Ninja Monkie Bacchanal

Maybe...

It’s time to retire the overused — and inaccurate — words “dysfunctional” and “paralysis” that have appeared in a recent spate of articles and commentary propagating the fashionable view that the current Congress has gotten little or even nothing done. In fact, this has been one of the most productive Congresses in decades.

Making sport of Congress has a long tradition. Speaker Nicholas Longworth, an Ohio Republican, said in 1925 that he had been a member of Congress for 20 years, but “during the whole of that time we have been attacked, denounced, despised, hunted, harried, blamed, looked down upon, excoriated, and flayed. I refuse to take it personally ... we have always been unpopular. From the beginning of the Republic, it has been the duty of every free-born voter to look down upon us and the duty of every free-born humorist to make jokes at us.”

This is great OP-ED piece in the NYT:

Suspicion of outsiders, of people who behave or worship differently, may be an ingrained element of the human condition, a survival instinct from our cave-man days. But we should also recognize that historically this distrust has led us to burn witches, intern Japanese-Americans, and turn away Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.

Perhaps the closest parallel to today’s hysteria about Islam is the 19th-century fear spread by the Know Nothing movement about “the Catholic menace.” One book warned that Catholicism was “the primary source” of all of America’s misfortunes, and there were whispering campaigns that presidents including Martin Van Buren and William McKinley were secretly working with the pope. Does that sound familiar?

Interviews from the folks that showed up at Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally this past Saturday in DC.

This really makes for some interesting reading:

In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one. What does it take to believe that Christianity is an endangered religion in America or that the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated? Who wakes up believing that there is no appreciation for our veterans and our armed forces and that without a noisy speech from Sarah Palin, their sacrifice would be scorned? It’s not unfair to say that such grievances are purely and simply imaginary, which in turn leads one to ask what the real ones can be. The clue, surely, is furnished by the remainder of the speeches, which deny racial feeling so monotonously and vehemently as to draw attention.

So much money in politics, so little accountability.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

This is an interesting commentary. The author is a Fox News/NY Daily Post reporter:

Welcome to the summer of hate.

These dog days have brought a veritable festival of racial demagoguery, from a phony “New Black Panther” controversy to Arizona’s draconian illegal-immigrant crackdown to the most recent “ground zero mosque” hysteria.

From Frank Rich in the NYT:

Poor General Petraeus. Over the last week he has been ubiquitous in the major newspapers and on television as he pursues a publicity tour to pitch the war he’s inherited. But have you heard any buzz about what he had to say? Any debate? Any anything? No one was listening and no one cared. Everyone was too busy yelling about the mosque.

As I was driving up here today, I saw that bumper sticker that absolutely incenses me. It’s not the Obama bumper sticker. But it’s the bumper sticker that says, ‘Co-exist.’ And it has all the little religious symbols on it. And the reason why I get upset, and every time I see one of those bumper stickers, I look at the person inside that is driving. Because that person represents something that would give away our country. Would give away who we are, our rights and freedoms and liberties because they are afraid to stand up and confront that which is the antithesis, anathema of who we are. The liberties that we want to enjoy. - GOP Candidate Allen West (22nd District of Florida)

Um..duh.

On the web, ideologues are both journalist and pundit. Indeed, with the rise of investigative blogging, we should expect a long future of biased, inflammatory “evidence”—on both sides of the political spectrum.

The official psychological term for this behavior is “motivated cognition”—a tendency to bias our interpretation of facts to fit a version of the world we wish to believe is true. For instance, one study found that college basketball fans, viewing the same video of a game, were likely to believe the rival team committed at least twice as many fouls as their own.

Political beliefs are even more susceptible. Research has found that when psychologists confront political partisans with facts contradictory to their opinions, they become even more convinced of their existing beliefs.

Coked-up Stimulus Monkeys - Sen. Harry Reid’s plan to save Nevada, as described by Republican contender Sharron Angle.

Rep. Bob Inglis lost his Republican primary contest and is sort of angry about it.

Inglis has criticized Republican House leaders for acquiescing to a poisonous, tea party-driven “demagoguery” that he believes will undermine the GOP’s long-term credibility. And he’s freely recounting his frustrating interactions with tea party types, while noting that Republican leaders are pushing rhetoric tainted with racism, that conservative activists are dabbling in anti-Semitic conspiracy theory nonsense, and that Sarah Palin celebrates ignorance.

Nice guys...very nice.

The Republican National Committee has invited conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart to participate in a private GOP fundraiser next month with party chairman Michael Steele.

Breitbart was behind an edited video clip of a former Department of Agriculture official that suggested Shirley Sherrod, who is black, denied a white farmer aid. The speech, when viewed in full, shows the opposite.

UPDATE:
Apparently, the Republicans have changed their mind on this one.

The Republican National Committee has cancelled a fundraiser with conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who is under fire for promoting an edited video that falsely portrays former Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod as having boasted about discriminating against a white farmer looking for her assistance.