Those Crazy Republican Candidates!

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I just watched a few seconds of the most recent Republican Debate.  Actually, I watched that highly toxic exchange between Chris Christie, and Marco Rubio repeating that sound clip he had developed, saying that Obama wanted to make the US just as functional as the other countries across the globe, instead of the great mistake it has historically been.  Marco Rubio wants the USA to go back to being exceptionally dysfunctional, as in the grand old days of, well, G. W. Bush.

I am beginning to suspect that these debates are just the candidates having fun.  The population they're courting just likes to be entertained, and Chris Christie is up for providing it.  And so is Trump, in his own way.  Rubio doesn't have much of a sense of humor, and unfortunately cannot think on his feet, so a lot of the humor sort of flies past him.  Ben Carson is sort of a solemn, serious man, and his humor is rather heavy-handed and pompous.

Actually, it is rather a strain trying to look at the positives among the Republican candidates.  They're just too cynical, and removed from reality, and their supporters are just too silly to be tolerable.  Many progressive writers have written that the Tea-Party sector of the GOP has become impervious to facts and to the truth; they have their own version of "the Facts," a sort of virtual reality that they have created for themselves, and they claim that anyone who tries to set them straight is a liar and a communist.

In the past, of course, everyone has disagreed about their opinions about what is the best way to proceed, but not about the facts.  Facts can be checked.  But the conservative component of the population has now got permanently stuck in a sort of reverse conspiracy-theory.  They have begun to distrust even the fact-checkers.

(Actually, we should not be surprised: fact checkers invariably come down on the side of the progressives, because it just so happens that in the last decade or two, it has been the progressives who have been keeping an eye on the facts, while the conservatives were either oblivious to the facts, or were actively engaged in obfuscating them.)

So the Conservative leadership knows that facts are their enemy, and the Conservative rank and file believe that facts are impossible to verify.  So everything has to be fought on ideology, completely divorced from the facts.  This is sad, and dangerous.  So the conservatives can be happy about one thing: by refusing to recognize the facts, they have taken away the most important weapon of the opposition.

The take-away of all this is that the US Constitution is rendered hopeless when the population is totally unimpressed by facts.  It is as if the entire country has been taken over by some fantastic religion.  (In fact, conservatives are not really driven by actual religion; they just use Christian Dogma as a convenience.  Most of them are not true believers at all.  Remember you heard it here first.)

My wife just informed me that the Australian Government had shut down all research into Global Warming, because the government officially accepted that Global Warming is real.  Why waste time investigating an accepted theory?  So thousands are out of work, because the Australian Government feels that it is irresponsible to expend public money on an already accepted conclusion.  (I mean, we'd be upset too, if we had to spend money on, for instance, research about whether the US is the Greatest Nation On Earth, which we know already.  The GOP would not want to bankroll such a silly investigation.)

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