Why you can't reason with a Republican Surely you've wondered this: why don't stupid things like facts change rightwingers' minds?
Digby explains:
...the GOP base is not really concerned with issues or even God, Family, Country. They are about hating liberals. (Many of them are about hating dark or foreign liberals in particular.) We can present a thousand ten point plans and say they should vote for us because their economic interests lie with liberal policies, but it won't make a bit of difference. We can point out their hypocrisy and flip-flops and it means nothing. Republican identity politics transcend such prosaic concerns as policy and political philosophy. It's all about whether you are one of them.
More than anything, as Matt Stoller observes, what they identify with is authoritarianism. Absolutely anything is OK for a Republican, as long as he affects the role of the big, strong, moralizing daddy. (h/t)
That doesn't mean that he — and, sorry, that inclusive "he or she" doesn't cut it with this crowd — actually needs to make us safer, holier, healthier, or wealthier.
He just needs to speak the tribal code of red-meat 'murkan jingoism.
He has to reassure us that we're superior to anyone who isn't a good, white, Christian, American man.
He needs to feed our paranoia about lily-livered liberals who want to fluoridate our water, impeding the flow of red, white, and blue testosterone.
He has to glorify unbridled power: military, religious, and economic.
He can be thrice-divorced and have OxyContin oozing out his eyeballs. He can be a drunk-driving draft dodger. He can wear magic underwear. He can even (shudder) have once thought women should be allowed control their own bodies.
He must assure "values voters" that he understands there are two kinds of people in this country: good and bad. The good people believe in "our country right or wrong." They hate the government (as long as hate means "investing imperial power in the executive branch... if the right party is in charge.")
The bad people are the dirty hippies, who care so little about American decency and our troops that they want America to be ethical, thoughtful, and responsible. They want to destroy the greatest nation on Earth with sissy shit like education, health care, diplomacy, and military planning.
The dirty hippies are people like Iraq War-opponent Diana Powe: Apparently, the fringe includes me, a 30-year serving Texas police officer, my oldest brother, Col. Marc B. Powe (USA ret.) who served two tours in Viet Nam, was a military attache in Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war and was in the Pentagon itself on 09/11, my brother, Christopher L. Powe, who was an artilleryman in Viet Nam, and my brother, Stephen F. Powe, who was a distinguished military graduate from Texas A&M University and served as an Army infantry officer in the mid-1970s.
We are widely recognized for being completely out of the mainstream of political and social thought as you can easily imagine. With commie-pinko, terrorist-lovin' freaks like the Powes, it's easy to understand why god-fearin' people in America's heartland won't listen to the left, and its famously outdated reality-based agenda.
The bottom line is this: matters like truth, ethics, and logic mean no more to a Republican than they do to a Rottweiler.
If that seems unfair, consider how much make-believe you have to play to believe in today's Republicans...
That they value common people more than they cherish Mammon.
That they value peace over the cheap thrills of sending other people's children to kill and die (or that peace and protecting our troops aren't worthy goals, after all).
That they live by Jesus' message of love and charity.
That their word is their bond, that they stand by "compassionate conservatism," "war is the last resort," "era of personal responsibility," "we support our troops," and "no child left behind."
That letting the most powerful corporations and their lobbyists craft federal legislation is in the best interests of every American.
That the best way to protect the environment and have peace in the Middle East is to have petroleum executives run the world's largest consumer of energy.
That the best way to put money in the pockets of average Americans is to give tax cuts to the wealthiest 1%.
That turning a record surplus into a record deficit is prudent financial stewardship.
That the future-tense document "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." was "an historical document."
That never once convening an anti-terrorism task force and sitting vacantly in a classroom while America was under siege is the highest standard of protecting our nation.
That abandoning a great American city in its time of need is further proof of our security, and of the decency and organizational prowess of our leaders.
That it's better to discard unused fetuses from in vitro fertilization than to use them to cure terrible diseases.
That tilting at WMD windmills in Iraq helped stop North Korea and Iran from advancing nuclear programs, and that everything that happened in the last six years really happened under Clinton.
That the correct response to senseless death is more senseless death, whether it's sacrificing American soldiers so that other ones whose lives we squandered "didn't die in vain," or killing thousands of innocent Iraqis to avenge the thousands of innocent Iraqis that Saddam Hussein killed, back when he was our ally.
That ignorance, arrogance, and pigheadness are the same things as vision, statesmanship, and resolve.
That illegal surveillance, legalized torture, and breaking down of the separation of church and state are what our forefathers would have hoped we'd one day achieve.
That Jesus really did tell George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld to open Pandora's Box in the Middle East.
That starting a disastrous war on false and ever-changing pretenses is of little consequence — so long as the party has a cross, a flag, and a picture of Ronald Reagan to wave in our faces.
You can keep arguing until you're blue in the face, because blue ain't the color of their tribal flag, and it never will be.
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