than actually doing something, but that is just a tautology. and tautologies are always true, which is why i believe in them. because something which is true can never be false. even republicans can understand something as simple as that.

but it never ceases to amaze me how often republicans use “liberal” as an insult and try to insinuate that liberals are “out of the mainstream” and have no chance in ever getting elected. no democrat would ever say things like that about conservatives. i mean, the right-wing ultra-conservatives who control all 3 branches of the federal government are out of the mainstream, yes. but they still manage to win elections on a fairly regular basis, somehow. i am not exactly sure why. this phenomenon needs to be researched more closely. anyway, the public agrees with liberals and disagrees with conservatives on most issues. yet more people call themselves conservatives than liberals. and no liberal would ever say that conservatives can never win elections. oh, they can win, and they do win, but not always, and they are evil, and they must be stopped. what is so stupid about them is their complete lack of understanding of what a liberal is. they think hillary clinton is a liberal, and are amazed that a lot of liberals feel betrayed by her pro-war stance and think she is too conservative. as if conservatives never have litmus tests for their own candidates, or never try to enforce right-wing ideological rigidity in the republican party by eliminating moderates? but i am not sure the idea of a so-called “mainstream” is even relevant anymore. society is so fragmented and polarized, i think there are multiple competing mainstreams, each trying to establish itself as the one and only mainstream. but what is the point of bragging about how many millions of people you have managed to brainwash through the mass media, anyway? that is all that discussions of a mainstream ever mean, anyway. and when they talk about historical failures of liberals in elections (most notably presidential ones in the 70s and 80s), this is a scare tactic and has absolutely no bearing on reality. things are much different now than they were in the 70s and 80s, and the fact is, society is polarized now along partisan lines, with democrats currently more popular than republicans, despite republicans controlling all 3 branches of government. the real purpose of this scare tactic is to goad the democrats into having centrist or even right-wing presidential nominees, or to at least minimize how liberal the nominees are. this is because republicans simply hate liberalism, because they hate anything their simple minds cannot understand. they were able to entirely dismiss everything in the movie fahrenheit 9/11 as either irrelevant or incorrect in their view of the universe, simply by making ad hominem attacks against michael moore, and questioning the things that they think are implied in the movie that are not even stated in words. plus they had point-counterpoint things where they would counter the facts stated in his movie with the lies they believe in that they were told by the bush administration or fox news. granted, the movie was a 1-sided polemical propaganda movie, but it was quite factual and accurate, using a lot of real footage of actual events, which was not doctored at all, other than having michael moore do a voice-over and have some music playing in the background. besides, everything these days is 1-sided and polemical, at least if it comes from someone like me, or anyone else who is the least bit partisan when it comes to politics. anyone who acts evenhanded or pretends to be fair and balanced is really being dishonest with how they conduct themselves, if they have any relevant deeply-held beliefs that they keep hidden. that type of covert bias is the hardest to detect, and it causes the most damage; people ought to be honest about their beliefs, because if someone is not honest about what they believe, how can you trust them to honestly report the facts? transparency is key, and since news reporters demand transparency from others, they ought to demonstrate it themselves. michael moore is a person who, at least, is honest enough to actually say what he thinks and not pretend to be unbiased. that is how all people ought to conduct themselves. now you might ask, what about ann coulter, doesn’t she say what she really thinks? and the answer is, no, i don’t think so, i think it is all an act, and she is a phony. she has admitted as such to her friends, and while she might really believe in conservatism or really support republicans, it is clearly not in as emphatic and dogmatic a way as she presents herself in the public arena. she is putting on an act to a certain extent, in the exact same way stephen colbert does on his show, except for her, acting is more serious and less of an obvious mockery. instead, she tries to outrage people to generate hype and sell more books, to make more money and promote her career as a high-status idiot. i don’t think all of the republican bush apologists really believe what they say; they could not possibly be so out of touch with reality. they are just trying to help their side win, even when they know they are wrong and the other side is right. and that is not what i do, nor is it something i can abide by. the truth must be preeminent. period.