The Sahara of the Bozarts goes to Washington

Jonathan Chait, who is becoming one of the best bloggers around on the national level, considers a new Republican talking point: "The President was condescending."

Earlier I noted of the health care summit that the Republicans in attendance seem to be divided between those who have no data at their disposal and those who have incorrect data. It is therefore difficult for President Obama, who obviously has a deep command of the issue, to engage with those Republicans without somewhat projecting condescension.

Waldo's got a different take. The GOP has, since the 1960s, cultivated a populist, anti-intellectual stance. They picked up, and ran with, George Wallace's "pointy-headed intellectuals" rant. It plays well to people with resentments in places progress has left behind. It has a nicely racial tinge as well: life is a zero sum game; the government dispenses all kinds of largess on people who aren't like us; they don't deserve it (recall Ronald Reagan's Cadillac-driving welfare queens).


Thus the embrace of creationism. The obsessive repetition of the "junk science" meme when it got started as a result of  "experts" in the hire of corporate interests  doing those interests' bidding in the witness box. The campaign to reduce climate change to a punchline (it won't happen in Waldo's lifetime, but in due course a big swathe of Republicans are gonna be really peeved when their beach houses go under).


You can see it in South Carolina, where legislators- and their consultant/bloggers- go on endlessly about the shortfalls of the education system. But they keep shoveling money at it even as they refuse to exercise their power to direct the spending of that money in ways they believe will produce better results.  They need institutions like education to attack- it pumps up their "outsider" status even as their tenure in office gets longer and longer and longer. At the same time they know the money they give to education- or Boeing- creates jobs and that makes voters happy when they are not angry. It's a win-win.


The best example of how the right denigrates education and educational accomplishment is their crack-like addition to the work of pollster Frank Luntz, who has determined how to assemble panels of angry white people and mine only their lower brain stems for emotional buzzwords that substitute for thought and analysis. Thus the death tax.


At CPAC speakers reading from teleprompters denounced the president as an academic who tries to govern by teleprompter.  Yesterday, at the Blair House Summit, the GOP's experts included Doctor/Congressman Paul Boustany of Louisiana- a Birther who tried to buy a British title of nobility- then, when it didn't pan out, settled for becoming a congressman; Rep. Paul Kirk, an Ayn Rand fan who wants to eliminate Medicare and Social Security; and Senator Tom Coburn, who says gridlock is good because nothing gets passed in Congress.