Archive for category Tribalism & Blind Obedience to Authority

I fail to understand why, but apparently Ted Nugent is considered a cogent and intelligent thinker on things political.  Hence his recent comment on Sarah Palin:

If Sarah Palin played a loud, grinding instrument, she would be in my band. The independent patriotic spirit, attitude and soul of our forefathers are alive and well in Sarah. In the way she lives, what she says and how she dedicates herself to make America better in these interesting times, she represents the good, while exposing the bad and ugly. She embraces the critical duty of we the people by participating in this glorious experiment in self-government. The tsunami of support proves that Sarah, 46, represents what many Americans know to be common and sensible. Her rugged individualism, self-reliance and a herculean work ethic resonate now more than ever in a country spinning away from these basics that made the U.S.A. the last best place. We who are driven to be assets to our families, communities and our beloved country connect with the principles that Sarah Palin embodies. We know that bureaucrats and, even more, Fedzilla, are not the solution; they are the problem. I’d be proud to share a moose-barbecue campfire with the Palin family anytime, so long as I can shoot the moose.

Andrew Sullivan archly observed:

Nugent perfectly channels Palin’s appeal to a bewildered, beleaguered, older white America. This appeal is not about policies or even Palin’s actual life so much as projection onto someone of an ideal type that represents something deep down in the national psyche. See if you can observe any policy reasons to support Palin in Nugent’s poem. Now look at the way he conflates her neurotic fundamentalism and delusional grip on reality with those dry deists who founded this country on Enlightenment principles. Then look at how most see her as “authentic” when she is, of course, less authentic than even John Edwards. And note too the judgment that a governor who quit halfway through her first term represents a “herculean work ethic.” We are in Imaginationland here.  And boy, how it makes Nugent – and so many others – feel good again, feel as if they have recaptured their country again. They see in this immaculate misconception (with a bonus miraculous birth to another symbol of the pro-life movement, a child with Down Syndrome!) the salve to every anxiety and view all criticism of her as somehow illegitimate, and stemming from a hatred of the real America. Rejecting Palin, of course, is actually a resistance to fake America, with its magical realist narratives and Christianism as a doomed cover for collapsing social norms, family breakdown and drug use.

I’m with Sullivan in his scorn of her “herculean work ethic” – nothing in her track record is consistent with the description “herculean work ethic.”

At Washington Monthly, Steve Benen:

Regardless, what the Tea Partiers have come up with doesn’t seem especially compelling.

This, for example, is the Contract From America’s tax position.

Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the internal revenue code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words — the length of the original Constitution.

This is a particularly silly proposal. 

Folks can make the case that reforming the code could make it easier to understand. One could also argue that the tax code has loopholes that should be closed. And while I think it’s ridiculous, we can even have a debate about the merits of a “single-rate tax system,” instead of the progressive rate system.

But once we get into maximum word counts, we’ve quickly entered the realm of hollow gimmickry and arbitrary nonsense. It’s a bit like Republicans’ obsession over the number of pages in the Affordable Care Act. Who cares? Sometimes complex policies require complex instructions.

I’m trying to imagine the executives at Ford telling the engineers, “It’s time to design a new Mustang, but you can only use the number of parts found in the Model T. If it was good enough for our forebears…”

These two very different bloggers have keyed into something similar.  It’s not accidental that the right’s favorite public figure right now is the aggressively ill-informed Sarah Palin, nor is it accidental that the right’s favorite political arguments are either uninformed or simply unworkable.