Fascinoma

So last night Michael Moore was on my teevee as I was fixing dinner, talking (God only knows why) to Wolf Douchebag Blitzer. Now, Michael Moore's heart is in the right place and he works hard and he's done some really good and funny things, but he gets a lot wrong too, which somewhat undercuts the force of the stuff he gets right -- unlike the rest of us who are infallible.

Anyway, last night Moore was raving to Wolf Blitzen about how the Democrats are wimps who lack the courage of their convictions -- and in this he is precisely right -- but he went on to say thats what he's "always admired" about Republicans is they believe in what they say, and get up early and bang away to engforce these beliefs no matter how wrong or stupid they are. Here Moore errs on several points. First off, all it's not clear that the professional Republican believes anything consistently. It seems much more likely that most are just bundles of sociopathic reflexes held together by a Caesarean sense of their own entitlement to everything in the world you can possibly imagine, and otherwise consistent only in their soiopthically contrarian impulse to manipulate people destructively, a subset of which is their unfailing, unreflective desire to piss liberals off.

Second, insofar as the Republican does believe something it is likely to be not merely wrong, in the sense of erroneous, or merely stupid, but it is quite likely to be actually evil - that is to say, it is a shibboleth of bigotry or a facile rationalization for past, present and intended wrongdoing. Nobody is to be admired for their belief in something for nothing ('Cutting taxes raises revenue... the ar will pay for itself etc') the core fallacy of the American Right. Nor should they be admired for the notion that war is good for economic ills, or for the idea that white Christians are the Master Race, with God-given dominion over all others and tough-love dispensation from all ethical reflection on the plight or treatment of brown people. It is wrong, criminally negligent at least, to believe most of the bullshit the Republicans swallow and regurgitate endlessly, and it is stupid to "admire" them for it.