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Speaking of both baseless Republican shouting, and triangulation…

I guess this NPR.org story is a little good news, bad news. On the one hand, the whole thing leads off with a Chicago Tribune column which declared the death of facts based on a recent egregious, yet still entirely typical, Republican absurdity. And then for good measure spends a little time on the “truthiness” concept, which is of course an outgrowth of Stephen Colbert’s ongoing satire of American conservatism. Short of actually coming out and reporting “Republicans have fully retreated into their own completely imaginary bullshit pseudo-reality and issued a fatwa condemning any challenges to its validity,” this isn’t too bad.

But, of course, even and perhaps especially in a story veering so close to recognizing the nature of this phenomenon, we’ve got to have “balance” of some sort. Since there’s no direct “Democrat statement” overtly blaming Republicans, there’s no direct “Republican rebuttal” in this case. There is, however, the inevitable invocation of “polarization” which achieves much the same “both sides share blame equally, same as it ever was” cop-out.

And there is also a little help from Bill Adair, whose Politifact service exemplifies just the sort of artificially-imposed “balance” which has, whoops, in fact done so much to suck the lifeblood from facts. That would be the same Politifact which awarded its “lie of the year” to Democrat claims that Republican efforts to end Medicare were, y’know, efforts to end Medicare. Presumably because they felt that consistently highlighting Republican lies would look like bias, and that their status as “referee” was more important than communicating the fact that Republicans consistently lie. Adair seems quite open about giving priority to “balance” at his alleged “fact” site, as well as the triangulator’s perennial sense of righteousness derived from hearing complaints from “both sides.”

Adair often gets emails accusing them of being biased, but he says he’s not sure who they’re supposed to be biased in favor of because they get criticized a lot by both sides. [...] “We are in a time when there’s more political discourse than ever … and when you hear somebody say your team is wrong, almost like a referee, you’re going to argue with the ref. You’re going to say the ref is biased.” Increasingly, people don’t just say the referee is biased, they say the referee is outright lying.

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In the 1990s we had Bill Clinton practicing what became known as “triangulation.” Now, I think, we might arguably describe the political strategy of Barack Obama as “discombobulation.” Not that I expect the idea to take hold, even if anyone read SB, but for all the Obama administration’s continuity with the Clinton era I don’t think that there’s really the same kind of “triangulation” in progress. Obama made a considerable attempt at a “bring everyone together” approach—far more than he is ever credited for—and has since largely given that up in the face of contemptuous obstinacy from the GOP. But it doesn’t seem like he has at any point taken to “pushing off” of both the left and right in an attempt to elevate himself as some kind of “third-way” centrist. He is a centrist, but he doesn’t seem to have much inclination or for that matter much scope for defining himself as such against a more-liberal Democratic congress; there isn’t one any more, really.

Instead I think that the Obama strategy, to the extent that there is one, is less of a pitch to the people based on being different from the two major parties, and more of a judo-move directed at Republicans. Obama (like most observant people) can easily predict the attacks which Republicans will make, and has nearly perfected the art of not being in the spot where those attacks are aimed; the president thus sidesteps them while leaving his opponents to expend their energy on moves which don’t work. It’s kind of like a rope-a-dope without actually having to stand there and take the punches.

Of course, Republicans seem to have an almost unlimited capacity for outrage and spleen-venting fury. But even if they never burn themselves out in assaulting an opponent who is standing several feet away from the path of their strikes, the strikes don’t connect and, moreover, it does at least seem to confuse the Hell out of the GOP. They don’t actually catch on, and so far have neither paused not re-targeted their attacks, but and probably in part because they are getting even more tied up in conceptual pretzels than ever before. Thus, discombobulation.

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I guess that if no one else will make this point I will.

Earlier this week I saw another item about the Gingrich presidential campaign and its persistence in the face of what, to every reasonable observer, is the impossibility that its candidate (or, really, any other candidate than Oven Mitt Romney) will win the nomination. And various interesting points have been made, related to this; I think the one about Newt staying in the race simply out of Ahab-like determination to harm Romney, as much as possible, is among the most insightful.

But the other day I thought “there’s something else here. There’s some additional interesting aspect to this” and while I couldn’t put my finger on it right away, eventually it came to me. Observers are scratching their heads at Gingrich’s and, for practical purposes Santorum’s, insistence that their campaigns for the nomination are still viable in spite of plain and indeed simple evidence that victory is well on its way to being mathematically impossible?

What the fuck gives anyone the idea that prominent Republican politicians would have the least interest whatsoever in math?

I mean dude, hello, have you noticed many of them doing so in any other context? Within the past decade if not longer? Their budget numbers don’t add up. Their economic theories don’t add up. Their proposed scenarios for energy policies and pricing are numerically ludicrous, particularly in Gingrich’s case though he is by no means alone. By no means. The party has rejected the existence of climate change. It has rejected income inequality. Republicans, generally, have firmly established rejection of science and reasoned logic, math included, as part of their own sense of identity. (more…)