Cognitive Dissonance and Mitt Romney

So Willard “Mitt” Romney has lost, and I still never learned what the hell “Mitt” stands for.

After a campaign full of the most outrageous, repeated, shameless lies on virtually every subject imaginable, Romney can finally return to his love of lying to his family. Also, evading taxes and buying show horses. (Who wants to bet against him revising his current-year tax return to take his effective tax rate down to 9% from 14%?) It is hard to imagine why he ever felt any need or desire to be president. I would enter the realm of speculation if I were to guess, and none of the answers the campaign gave can be trusted. Going down in history as the most flagrantly dishonest, insincere politician in American politics may not have been his goal, but it might well be the result of his campaign. One aspect of the Romneys did strike me as sincere and genuine, however, and that was their utter contempt for ordinary Americans and disregard for their struggles. How, I wondered, could someone as privileged as Mitt Romney treat 47% of America as beneath contempt? (In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I have been part of that group as recently as two years ago when, while working 60-80 hours/week, I was eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit on my measly Lecturer salary. This is because my state government believes in Freedom!) My theory is that it is based on cognitive dissonance and the tendency for people to reduce their cognitive dissonance. First, an example.

I lift weights and have lifted weights for about two decades. I have type 1 diabetes, which caused me, when I got it, to lose 40 pounds of muscle over the course of one year before I was diagnosed. In addition, I have suffered just about every type of muscle, tendon, ligament injury not requiring surgery known to humanity. Still, while I had diabetes and had not been diagnosed, I went to the gym and attempted to lift weights despite being so tired that it felt as though I would fall asleep on the weight benches. (I was also finishing my dissertation and working my first full-time teaching job.) Some of my other injuries have been rotator cuff tears, chondromalacia (a prearthritic condition in my knees), something called ‘frozen shoulder’, and, most recently, tendinitis (not counting all the other minor aches and pains that come with weightlifting). Through all of this I continued to lift weights. (I’ve found the best injuries are the ones where the doctors say, you can keep training even if it hurts; the training won’t make it worse. I hate the injuries when I have to stop lifting. I’m looking at you, tendinitis.)

Why do I bring up this story? Because of the difficulties I have had in keeping up my weight-training, I have a really hard time sympathizing with obese, overweight, or out-of-shape people. When people say they don’t have time to go the gym or that they have some problem that makes it hard to exercise, I can’t fathom it. I am engaged in reducing cognitive dissonance.

According to Wikipedia,

Cognitive dissonance is the term used in modern psychology to describe the feeling of uneasiness when holding two or more conflicting cognitions (e.g., ideas, beliefs, values, emotional reactions) simultaneously.

One consequence of this is that people who do something that is considered wrong are more sympathetic to people who also done it.
Here’s one of the examples of cognitive dissonance reduction from the Wikipedia page. People will tend to :

Justify behavior that opposed their views: Students judge cheating less harshly after being induced to cheat on a test [The assumption is that no one believes that cheating on a test is morally acceptable.]

The converse of this is that people who resist the temptation to cheat tend to judge cheaters more harshly. People may be reasoning thus: I could resist cheating, so everyone could resist cheating, so they must be bad people for cheating. In my case, I have constantly had temptations to quit lifting weights, but I have not done so, and so it is very difficult for me to feel any sympathy for people who don’t exercise. It’s easy to think: I’ve managed to stay in shape despite all these challenges, so you should be able to as well. When other people struggle with things that I have managed to do, I can feel the dissonance of believing that my struggles were not so great after all (but they felt terrible!) compared to others or I can conclude that these other people are lazy or just plain weenies (I’m looking at you, Paul Ryan. With all the campaign cash you get, you'd think he could buy a bicep. Or is it all soft money?)

The Romneys appear to believe that they succeeded despite considerable struggles. Witness this story about an interview [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2200624/We-know-like-struggle-says-Ann-Romney-tells-hardships-Mitt-faced.html] with Anne Romney. Similarly, in his famous 47% video, Mitt makes the rather implausible claim that he did not receive help in his business career from his father (because he had become wealthy enough himself to donate his inheritance that his father left him). No doubt they did struggle. Everyone struggles in one way or another, at one time or another. I’m sure that raising 5 boys was difficult, especially for someone with MS. My mom had 3 boys, and I’ve always said she was a saint for it. (Of course, she was also a public school teacher.) The Romneys believe they had to struggle with financial hardship as well, selling off stock to survive, living in a small apartment, and the rest. Most of us could wish for that kind of hardship, but still, it seemed difficult to them. Given their perception of their own difficulties, they probably reasoned as I am tempted to: we managed to overcome our difficulties, so other people should be able to overcome their financial difficulties as we did. The fact that they have not done so indicates that they are shiftless layabouts happy to live off the work of other, more productive citizens. The alternative is to think that the Romney’s struggles were not so great after all, that other people have things much worse than they did, or that others lack some advantages they had. Nobody wants to think those things, that they are privileged and succeeded primarily because of their advantages, so they blame the 47% for their own poverty.

There must be at least one other factor at work, of course, since lots of wealthy people sympathize with the poor. I think there must be an implicit comparison group and a lack of exposure to true suffering. If the Romneys only compared themselves to other rich people, they might not recognize their advantages. If they are not exposed to the truly needy, they can write off their struggles more easily. (Today I watched a man with one leg negotiating a 5 lane street in his walker. Come on, dude: Pull yourself up by your own bootstrap!) Lack of exposure to the real suffering of the poor in America clearly enables a lack of empathy as well.

I like to think that there is a lesson of some sort in all this. Our struggles are rarely as bad as we think they are? We should be more aware of the world outside our (comparatively privileged) purview to develop empathy for those worse off than ourselves? The American people can see through the lies of an overprivileged jerk? I’ll leave that for another day, and now hope that Mitt Romney, crying bitter tears into his silken pillows, learns a decent empathy for at least some Americans: wealthy, failed Republican presidential contenders. It would be too much to hope that he can extend that circle of empathy any further.

On a somewhat related note, I was as amazed as anyone that Karl Rove et al. fully bought into their own bull$%#t about Romney’s popularity. As any good drug dealer knows, never sample your own product. I had always had Rove pegged as a con man, not a true believer. I guess even con men can fall for their own cons if they run them long enough.

Atheism and Dogmatism

Reading an issue of Smithsonian magazine the other day, I came across a strange article on an artist (Barbara Kruger) bringing some important message to our politicians in Washington. Apparently an artist was going to fix our broken political system by bringing a one-word message to our politicians (appropriately contextualized in some visual image). Here’s the first paragraph:

Barbara Kruger is heading to Washington bearing the single word that has the power to shake the seat of government to its roots and cleave its sclerotic, deep-frozen deadlock.

It’s hard to imagine a more pompous, even delusional, idea than that one word can change the reasoning of our elected representatives without, presumably, changing their various interests and incentives. So, what is this magic word? I had to read all the way to the end of the article to find out, but you, dear reader, get the answer immediately:

The magic word with the secret power that is like garlic to Dracula in a town full of partisans. The word is “DOUBT”.

To this I reply with William Butler Yeats’, The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I realize the point of this article is to advertise some museum’s artistic installation (the Hirschhorn in Washington, D.C.; I recommend avoiding it), and that no rational being could actually believe that one word could change the world. There was adequate reason to doubt the seriousness of the author when he/she describes part of the installation:

It was up there, dominating the top of the work, a line written in the biggest, boldest, baddest letters. The central stack of words is superimposed over the brooding eyes and the advancing shoes of a man in what looks like a black-and-white movie still. His head is exploding into what looks like a blank white mushroom cloud, and on the cloud is written: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face forever.”

The author (Ron Rosenbaum) asks Kruger, the artist: “Where’d you get that quote?”

Let us get this straight, the Smithsonian glossy advertisement for various allegedly publicly funded museums hires someone who does not remember, or never knew, the most famous quotation from 1984? And the artist so awes him that we will rush to be told that that George Orwell fella was really onto something there. It’s obvious that we’re not going to get an informed and intelligent description of how art can change the world. Nonetheless, the article slouches towards its ending:

With the absence of doubt, each side clings to its values, devaluing the other side’s values, making any cooperation an act of betrayal.

But do they revalue their own values in devaluing the other side’s valuation of its own values? This is false equivalence and “both-sides-do-it-ism”. The Democrats and Republicans are each equally certain of their own beliefs and each equal in refusing to compromise with the other.

Quickly, then, why is it stupid to think that this one-word art exhibit will completely alter partisanship in Washington, D.C.?

• It’s not true that both sides do refuse to cooperate. Obama borrowed virtually every major public policy that Republicans espoused just a few short years or even months before, and yet somehow the Republicans managed to vehemently oppose their own ideas (both individually and collectively). The refusal to cooperate is almost entirely on one side.

• There is absolutely no reason to think that any change in politicians’ level of certainty will materially affect their behavior. Even if they are not absolutely sure they are correct, they might still oppose each other in just as partisan manner as before they were less certain.

• It is unrealistic to think that people’s behavior will change without some change in their underlying system of beliefs, their interests and allegiances, the interests and allegiances of their constituents, and the incentives for their behavior. It doesn’t matter much how certain politicians are that they are correct, they will still act the same way if they will get voted out of office for not acting that way.

• Less certainty on the part of the Democrats, assuming that is even possible, especially might lead them to give in even more to the Republicans. The best lacking all conviction is as much a part of the problem as the worst being full of passionate intensity. Excessive uncertainty can lead to paralysis just as much as partisanship can.

It is nothing more than a fantasy that politicians will change their behavior based on a single word no matter how artistically presented.

But all of that is not my present point. My point is to critique the final absurdity of the article:

The conversation about doubt turned to agnosticism, the ultimate doubt.
She made clear there’s an important distinction between being an atheist and being an agnostic, as she is: Atheists don’t doubt! “Atheists have the ferociousness [what, ferocity ain’t a word no more?] of true believers – which sort of undermines their position!” she said.

“In this country,” she added, “it’s easier to be a pedophile than an agnostic.”

Indeed, I sh*t not upon thee, good reader. This is Kruger’s claim, and most self-evidently true it is. Pedophiles frequently announce their pedophilia proudly during interviews with national magazines. It is also obvious that agnostics are thrown in prison for decades, cast out of decent society (assuming they are no longer pursuing successful football coaching careers or being on uncomfortably close terms with those who are), labeled as child predators and sometimes rendered homeless by virtue of restrictions on living within a given distance of anything that might conceivably ever attract a child. And, finally, we know that agnostics in prison are highly likely to be killed or assaulted by other prisoners who were agnosticized as children. Nothing really compares to the ostracism of an agnostic in American society. It’s worse than the Bataan death march! [This is a private joke based on a This Modern World cartoon by Tom Tomorrow that I have never been able to find online.]

Unless she’s talking about being a Catholic priest, in which case being agnostic would be problematic.

Overlooking the absurd persecution complex, we note that Kruger is making a category mistake. She thinks that our society continually demands certainty of us when, in reality, no certainty is possible on this issue. She thinks that atheists, by claiming to believe that there is no god, must be dogmatic in their adherence to their belief, and the only way to maintain the proper humble attitude towards our lack of knowledge is to remain agnostic. Let’s use the term ‘Dogmatism’ for the attitude of certainty, closed-mindedness, unwillingness to countenance evidence against one’s position or revise one’s belief given evidence, and willingness to force one’s beliefs on others (by, for example, legislating public displays of fealty to one’s belief system as fundamentalist Christians tend to do). But dogmatism is not a part of atheism any more or less than it is part of theism or agnosticism. Dogmatism is not a belief, or even a system of belief, but an attitude toward belief and so it is logically independent of whatever belief one has. One can be a dogmatic theist, atheist, or, even, agnostic.

People who become atheists (or ‘deconvert’) have often done so precisely because they were open-minded and willing to revise their beliefs when they realized the evidence did not support them. It’s a stretch to imagine that once this deconversion occurred, atheists suddenly became closed-minded. Saying one does not (and perhaps cannot) know that God exists does evince uncertainty about the existence of God, but one might also feel subjectively so certain that we cannot know that God exists that one does not consider counterevidence (that we do know that God exists or that God does not). Contrariwise, we could be perfectly undogmatic in our theism or atheism. A theist who was willing to revise her believe in light of evidence could be much less dogmatic than Kruger, who appears happy to generalize about all who disagree with her on the basis of no evidence at all. Who then is the dogmatist—the atheist or the agnostic who vilifies her without evidence?

This story would be funny were it not so commonplace a view. Some months ago my mother-in-law announced during a discussion of religion that she “could stand to have an agnostic in the family but never an atheist.” Since I thought I’d made it fairly clear that I was an atheist, I found this a bit disconcerting. I have even harbored suspicions that her husband was an atheist. So why did she say this? (Was I being excommunicated?) I never found out precisely, but I think it was for the same reasons Kruger gives. She thinks that atheists are just as dogmatic as the most fundamentalist Christian, and, possibly based on stereotypes of atheists one finds in the press (especially among the Fox-newsians), that atheists are contemptuous of ordinary Americans.

In short, it’s not just an artist with an inflated ego and a penchant for inappropriate analogies who thinks atheists are all dogmatic. It appears to be one of the common, and undeserved, pictures of us, and that image provokes significant dislike among even thoughtful people. Indeed, dogmatism is so contrary to ideals of tolerance and understanding in the liberal mind that considering atheism to exemplify that dogmatism provides reason enough to reject it for those among us who most value tolerance and pluralism. I do not see a solution to this problem when few mainstream figures are free to make the case for atheism, to show that atheists are reasonable and rational people, and, generally, to provide living counterexamples to the stereotype of the close-minded atheist. Those, such as Richard Dawkins, whose main public role is to argue for atheism are easily caricatured as strident, anti-religious fundamentalists simply because they only appear in public in the role of atheists. Many public figures are atheists, but, aside from youtube videos, they never get much chance to talk about it on television—bad for ratings, no doubt—and thus the atheist struggle for recognition proceeds without much in the way of a mainstream media voice and with little opportunity for the ordinary people to see atheists as reasonable people much like themselves.

Mitt Romney Faces Difficult Questions

After a week in which Governor Mitt Romney has apparently refused to answer direct questions about his stance on SB 1070 the Arizona immigration law, that he earlier touted as a model to the nation, about his stance on President Obama’s executive order called Dream Act Lite which would redirect enforcement of immigration law to not to expel those who have lived in America since they were children in the United States illegally, about the specific ways in which he would alter the health care reform legislation, and about even whether he was actually appearing at a fundraiser with noted Birther and blustering hairstyle Donald Trump, who has himself advertised the fundraiser. Some have speculated that is trying to avoid taking a position on controversial issues in order to avoid alienating any part of the electorate in the hopes that the poor economy in itself will result in Governor Romney’s election.

The following is a transcript of an interview on CNN’s Talk of the Talk in which Romney campaign advisor Bertram Wooster III faced tough questions from a visibly exasperated Boledad O’Sanchez on Wednesday.

O’Sanchez: Is Donald Trump hosting a fundraiser for Governor Romney? If so, is Governor Romney going to appear at this fundraiser or not?

Wooster: We need to focus on the kind of questions that matter to the American people, like “How much of a failure is President Obama?” and “Why hasn’t Obama led the Republicans in Congress to real bipartisan reforms?”

O’Sanchez: But wouldn’t you have to report the fundraiser to the SEC? What is the point of hiding this information since it will come out soon anyway?

Wooster: You’re assuming that Governor Romney, as a candidate for President, would have to report his fundraisers.

O’Sanchez: Are you saying that Governor Romney is no longer running for President?
Wooster: You’re oversimplifying what is a very complex and difficult issue, and I think the American people should know that we are committed to moving forward in a bipartisan way to solve the challenges that face America in a comprehensive and detailed manner, unlike President Obama who has repeatedly failed to provide the leadership necessary to move the country forward.

O’Sanchez: I thought it was fairly clear in the Republican primary that Governor Romney was running for President.

Wooster: Governor Romney stands by whatever he said in the primaries even if he, and I, cannot remember what he said. The general election is a chance for us to present Governor Romney to the American people in a new light.

O’Sanchez: But he is running for President, isn’t he?

Wooster: Boledad, that’s just the kind of gotcha question that you in the media love to ask, instead of asking important questions that matter to the American people, like, “Did Obama really eat a dog and does he still eat dog?” I have to remind you that President Obama has failed in his presidency to bring people together in a bipartisan manner to do things the Republican party wants him to.

O’Sanchez: As president, you mean?

Wooster: That’s not as simple a question as you make it out to be. I think the American people are tired of these meaningless media distractions and gotcha questions. The American people understand what it is that Governor Romney is trying to do, and we are confident that they will agree with us.

O’Sanchez: By voting for Governor Romney on election day?

Wooster: Once again, you are asking for a simple answer to a complex question that requires bipartisan cooperation of the kind that President Obama has repeatedly failed to provide.

O’Sanchez: But Governor Romney will, as president?

Wooster: I don’t understand why you keep asking a question that I and the entire Romney campaign have answered repeatedly, and we have shared our ideas with the American people.

O’Sanchez: Well, we’re out of time. The Mitt Romney campaign may or may not have a platform, but if he does, then he won’t tell us what it is. And he may not even be running for president.

[Sorry, but I cannot find a link to the program that led to this satire.]

Three Shorters for First Half of June

Shorter Mitt Romney: I didn’t really want to serve in Vietnam. I just liked the uniform.

Shorter Bobo Brooks: More giant statues of dead white men to cow the populace, please!

Shorter Paul Krugman (no link—he says this every day):
Why can’t you short-sighted, self-interested baboons do what’s best for America and listen to me? Wait . . . I think I just answered my own question.

This blog post is not funny

Discussions of humor are never funny just as theories of objective truth are never objectively true (not because there is no such thing as objective truth but because it’s just plain hard to give a good theory of truth). Furthermore, I doubt there is even a single thing that is humor. There is probably nothing that all types of humor have in common, and nothing that suffices for something to be humor. The best we can get is probably a family resemblance model of features that humorous things tend to have in common.


All of which is meaningless preamble to the question of the day: Why aren’t conservatives funny?


I joke, of course. See, that was funny right there. Wasn’t it? Or was it? I’m just going to take certain things as funny and other things as not funny with no argument or attempt to convince. Whaddyagonnado?


Actually, conservatives are frequently, but unintentionally, hilarious. I must make the question more precise: Why are so few deliberate and intentional acts of comedy or humor from political conservatives in contemporary America funny? There’s an enormous humor gap between the two sides of our political debate in America. Liberal humorists are simply much funnier than conservatives. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are consistently funny, but there is nothing even close on the political right. So, what explains the humor gap? Is there something about political liberalism, rather than conservatism, or the character of political liberals that lends itself better to humor?


Before getting into the meat of this issue, I don’t want to overlook or underestimate the obvious explanation. Comedy is hard. It is excruciatingly difficult and embarrassing to learn comedic timing and all the little things (proper inflection, phrasing, ability to read an audience, etc.) that make for good comedy. Becoming a good comedian must be one of the most difficult and emotionally scarring things one can do in modern America. There are physically more demanding jobs, and more dangerous jobs, but working in comedy clubs, refining jokes, and having them fail over and over before you get them right, must be emotionally and intellectually draining. The professional complainers on the right are just too stupid and lazy to do good comedy. And it may be that the contemporary conservative movement, with its aggressive sense of grievance, self-aggrandizement, and obliviousness, inculcates values in the followers of the movement that renders them incapable of the character one needs for good comedy.


It’s possible but perhaps not always plausible that conservatism so deforms one’s character (or attracts only those with such deformed characters) that no conservative could do good comedy. I will suggest, instead, that there is something about humor and comedy that makes it more difficult for conservatives. I will argue that some common features of humor or comedy, specifically its subversive, self-effacing nature and its focus on incongruities or inconsistencies, conflict with the conservative ethos. My source of assumptions about the conservative personality and movement is Bob Altemeyer.


His research does not address conservatism worldwide or even all varieties of conservatism, but primarily the right-wing (politically conservative American) authoritarian follower. Thus, my references to conservatives are to the authoritarian follower type.


Anti-Authoritarianism


Humor is frequently subversive and anti-authoritarian. Conservatives in America are primarily authoritarian followers while liberals are more likely to question authority or those in power, even the authorities on their own side.

Carlos is late for work on his construction job for the third time in a week and the foreman talks to him about it. “Carlos, If you’re late for work again, I’ll have to fire you.” Carlos replies, “I am sorry, senor, but I have terrible headache this morning and had hard time getting to work.” The foreman says, “You should do what I do when I have a headache. I get my wife to give me a blowjob and the headache clears up right away.” The next day Carlos shows up for work on time and bright-eyed. The foreman says, “So, did you have a headache and take my advice?” Carlos responds, “Si, senor. Your wife, she is very nice.”

This joke would not be as funny if the foreman had been the one with the headache who got a blowjob from Carlos’s wife. The foreman gets his comeuppance for his attitude of superiority toward Carlos, and Carlos, by getting a blowjob from the foreman’s wife, gets a kind of revenge on the foreman who has power over him. In that sense this joke is anti-authoritarian.


The problem for conservatives is that they have too much respect for their own authorities to be make jokes like this. Respect for authority is tied to poor critical thinking skills in general. Since conservatives frequently lack the skills to defend their beliefs against those who disagree with them, they tend to spend time primarily with those who agree with them and who don’t raise uncomfortable questions. Liberals tend to seek out people with different opinions rather than only seek out support. (Of course, everyone wants social support but conservative prefer not to have diversity of opinion.) I’ve seen this on questions on religion I’ve asked students. Conservative religious believers are much more likely to seek out authority and confirmation when they are faced with doubts about their beliefs. Liberal/less-religious people are more likely to seek out opinions from people on all sides of an issue. The anti-authoritarianism one finds in many jokes is, thus, uncomfortable for typical American conservatives.


Conservatives are happy to attack liberal authorities. However, given the nature of liberalism in America, there are people liberals respect, but there aren’t really liberal authorities. Similarly, liberal humor is often self-effacing and willing to critique one’s ideological allies or authorities (to the extent that there are any). If one’s world-view is supported more by reason and less by group conformity, then it is easier to criticize, even in jest, one’s ideological colleagues. When one has a foundation of good reasons for one’s view, jokes are less likely to undermine one’s beliefs. Hence, liberals have the unfair advantage of making fun of themselves as well as of conservatives. Conservatives can only make fun of liberals and those not in a position of power.

Question: How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Answer: That’s not funny.

I’ve heard feminist-sympathizers make this joke about the supposed humorlessness of feminists. I don’t find feminists to be actually humorless (in general), but they can still poke fun at the caricature of feminism as humorless. It’s not clear how well a conservative can do this with another conservative or ideological ally. Conformity tends to hold conservative groups together, and that conformity suffers from making fun of each other. Liberals do not rely so heavily on consensus in their group identification. Liberals are open to differences of opinion. (Sometimes it seems as though liberals can’t agree about anything.) I also think that feminists mostly don’t mind jokes such as this one in the way that conservatives mind jokes at their own expense. When authority, not backed by reasons, is all one has, then jokes about the authority are particularly painful.


Humor is often tribalistic. It tends to construct and reinforce in and out group distinctions, and thus to reinforce social cohesion within the group. Conservatives can easily make jokes that demean an out-group (just as liberals make demeaning jokes about conservatives), but when the out-group is a traditionally disadvantaged group, the humor is considered to be in poor taste. Racist or sexist jokes, or jokes demeaning any out-group, tend to maintain the self-esteem of the in-group. A lot of people will say that racist or otherwise prejudicial jokes are not funny, but I do not believe this to be always true. Even the most offensive things can be funny.


Humor based on stereotypes, even offensive ones, can be funny.

Question: Did you hear what the drummer got on his IQ test?
Answer: Saliva.

Our society now frowns more on racist or sexist jokes, or other jokes that operate at the expense of those of lower status. You can make jokes about bankers (or the foreman) more easily than about the homeless (or Carlos). That doesn’t mean that jokes about the homeless or, other powerless groups, are not funny. It only means one cannot tell those jokes in public as much. Since conservatives tend to ally with those in power, insulting conservative humor tends to be less acceptable in public.

A spic, a wop and a kike walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Hey, you three. You can’t come in here; this is a nigger joke.”[Note 1]

Incongruities and Inconsistencies


Another common feature of humor is exposing incongruities or inconsistencies. It is in this way that comedians are most like philosophers. Philosophers often discover a problem to worry at when they discover an inconsistency in what people in general, or they in particular, believe. These inconsistencies are a source of philosophical bemusement but also of humor. For example, here’s my favorite Daniel Tosh joke. (The What Would Jesus Do Joke).


Tosh points out the inconsistency of believing in a loving Jesus given the tenet of Christianity that non-believers are condemned to hell. More generally, there’s something strange about taking a religious leader as a moral paragon representing universal love and charity.
Conservatives are uncomfortable with dissension in their group and inconsistency in their beliefs. They have more difficulty with vagueness, ambiguity, and complexity. And, given the general failure to address problems with beliefs, they tend to avoid this sort of humor.


Humor and Truth

Humor has a complex relationship to truth. If humor often involves inconsistencies, does this mean that humor has as a function of helping us avoid false beliefs? Inconsistent beliefs cannot all be true, so, discovering, and being comfortable with discovering, inconsistencies in our beliefs might serve a larger function of guiding our belief systems towards truth or at least away from falsity. Unfortunately, guiding beliefs away from inconsistency is an unreliable means of guiding them towards truth. So, while jokes and humor as a reaction to inconsistency or incongruity may play a salutary role in our cognitive economy, I don’t think it can be exactly that jokes or humor help reveal or discover truth.


We often say that something is funny because it is true, but most of the time truths are not funny at all. And many times we find things funny when they are exaggerated or unrealistic.

The day after his inauguration as president, George W. Bush called his vice president Dick Cheney in his office, “Mr. Dick, I’m bored. I’ve already signed all the ceremonial bills I can and arranged everything on the desk, and I’ve run out of things to do.” Cheney replied, “Why don’t you find a jigsaw puzzle?” So, Bush went in search of a jigsaw puzzle. A while later he called Cheney again, “Mr. Dick, I’ve found a jigsaw puzzle, but I can’t do it. The pieces don’t fit together and they’re all the same color.” Cheney went to the oval office and looked in on the president. “George, that’s a box of cornflakes!”

GW was dumb, but clearly not as dumb as that. The point is made by exaggeration. Perhaps the exaggeration lessens the discomfort many of us felt with having an obvious moron as our president. Perhaps there is a deeper truth told through exaggeration, but the joke is not straightforwardly true.
I think it’s a commonplace to note that the truth is often painful, and we use humor to distract from that pain or that the recognition of a painful truth simply forces a laugh from us. The joke itself may be true, exaggerated, or understated, but it’s the painfulness of the truth that makes for the humor.


Other jokes, such as the one about the humorless feminists, aren’t really revealing truths at all. The feminists-have-no-sense-of-humor joke depends on the fact that people perceive feminists as humorless but not on them actually being humorless. I’m uncomfortable with saying that humor depends on truth since the truth is only about people’s perceptions.


In fact, we often joke when we cannot face a terrible truth. See the collected works of Allen, Woody. The humor is more because the jokes are painful than that they are true. Perhaps this is our way of admitting that something is true while taking away the painful truth’s sting, but it may just as easily be a way of hiding an uncomfortable truth, covering our fears or pain with self-delusion. For every joke based on a truth, there’s a joke that distracts attention from a truth by means of a falsehood. The source of the humor is the recognition of the truth, but the joke may call attention to it or to distract attention away from it.


Still, humorists who cannot recognize the essentials of the human condition will consistently fail to be funny. Alas, the standard conservative blogger-crazy-uncle-FOXNews talker has significant problems with recognition of the truth. With little ability to distinguish truth from fiction, or their alternative fantasy world, conservative ‘thinkers’ would have more difficulty being funny than liberals.


I don’t have a theory of jokes or humor, but I think it is more than a coincidence that humor is more often found on the political left in America than on the political right. The tendency of humor to puncture pretensions and undermine authority, to lead to questions about one’s beliefs or to point out incongruities in one’s beliefs, tends to cohere more comfortably with a world-view that not only accepts but values such questions. That worldview is more liberal than conservative in America.


All my rambling prompted by this Whiskeyfire post.


Note 1: I made up this joke because, as the point I made above, no one tells jokes like this in public anymore.

Scalia and the Supreme Court on Health Care Reform Law

There is a phenomenon at philosophy conferences and in graduate school in philosophy in which someone can appear superficially quite intelligent, in their ability to move polysyllabic words around. Often they dress in tweed and learn a set of specialized terminology; in short, they look and sound like respectable, intelligent academics. I have even witnessed such people read papers or give presentations at conferences. It is only when one questions these people about their 'claims' that you realize that they have no idea what they are talking about, that they have no conception of how this complex web of interconnected terms might have any connection to anything outside the web. In other words, to paraphrase Mark Helprin in Winter's Tale, they don't know what an apple is. I give various names to these pseudo-intelligent persons at different times depending on circumstances, but I sometimes call them Apparently Respectable Morons.

I believe the same can be said of Antonin Scalia. He makes superficially clever, if vicious, quips, and he may, for all I know, have some superficial capacity for manipulating legalistic language. He is, however, an Apparently Respectable Moron. I have, alas, attended to the supreme court's questions about Obama's health care law. These Republicans have recently discovered a long-standing opposition to the oppressive hand of big government in its ability to support insurance companies. Scalia, who never objected to the vast expansion of the Bush administration's 'war on terror' policies, suddenly is worried that the government is not limited and that there is nothing that it might not do if it is allowed to force people to buy health insurance. Antonin Scalia claimed that torture of prisoners at Guantanamo is perfectly constitutional, that it does not violate the 8th amendment's banning of cruel and unusual punishment, on the grounds that the prisoners are not being punished for anything. On these grounds, it would be perfectly constitutional for a representative of the government to beat you with a baseball bat, as long as they were just doing it for fun and not for any punitive purpose. So, suddenly, Scalia decides that forcing people to buy health insurance is the unconstitutional excess of an unlimited government, but torturing people for no reason is perfectly constitutional.

So, what brilliant analogy does Scalia give to show why the individual mandate is unconstitutional? He asks, "Can the government force you to buy broccoli?" Obviously, food is transported across state lines and involves a significant amount of commerce, so why can't the government regulate it by forcing people to buy broccoli? This is an absurdly faulty analogy.

Insurance companies have incentives to deny health care to people who would cost them money or who try to get payment for their health care. To regulate this market and guarantee health care to Americans (clearly a worthy goal and one that would be ordinarily within the purview of the government), it is necessary to prevent health insurance companies from denying coverage. However, if the government required that insurance companies provide coverage without any protection for the insurance companies, people would only sign up for health insurance when they got sick. Since this result would undermine the possibility of a private health insurance industry, the Obama administration, following all the Republicans before them, included an individual mandate in the bill, so that everyone has to purchase health insurance. This measure is, to be clear, a protection for the private health insurance companies.

So, how is this different from the broccoli case? Simply, buying broccoli is not a necessary condition for the existence of a market for food. If it were impossible for a large percentage of the American people to purchase food if people were not forced to buy broccoli, then it would be legitimate to mandate broccoli purchases. Suppose food is so expensive that no one can afford to pay for his/her own meals, but everyone has to buy into a kind of lottery (or insurance program) so that when people really need the food, they get a payout so they can afford it, but otherwise they pay into a pool that redistributes their money to those in need of food. Now, suppose the government wants to guarantee that everyone has food when they need it, so the government requires that they sell food people even if those people cannot pay for that food. If the government passed such a law, it would undermine the food companies' ability to be profitable (or even survive). So, if the only way to force people to pay into their 'food insurance' was to make them buy broccoli, then it would be ok to force them to buy broccoli.

Or, shorter, since companies will be able to survive whether people are forced to buy broccoli or not, there can be no compelling government interest in forcing people to buy broccoli. The food industry can survive while providing food for everyone without everyone being forced to buy broccoli.

Antonin Scalia, especially, but all the conservatives on the court, are capable of making rational-sounding but utterly nonsensical arguments and claims, but they just seem to lack any legitimate understanding of anything that matters. This is a common failing, especially among creationists, climate-change deniers and other true believers, in that people believe things for reasons that have nothing to do with evidence or rationality, and then they deploy their rational capacities to justify (or rationalize) the beliefs that they have for these other reasons.

Romney Lies

Rachel Maddow has treated Mitt Romney’s constant, unapologetic, serial lying about virtually everything having to do with himself, the economy, his campaign, and the Obama administration. She thinks that Romney’s campaign is new in the quantity of lying and in the fact that they feel no need even to correct their claims when their lying is exposed. I beg to differ. I think the lies here are almost identical in type and quantity to the lies told by the George W. Bush’s campaigns.

For example, Maddow cites a quotation from Romney surrogate Karl Rove in which he claims that Obama’s decision on sending in Seal Team 6 ™ was completely ordinary and quotes Bill Clinton saying, “It was the call I would have made,” about it. Rove left off the crucial phrase, that directly contradicted the meaning he was attributing to Clinton, “I hope that it was the call I would have made"[emphasis added]. Obviously, Clinton’s actual sentence had a completely different meaning to the one Rove claimed. Rove’s lie is similar to the previous Romney campaign commercial lie in which Obama is heard saying, “If we talk about the economy, we will lose,” when in fact Obama was saying in 2008 that the McCain campaign was saying, “If we [the McCain campaign] talk about the economy, we will lose.” Clearly, taking quotes out of context to change their meaning is a standard operating procedure of the Romney campaign.

However, Maddow is suffering a bit of amnesia. These out-of-context quotes were a staple of Bush campaigns past. Here are but two examples. The first is the Bush campaign taking a quote out of context to make it appear that he had received an endorsement from the New York Times (not something that would help in the current Republican primary campaign, of course).

Bush advertising fliers touted a New York Times endorsement, quoting the Times as saying: “He has a clear and compelling idea in his mind of where he wants to take the nation.” [One should be immediately skeptical because the Times would never use such a linguistic barbarism.] The

full quote from the NYTimes Magazine

reads, “Bush says that if he runs it will be because ‘he has a clear and compelling idea in his mind of where he wants to take the nation’—and not because he wants to avenge his father’s defeat in 1992.” NYTimes 9/3/98. In effect Bush is quoting himself and pretending it is an endorsement from the Times. That certainly fits the modus operandi of the current Romney campaign.

The second example is a variety of strawman. On the campaign trail after a debate with John Kerry, Bush quoted Kerry as saying that our military actions needed to pass a ‘global test’, and this test, Bush asserted, meant that France would have veto power over our use of the military. Needless to say, Kerry meant that this ‘global test’ would mean only that we should have such compelling reasons to act militarily that we could make our case to the world and demonstrate the necessity of military action. In fact, the direct preceding sentence from Kerry was, 'I will never cede America's security to any institution or any other country.' Clearly, Bush’s campaign had prepared him to take out of context so that he could make it appear that his opponent meant the exact negation of what he had said.

So, the Romney-Rove playbook is not something new in politics but something a few years old renewed. I almost feel a certain nostalgia for this kind of lying, coming as it does after claims that Obama ‘pals around with terrorists’ or tries to implement ‘death panels’ in his health care law to let him kill old people. Whereas Rove’s lies are complete negations of the claims made by his opponents, Sarah Palin's (and other recent right-wing) lies force us to occupy, temporarily at least, to live in the twisted fantasy realm that might be considered the right-wing mind just to try to discover why they even say these things. The Rove-Romney lies are almost quaint in their straightforward mendacity rather than bats#$t insanity.

It’s possible that the national media are even less likely to contradict Romney’s lies than they were to contradict Bush’s, but I'm not sure this is true. I remember the laments during the Gore campaign about how Rove got to look like a genius because no one in the media ever seemed to call him on his lies. And, honestly, when the media were, on their own accord, busily attributing claims to Gore that he had never made, they rarely spent time checking Bush's campaigns claims about their opponents.

Georgia Republicans Consider Change to Electoral System

Dissociated Press. 9/20/2011

One week after Republicans in Pennsylvania considered changing their state's distribution from a winner-take-all system to one in which those votes are distributed by county, and one day after Republicans in Nebraska began a push for a winner-take-all system rather than the proportional one that gave Barack Obama a single electoral college vote from Nebraska, Georgia Republicans have considered a bill to change their electoral voting system.

Currently, in Pennsylvania's winner-take-all system, the popular vote winner receives all 20 (as of the current census) electoral college votes. The Pennsylvania state legislature is considering changing this system to "each congressional district elect one presidential elector and award the other two electors on a statewide basis," according to this AP story.

Given the distribution of voters in the various districts, this new system could easily mean a Republican who lost the popular vote could receive approximately the same or more votes as the popular vote winner. This is possible because of the tendency for Democratic voters to be concentrated in a relatively small number of districts (that have large majorities of Democratic voters) and Republicans to be dispersed in many districts in which there are slight Republican majorities. This distribution of voters would, according to Rachel Maddow, have turned Barack Obama's 11 percentage point victory in Pennsylvania in 2008 from a 21 electoral vote advantage into (probably) a 1 electoral vote advantage.

Nebraska Republicans are also advocating changing their state's distribution of electoral college votes to a winner-take-all system, apparently in order to deny Barack Obama the chance at the one of five votes he received in the 2008 Presidential election.

The bill Georgia's legislature is considering is not a change to the winner-take-all system but an enshrinement in perpetuity of Georgia's penchant for electing Republican candidates. The proposal is that the state's 16 electoral votes are to go, in perpetuity, to the Republican candidate for President. Georgia's electoral votes have gone to Republicans in the last four presidential elections.

State Sen. Goober Hayseed (R-Anywhere) asserted, "This bill is in perfect conformity with the law and the wishes of the good citizens of our state. I see no possibility that the Republican party might stray from its foundational principles of small government, states' rights and the permanent enrichment of wealthy whites at the expense of the poor and minorities. This is a win for all of us who value democracy. And if the Democrats want to change the law, they would only have to gain control of both houses of Congress and the Governorship."

A reading of article II of the U.S. Constitution suggests that Hayseed is on firm constitutional ground. That article states that

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

"Nothing in the Constitution says that we have to choose them at the time of the election," Hayseed said. "We just want to save the voters of Georgia the time of punching in the name of the Republican party candidate for President since they have made their views abundantly clear over the last several elections."

While not commenting on the constitutionality of the proposed law, others are not in favor of it. "If Senator Hayseed's law had been in place before the War of Northern Aggression, it would have given the precious electoral votes of this great state to that tyrant Abraham Lincoln," said random person on the street Percy McShaw, adjusting his white hood. "What if somehow that Mormon apostate wins the Republican nomination? The state of Georgia might want to take its votes and move to the Republic of Texas."

In response to critics who claim that the move to a permanent Republican vote for President is purely political, Hayseed lashed out. "These carpetbaggers don't know the state of Georgia like I do. We always have and always will vote for the Republican, so there's no reason not to respect the will of the voters by passing this law."

When this reporter noted that Georgia's electoral college votes went to Democrats in 1992, 1980 and 1976, Hayseed responded, "I know there's some fear-mongering out there from Government bureaucrats and so-called 'scientists', but there's a lot of room for disagreement about our history. And I don't cotton to those revisionist historians who say that the civil war was about slavery, or that Georgia once voted for Democrats. That's all just ivory-tower hogwash."

Georgia Democrats are reported to be troubled by the prospect of being permanently disenfranchised from presidential elections, but none could be found by press time.


Note: I apologize for the lack of posting. My computer died and was only revived after about three weeks, so posting may begin again.

Protecting Our Second Amendment Rights

Republicans in Congress and the states, in particular Indiana, have pushed for (and in Indiana have succeeded in) defunding Planned Parenthood on the grounds that, while it is already illegal for them to receive government money to pay for abortions, money they receive for other services might help maintain the organization's ability to offer abortions. This is true.

What has not been noted, and I think this will revolutionize all our current thought on federal funding and taxes, is that whenever a poor woman is not able to receive aid to undergo a medical procedure (a pap smear, breast exam, etc.) from Planned Parenthood, she will have to pay for this procedure from some other source. All former recipients of federal or state aid for healthcare will have less money for other things, such as abortions, but they will also have less money for purchasing legal firearms.

Can you imagine a poor woman, who has just had to put her Glock in hock in order to pay for a breast exam, now has to walk home late at night unarmed and unprotected? She's an easy victim for a mugging or, worse, a rape! In our zeal to prevent her from getting an abortion, we've just caused her to be raped since she can no longer keep the firearm that would have protected her. We must remember, every dollar the government withholds from women's healthcare, is a dollar women cannot spend on firearms. Without that money, women will be easy prey for murderers, philatelists and sexual predators.

I say that Republican social engineering has gone far enough. We must fund women's health, even abortions, in order to keep sacrosanct the individual's right to keep and bear arms.

I know what you're thinking. If we pay for this health care, won't we only be arming poor women? Affluent, primarily white, women will still be able to pay for their health care, abortions and firearms? So, what's there to worry about?

Well, plenty. The heavily armed poor or minority woman is the backbone of poor communities. I've seen the documentary "Big Momma", and I think that preventing such women from packing heat is the worst disservice we can do to those communities. Remember, big handguns make good neighbors. Or dead ones, or something. Government spending for X always frees up money for Y, and so we can never cut spending for any X without cutting money for Y (in this case handguns), and so we can never cut government spending without taking away people's Second Amendment rights.

Federal Judge Rules on Constitutionality of Taxation

(Dissociated Press, 2/5/11) A federal judge has ruled that the Affordable Health Care Act is unconstitutional in requiring Americans to pay for private health insurance. In passing, the judge invalidated laws providing tax incentives for child care, fuel efficient vehicles, home ownership, marriage, and having children.

The judge wrote, “If Congress can penalize a passive individual for failing to engage in commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would have been in vain.”

He continued, "That the enforcement of the mandate to purchase health insurance is covered by the Internal Revenue Service proves that the tax code is a kind of government coercion that cannot be used to encourage or discourage constitutionally protected commerce or other behaviors."

The health insurance mandate is enforced by a tax increase on those who do not acquire health insurance voluntarily. Since increases in taxation on one group is only an increase relative to taxes paid by other, comparison groups, it follows that decreasing taxes on one individual is the same as increasing the taxes on these comparison groups. The act is indistinguishable from a law that increases everyone's taxes and then offers an incentive to reduce the taxes of anyone who purchases private health insurance.

Vinson continued, "Any use of the tax code to decrease taxes on any individual for purchasing some private good or engaging in some private, constitutionally protected behavior, is effectively increasing the taxes on everyone not engaging in that behavior. If taxing individuals who do not buy private healthcare is coercing them to buy it, then taxing individuals more for not getting child care, for example, than those who do get child care, is effectively coercing individuals to get child care. The situation is worse for marrying or having children since the Supreme Court has found that private behavior of this sort is constitutionally protected. Pairs of cohabiting individuals who do not marry pay more in taxes--a penalty--compared to those who do marry. It follows that every tax incentive that favors one sort of behavior over others is constitutionally untenable."

"Goodbye federal tax code," he concluded.

Ronald Reagan at 100

In honor of Ronald Wilson Reagan's one hundredth birthday, I wanted to write of my recollections of this great man, the ultimate hero of the twentieth century.

As a youth growing up in Illinois, Reagan saved dozens of lives as a lifeguard before spending a summer on a raft on the Mississippi with his friend Jim. Jim was an escaped slave, and, because of his great respect for property rights, young Ron traveled all the way back to Mississippi to return him. Once, on a lark, Reagan cut down an entire forest of cherry trees. When the farmer who owned the trees objected, Reagan quipped, "Don't you know? Trees cause pollution."

After high school, Reagan went to Hollywood to make movies. He starred in cowboy adventure movies including "Bedtime for Bonzo," in which, with the help of a chimp, Ron defeated the chimp-overlords of an invasion of "damn, dirty apes" intent on stealing our guns. He took time out from his movie career to volunteer to make movies encouraging others to enlist and then to lead the invasion of Germany, liberating several concentration camps and single-handedly stopping Hitler's attempt at world-domination.

After that, Reagan spent several years making speeches and reading radio scripts for General Electric on politics. He learned his great communication skills fulminating against the dangers of government: the government takeover of healthcare, medicare, the communization of America and the fluoridation of its water supply.

Reagan parlayed his fame as an actor and union-busting president of the Screen Actors Guild into the governorship of California. Reagan did his part in the war in Vietnam by having the national guard shoot communist protestors infiltrating America's universities. After his success as the governor of California, lowering tax after tax and never raising any taxes, no matter what any Commie-history book says, he was elected the Greatest President in American History.

Reagan announced that government wasn't the solution but the problem. Then he took over the government and solved that problem.

Reagan's legend was so great that the Ayatollah Khomeini released the American hostages as soon as he took office out of fear that Reagan would personally go to Iran and beat him to death with his own beard. In no way was the timing of their release suspicious. They were just afraid of Reagan.

As President Reagan reduced the tax rate to 0% while increasing government revenue to record levels. And in no way did he "enhance government revenue" or raise the social security tax or anything like that. In fact, he cut government spending to $0 and still managed to spend the Evil Empire of communist Russia into oblivion, probably by private donations or something. When Reagan took office, he couldn't believe that we didn't have a magical shield to defend us from Russian missiles, so he ordered that one be built and by the power of his will, he overcame all the technological barriers to it. Finally, he defeated the Soviet Union and ordered Mikey Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin wall, and he did.

Democratic politicians continuously tried to destroy his presidency by persistent and biased investigations. But they never found any scandals. All they ever found was that a great American hero named Ollie North moved some missiles and money around in order to support freedom fighters in Nicaragua and Iran. All he was really doing was supporting their second amendment rights. But Reagan didn't know anything about that, and would not have supported it if he had known even though he praised North as a hero.

Ronald Reagan is remembered today as a great American hero, the man with Teflon hair, sometimes known as Old Hickory, for his wooden teeth, who led the Americans at the Alamo when America took Texas back from the Mexicans. And when America is in his hour of greatest need, Reagan will return to lead us into the promised land, to the shining city on the hill to a time when it is always morning in America.

Also this.

Mitch McConnell’s Heroic Fight Against Information

Mitch McConnell gave a compelling argument against a bill introduced in the US Senate to require campaign commercials to disclose their donors so that voters would know who supported them.

Meanwhile, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, accused Democrats of trying to rig the election. His suspicions were only heightened [by] the fact that [Senator Charles] Schumer, who authored the bill, used to chair the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee:

MCCONNELL: You talk about transparency. This is a transparent effort to rig the fall election.

There have been no hearings, no committee action; written by Senator Schumer, the former chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, riddled with special advantages for Democratic-leaning groups and punishment for Republican-leaning groups.

Senator McConnell continued: Even worse than helping elect others, Schumer may seek re-election himself. The fact that a Senator who might run for re-election could introduce this bill shows that it must have as its only goal that Senator's re-election. In fact, everything every single Senator says or does can only be understood as a political calculation whose purpose is to get him or her elected. I urge everyone then to consider everything any elected official or would-be elected official says to be false. We, as elected officials, are the only beneficiaries of all our actions. Do not trust anything any elected official says; everything we tell you is a lie.

The “Special advantages” to which McConnell refers are apparently for the notoriously Democratic-leaning National Rifle Association. As the article notes:

Not all organizations received the same treatment, however. For instance, the National Rifle Association would be exempt from the legislation.

When, oh when, will the NRA cease its relentless, partisan attacks on Republicans? Perhaps only when Republicans can pry its checkbook from its cold, dead hands.

Does Andrew Breitbart Hate America?

After hearing about the controversy over remarks made by, and the forced resignation of, Shirley Sherrod, I looked at the source of this video. I found a story that raised many questions for me, but, ultimately, I think, it speaks for itself.
The story is about an addition to Andrew Breitbart's massive media empire(tm) called Big Peace which is supposed to revolutionize our view of national security. Now, right off, I was suspicious that this was unamerican because, really, what American wants Big Peace (which I assume is a lot of peace)? And certain quotes from the article, that are in no way taken out of context and selected in no way to embarrass the author, I found further troubling claims.
To wit:

Most every problem in the world could somehow be traced back to the U.S.

My goodness, I thought, can Breitbart's site and its author, a Mr. Mike Flynn, blame America for every problem in the world?

And what about their view of St. Ronald Reagan? Describing the 1980s, he writes that people,

were openly worried about a “warmongering” US President who didn’t understand complex foreign policy and might just start a war for kicks.

Apparently, Mike Flynn believes that Reagan was not really popular. He writes,

it is impossible to appreciate the level of hatred and animosity that was directed at the 40th President during those years.

[I]t couldn’t be that the public agreed with Reagan; rather, they were “duped” by his rhetorical skills.

Does Flynn border on libel of America's Most Beloved President(tm)? Finally, he concludes that our new threat is from Islamic Fundamentalism, but it's not as bad as some previous threats.

To be sure, in some respects, the threat isn’t quite as existential as that of the Cold War. Thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at every city in America is an order of magnitude different than an Iran, no matter how bat-shit crazy, with a handful of nukes. But, in other respects, it is far more challenging. Because, not only do we allow this fundamentalism to thrive in the West, we make excuses for it.

At this point, Flynn clearly has gone beyond the pale in besmirching the blessed memory of St. Joseph McCarthy who proved the existence of communists in the US State Department, Hollywood, academia, and the American media. The American Left did not just make excuses for Communism, but actively worked to undermine America. I worry that Flynn and Breitbart's Big Peace might just have lost touch with reality.