Krugman Versus The Stupid

Paul Krugman at the NY Times: "Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid."

What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

In the case of oil, this takes the form of pretending that more drilling would produce fast relief at the gas pump. In fact, earlier this week Republicans in Congress actually claimed credit for the recent fall in oil prices: “The market is responding to the fact that we are here talking,” said Representative John Shadegg.

What about the experts at the Department of Energy who say that it would take years before offshore drilling would yield any oil at all, and that even then the effect on prices at the pump would be “insignificant”? Presumably they’re just a bunch of wimps, probably Democrats. And the Democrats, as Representative Michele Bachmann assures us, “want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, take light rail to their government jobs.”

Is this political pitch too dumb to succeed? Don’t count on it.

This is what it's all about, and every now and again the Village gets it right. The GOP strategery has been willful ignorance of the facts on the ground as they were busy running about creating their own little reality and expecting everyone else to buy into it out of sheer laziness and cynicism. It is stupidity raised to an art form, the art being the Art of Governance. Keep the people fat, dumb, and happy!

Eight years of this and we're facing a nasty recession, a country that is no longer recognizable as America the free, two wars without end and a third on the way, and a President despised by the world.

Now don't get me wrong, plenty of Democrats contributed to this mess. Some are gone, many are still in the halls of power. And there are plenty of realities that the Democrats choose to willfully ignore.

But with the choice being McSame and Obama, I take Obama. I know exactly what I'm getting with John Sidney McSame. Obama I still have hope for. That hope wavers on days, but it's still there. I have to believe that he can start the healing, and that he has to be better than who we have now.

Krugman ends with this:

In any case, remember this the next time someone calls for an end to partisanship, for working together to solve the country’s problems. It’s not going to happen — not as long as one of America’s two great parties believes that when it comes to politics, stupidity is the best policy.

Next time you hear somebody dump on the Dems for being elitist and condescending and appearing to consider Americans to be dumb, remember the GOP game plan of lying and obfuscation for the last eight years, and actually treating Americans like mindless idiots.