If you missed Maddow last night, here’s a clip you might enjoy —

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Read Paul Krugman:

Never mind the $700 billion price tag for extending the high-end tax breaks: virtually all Republicans and some Democrats are rushing to the aid of the oppressed affluent.

You see, the rich are different from you and me: they have more influence. It’s partly a matter of campaign contributions, but it’s also a matter of social pressure, since politicians spend a lot of time hanging out with the wealthy. So when the rich face the prospect of paying an extra 3 or 4 percent of their income in taxes, politicians feel their pain — feel it much more acutely, it’s clear, than they feel the pain of families who are losing their jobs, their houses, and their hopes.

And when the tax fight is over, one way or another, you can be sure that the people currently defending the incomes of the elite will go back to demanding cuts in Social Security and aid to the unemployed. America must make hard choices, they’ll say; we all have to be willing to make sacrifices.

But when they say “we,” they mean “you.” Sacrifice is for the little people.

Krugman writes that the anti-Obama rage is being generated by the as yet unscathed well off, not people who are actually being hurt by the downturn in the economy. I can already hear the clicky-click of rightie fingers striking keyboards arguing that “regular Americans” are angry too. Yes, but their anger is misplaced.

I see Bill Clinton said the tea party movement is a “general revolt against bigness.” People feel they are getting shafted, and they are thrashing around looking for someone to blame. And they have been conditioned by their leaders to blame government and liberals, so that’s what they do.

I came across a rightie blog today that I take it is picking up in popularity. Doc Zero writes,

Political control is what’s killing us. It is expressed in hundreds of ways: high tax rates with carefully tailored exceptions, massive bailouts, laws rigged to favor government-controlled industries, restrictions on resource development, and a vast poppy field of subsidies and penalties. The Democrats have added thousands of pages of fabulously expensive legislation since Obama took office. Two messages echo through those pages: Obey and be rewarded. Resist and be punished.

This is not appropriate behavior for a government that was meant to live in awe of the people’s boundless freedom, and work carefully with limited powers to accomplish its sworn duties. Even the most apolitical citizen can now see that it’s also disastrous behavior.

Who are the President and his congressional allies, to lecture us on what products to buy, or investments to make? Who are they to demand even more of our wealth to fund their next round of grand designs? Their failure is obvious and complete. I don’t believe any group of brilliant central planners can legislate prosperity… but if such a group exists, it sure as hell isn’t this bunch.

There’s more, if you can stomach it. Sometimes I can sorta kinda figure out where righties are picking up their fantasies, but some of this has me stumped. There are government-controlled industries? Seems to me what we’ve got is an industry-controlled government, with regulatory agencies “captured” by industry insiders. That accelerated mightily under George Bush, and President Obama hasn’t moved fast enough to clean out the corruption.

“Restrictions on resource development, and a vast poppy field of subsidies and penalties” usually refers to environmental and safety standards. Doc apparently wants to go back to the days when the annual number of deaths in coal mines was in the hundreds, sometimes thousands, not merely dozens. And let’s not kid ourselves that without environmental regulation private industry would not have raped and pillaged the country long before now and left behind a ruined mess for taxpayers to clean up.

I don’t recall being lectured about what products to buy or which investments to make, unless Doc resents people who push curly light bulbs. They really do last longer than the regular ones. Maybe I slept through the march of the Government Product and Investment Gestapo.

Most of Doc Zero’s piece is an incoherent rant against bigness. He repeats the buzzwords he’s been taught, and it’s obvious he has no idea why government is doing these “big” things, and what price we would pay if they weren’t done.

As Clinton said, people are angry because they think they are being shafted. The problem is, they don’t clearly see that their primary enemy isn’t government. Or, I should say, government is the enemy only so far as it has been co-opted, which admittedly is pretty far. But most of the time the parts of government righties most hate are those parts that are still making a little effort to protect them from the coming tyranny.

We surely could put the limits on government that he wants and give ourselves “boundless freedom.” And we surely could hate living in the third-world rathole America would turn into if we did. And the angry rich will be even angrier, because they’d have to pay for bars and bodyguards to keep them safe from the angry peasants.

Yes, if you want “boundless freedom” from government, try Somalia. I take it the government is pretty much drowned in the bathtub. No tax collectors, no big government programs. Do take lots of guns, though, and maybe some mercenaries, for protection. Freedom can get rough.

Update: Here’s more of what Doc Zero wants for America —

In China, death from overwork is so common, there’s a word for it: guolaosi. …

…Yan Li’s family knows the meaning of guolaosi far too well. Li worked for a Foxconn factory in Southern China where he helped assemble components for iPads, Playstations, and mobile phones. He stood on the assembly line in one place, making the same tiny motion with his wrist all day. Sometimes, according to his family, his shifts would last for 24 hours. Sometimes up to 35 hours at a time. Li had no trade union, no group to represent his interests, and if he had tried to form one he’d probably have been imprisoned or killed. This went on until one day 27-year-old, otherwise healthy Li finished a particularly long shift and dropped dead.

Gualoisi is not uncommon in China. In fact, China Daily estimates that up to 600,000 workers a year die from overwork. That figure includes many workers like Li who are young and have no serious health problems before starting brutally strenuous jobs. It also includes workers who commit suicide to escape abusive work environments, which incidentally, happened to another worker at Li’s factory the same night he died.

Righties will scream that this is what happens under Communism. But these days People’s Republic of China is about as communist as it is a republic. This is what happens when workers have no government or union to speak for them, which is the world the teabaggers say they want. Well, they can have it.

Here are a couple of items to take in together. First, here is a bit from Friday’s Countdown with Ken Vogel of Politico. Vogel essentially makes the point that “astroturfers” like the guys behind Tea Party Express primarily are using the movement to promote themselves and raise their own profiles as political and campaign consultants. Those fellows and a lot of other “leaders” of the allegedly grassroots movement have long political histories, but the tea party activists themselves generally are people who didn’t pay much attention to politics until the day before yesterday. And so for the most part the activists are unaware that they’re being manipulated by a pack of Establishment figures even as they rail against the Establishment.

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At Newshoggers, John Ballard takes up a similar theme.

I watched a Christine O’Donnell video by “anna missed”. Innocent viewers who just came from Sunday School, knowing none of the back story about this woman, will have nothing but a positive reaction to what she says. Never mind that along with Beck, Palin and the rest of the crowd she is blowing smoke. Just because the words are as devoid of content as cotton candy it is a mistake to mock and point at those who buy them. There is a market for cotton candy, too, you know.

She’s telegenic, speaks without profanity and uses all the right images, knowing instinctively how to push the right buttons and wave the right flags. Anybody trying to follow this video (or other rhetorical fluff) with hit pieces will only succeed in looking vindictive. The point was made in a comment aimed at me by one of their number just yesterday. Closed minds are as durable as epoxy.

I live in a place where Glenn Beck is cited in sermons as a courageous man and a spokesperson for God. When a certain population of sincere Christians look up from the pages of their bibles they may not understand what they have read, but their minds and opinions are as malleable as those of children. They have been taught from childhood to hear and respect their leaders.

Please do read the whole post. It’s very good.

A lot of us have been saying that the tea party movement doesn’t seem to have any real cause behind it; just fluffy and meaningless rhetoric. Some righties objected when I wrote that, so I asked a couple of them to articulate what the movement stands for, beyond T-shirt sales, and they couldn’t do it. They could cough back the empty slogans they obviously didn’t understand and express their feelings about current events, but they couldn’t explain the movement’s cause. I’m not sure they understood what I meant by a “cause.”

While we wonder at people who wear T-shirts and golf caps promoting “liberty” even as they willingly march into serfdom, I admit Ballard is right that mocking them them makes them even more enslaved to their manipulators.

Unfortunately, trying to reason with them doesn’t work, either.

Ballard finishes by saying,

There is no way that knowledge will ever trump belief systems. Those who think these people are nothing but a bunch of kooks who will soon go away do so at their political peril.

I don’t know anyone who thinks they will soon go away. I certainly don’t.

The tea partiers themselves are lost to reason, so there is no point trying to change their minds. A small percentage of them eventually will wake up and realize they’re being had, but most never will, no matter what happens. That’s the reality of the thing. The best we can do is try to keep Congress from completely going over to the Dark Side in November and try somehow to reach Americans who aren’t committed to a “side.” And I think that publicizing the weirder aspects of candidates like Christine O’Donnell is one way to do that.

Update: One more video — possibly the most brilliant 44 seconds in any film, ever, of all time.

Update: Right on time — a profile of Sal Russo, the head of Tea Party Express. So the head of this allegedly rogue organization has insider connections going back to the Reagan Administration. Further, there is an appearance that tea party donations have turned into a cash cow for Russo —

Mr. Russo’s group, based in California, is now the single biggest independent supporter of Tea Party candidates, raising more than $5.2 million in donations since January 2009, according to federal records. But at least $3 million of that total has since been paid to Mr. Russo’s political consulting firm or to one controlled by his wife, according to federal records.

One suspects Russo doesn’t care if Christine O’Donnell is a serious politician or a ham sandwich.

Mr. Russo’s group is also under attack from Republican Party leaders in Delaware, who have accused the Tea Party Express of improperly collaborating with Ms. O’Donnell’s campaign. Federal laws allow political action committees to support candidates independently, but they are not permitted to coordinate their spending with campaigns. … the campaign finance records for the Tea Party Express also showed payments totaling more than $10,000 for stays at casino hotels, as well as bills for meals at expensive restaurants near Mr. Russo’s offices, including nearly $5,000 at Chops Steak House, which former staff members said the Tea Party Express frequented after work.

Oh, but they are restoring honor to America, aren’t they?

Christine O’Donnell’s supporters have no idea why we are laughing at them. Indeed, I’m not sure they even realize we are laughing at them.

For example, Jeff G. thinks that much of the leftie blogosphere has embedded the O’Donnell “witchcraft” video because we think it will end her political career. For example, Jeff G. writes at Protein Wisdom:

Wow. No, really, wow.

Christine O’Donnell’s candidacy is evidently dead because of something she said on “Politically Incorrect” (quick, take note of the show’s freakin’ name) in the 1990s — but only because Tea Partiers are evidently small-minded religious bigots who will be so OUTRAGED by this ANTI-CHRISTIAN DEMON WORSHIP that they’ll forget all about fiscal conservatism and smaller government and remain home election night, allowing an unrequited Marxist to win the state.

At least, that’s the argument — and it’s one that speaks poorly of the small-minded religious bigots who have essentially just KILLED O’Donnell’s candidacy with their small-minded religiosity. Meaning, those who backed her. The Tea Partiers.

But no, that’s not why I embedded it, and it’s not why I’m laughing at Jeff G. and other O’Donnell apologists. I’m laughing because they take her seriously at all. I’m laughing because they think she actually gives a hoo haw about “fiscal conservatism and smaller government.”

It’s obvious from her own history that O’Donnell is to fiscal responsibility what Charles Manson is to sainthood. The manager of a previous campaign said that O’Donnell used campaign money for personal expenses but did not want to pay her staff. Another former staffer from her 2008 campaign said she spent campaign money stupidly and was more interested in getting a media contract than winning the election.

Also in 2008, she blew a large part of her meager campaign funds on an expensive trip to the Republican National Convention, apparently believing she would be asked to give the keynote address. And she traveled to California for a fundraiser that raised less money than her trip cost. And then the campaign office phone was cut off because she failed to pay the phone bill, so she was making campaign calls from her parents’ home.

Yet because she is able to recite all of the right buzz words about cutting taxes and budgets, her groupies honestly believe she will be an effective force for fiscal conservatism in Washington.

This brings to mind what Delaware Republican Party chairman Tom Ross said of O’Donnell: “I could buy a parrot and train it to say, ‘tax cuts,’ but at the end of the day, it’s still a parrot, not a conservative.”

It’s blatantly obvious O’Donnell is a manipulative attention junkie who has been using election campaigning at a self-promotional tool and a source of personal income.

O’Donnell’s revelation that she “dabbled in witchcraft” (assuming she wasn’t making that story up on the spot just to get more air time), to me, is more evidence of her lack of seriousness than anything else. Face it; the woman is a walking sideshow carnival.

But Little Lulu is steaming with fury at Bill Maher, alleging that he somehow edited the video (which you can watch in the previous post) to leave out the “context” in which she says she opposes witchcraft because she tried it and rejected it. But the trying and rejecting part is in the video. What was left out is that O’Donnell had first said she is against Hallowe’en.

This makes her seem less of a flake, how, exactly?

And then Lulu says, “Focus on the campaign, the voters of Delaware, and the bearded Marxist opponent who’s the real out-of-touch extremist in the race.” Chris Coons doesn’t have a beard on his website (the only bearded candidate I know of is the tea party candidate for Senate from Alaska) and Coons is no Marxist.[Update: Now I know that Coons called himself a “bearded Marxist” in a college paper he wrote in 1985. However, righties, he is not a Marxist now, however much you have been brainwashed to believe he is.] But while Coons may be “out of touch” with conservative ideology, as most people with critical thinking skills are, O’Donnell is out of touch with Planet Earth.

Mice with fully functioning human brains? Wow. No, really, wow.

Karl Rove’s stature and influence within “movement conservatism” appears to be deflating like a punctured balloon. I say “appears to be” because he no doubt still is respected in the upper echelons of the GOP. But among the tea partiers, he is cow pie non grata.

After Tuesday’s primaries, Rove got on Faux News and slammed nominee Christine O’Donnell with the firm conviction of a man certain of his own importance. Twenty-four hours later, he was taking it back and claiming he was one of the first people to endorse O’Donnell.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. There was a time Karl could blastfax the movers and shakers of the Right that the sky was orange, and by the end of the day every right-wing media outlet and blogger would be marching behind the “sky is orange” meme. Now even Rush Limbaugh thinks Rove is too “establishment” and has betrayed conservatism.

Rove must have been chagrined when Moosewoman went after him this week. After all, he was the primary architect of the bleeped-up political culture that made her national career possible. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!

BTW, did anyone else catch the video on Real time with Bill Maher in which O’Donnell admitted to practicing witchcraft?

I have a post up at the other site about a couple of communities denying permits to build Buddhist temples or dharma centers. The Justice Department recently filed a suit against a California community for blatant discrimination against a proposed Zen center. You can read the suit, United States v. City of Walnut, California, here.

The story, in brief: The Chung Tai Zen Center, with between 100 and 200 members, had been holding services and meditation classes in a house sitting on a 2.19 acre lot. The area is zoned for residences and churches, and several churches are in the neighborhood.

In 2001 the zennies decided they needed a bigger space. They drew up plans in consultation with other organizations in the neighborhood and with city officials. In 2003, they submitted their plans to the Planning Commission for feedback.

The Planning Commission expressed concern that the proposed facility would be too large and didn’t provide enough on-site parking. The PC told the zennies they could get a permit for a smaller facility. However, at the same meeting the Vice-Chair of the PC expressed concern that the zennies would try to “recruit” students at a local Middle School.

So the zennies downsized the plans by more than 40 percent and provided for parking lots, and applied for a permit to build. The PC said the facility was still too big. The PC also asked the zennies to limit the size and frequency of meditation classes and provide valet parking for special events. Further, the zennies were asked to submit a traffic study to be sure the facility didn’t foul up traffic.

So the zennies did that, and the PC decided they didn’t like the traffic study (which anticipated no serious problem) and asked for another one that included additional data that, the PC admitted, were not usually required.

Finally, in 2008, the PC held a public hearing and voted to deny the permit.

At the January 16, 2008 hearing, the Commissioners provided explanations for denying the application, including a belief that the Zen Center would be a “tourist attraction” and would attract numerous visitors and adherents from outside Walnut. Although the proposed Zen Center was in fact smaller than other houses of worship in Walnut, certain Commissioners stated that the Zen Center, as a Buddhist house of worship, would resemble much larger Buddhist temples elsewhere in California and in Taiwan.

Later in 2008, the Walnut PC approved the building of a Catholic Church in the same neighborhood. The church will be three times larger than the Zen Center would have been. Further, after the denial of the permit, the zennies were no longer allowed to use the house they’d been using for religious purposes, so they had to move to another community. Effectively, they were run out of town.

As I said, the Justice Department has filed a suit.

The other recent episode occurred in Rankin County, Mississippi. A group of about 20 Vietnamese immigrants had been using an old trailer parked on a three-acre plot in Pelahatchie as their temple. They decided to build a proper temple, and applied to the local Board of Supervisors for a permit. Apparently the temple would not have been in violation of existing zoning ordinances, but the B of S turned them down, anyway. “If your congregation was to grow, where is it going to grow?” the County Supervisor said.

The Buddhists have a three-acre plot, notice. I’m guessing Rankin County is well stocked with big Southern Baptist churches, and that many of those churches are built on less than three-acre plots.

The B of S also had received a petition signed by 130 residents opposed to the temple. The signees said they were afraid the temple would screw up local traffic.

I monitor news stories involving Buddhism, and such stories about building permit denials come up occasionally. Sometimes permits are denied because of zoning laws, but more often the claim is that the temple will cause traffic and parking congestion. It’s hard to tell from a distance whether such claims are legitimate. But somehow I have a hard time believing that a little temple on a three-acre plot in Pelahatchie, Mississippi, would necessarily tie the community up in gridlock.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s a little film called Mystery Men (1999; see trailer), a mostly fluffy comedy that got a thumb’s down from Roger Ebert, although I liked it. It has just enough subtle satire to give a little edge to the fluff.

The main characters are a group of ordinary men (and one woman, The Bowler, played by Janeane Garofalo) who desperately want to be superheroes, but they have no superpowers. So they wear costumes and sort of fake having superpowers. Other cast members include William Macy (The Shoveler) and Paul Reubens (as, I think, The Spleen).

The main character, played by Ben Stiller, is Mr. Furious. Mr. Furious gets really, really angry. However, his anger has no productive use. He doesn’t turn into The Hulk; he’s just angry. He believes that his anger gives him power, but by the end of the film he has learned the lesson that he’s more powerful, in a way, without it.

So yesterday a whackjob named Carl Paladino beat the always hapless Rick Lazio for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in New York. The Democratic nominee, Andrew Cuomo, is not seriously threatened. But Paladino reminds me of Mr. Furious.

“We are mad as hell,” Mr. Paladino said in a halting but exuberant victory speech in Buffalo shortly after 11 p.m. “New Yorkers are fed up. Tonight the ruling class knows. They have seen it now. There is a people’s revolution. The people have had enough.”

Referring to criticism from what he said were liberal elites, he added: “They say I am too blunt. Well, I am, and I don’t apologize for it. They say I am an angry man, and that’s true. We are all angry.” …

…In Orchard Park, a Buffalo suburb, Darryl Radt, who described himself as a regular primary voter, said he had come to the American Legion post to vote for Mr. Paladino “because he’s mad as hell and so am I.”

And this anger will be useful, how, exactly?

And in Maryland Delaware, we have tea party darling and Mystery Woman Christine O’Donnell coming out of nowhere to upset the establishment Republican Mike Castle. The GOP establishment is furious, because they believed Castle to be well positioned to take Joe Biden’s former seat.

E.J. Dionne quotes Delaware Republican Party chairman Tom Ross, who complains that Castle had the endorsement of the state’s grass roots Republicans, while O’Donnell was bankrolled and supported by the Tea Party Express, which is headquartered in California.

Ross notes that the state Republican convention endorsed Castle. These are not some shadowy party bosses, but, as he put it, “the grass-roots delegates who knock on the doors and pass out the literature and pound the pavements.”

Ross says he thinks it’s pretty nervy for “some group in Sacramento that doesn’t know our state to come here, destroy our civility, and tell the people of Delaware they know more about our state than we know.”

What’s interesting here is the notion that for all its grass-rootsy talk, the Tea Party is a nationally led and nationally directed movement that is willing to run roughshod over local Republican parties if it finds them to be less than ideologically pure.

What helped O’Donnell is that Delaware has a closed primary, so that independents and conservative Democrats who would have likely voted for Castle in November couldn’t vote for him in the primary.

Anyway, the rightie bloggers see O’Donnell as the grassroots candidate sending a message to the Beltway elite, not noticing that O’Donnell’s “grassroots” backing was from a national organization led by long-time political pros.

Recommended Read: “The Paranoid Style in American Punditry.”

The odds the Dems will keep the Senate just got a lot better.

Please do read “Intolerance” by Lawrence Wright at the New Yorker.

Folks are talking about a short piece in the New Yorker by George Packer, plus a brief comment by Andy Sullivan. This is what Ben Smith said at The Politico (“Liberal despair: Age of irrationality“):

A couple of influential writers broadly in sympathy with Obama today float the same notion: That we’re living in a fundamentally unreasonable age, that voters basically can’t be trusted, and that democracy is just barely muddling through.

Anyone who spends much time covering American politics feels this sometimes. At the same time, it’s a lot easier to think this when your side is losing politically.

First, let me say that neither Packer nor Sullivan come out and say that the people can’t be trusted, and I don’t think they meant to imply that the people can’t be trusted, although I can see how one might read them that way. However, if it’s true (as polls suggest) that voters are about to hand the House and maybe the Senate back to the Republicans because they are angry with Democrats for failing to fix the mess the Republicans made, then yeah, the democracy thing doesn’t seem to be working any more.

Here is a bit of what Packer said:

Nine years later, the main fact of our lives is the overwhelming force of unreason. Evidence, knowledge, argument, proportionality, nuance, complexity, and the other indispensable tools of the liberal mind don’t stand a chance these days against the actual image of a mob burning an effigy, or the imagined image of a man burning a mound of books. Reason tries in its patient, level-headed way to explain, to question, to weigh competing claims, but it can hardly make itself heard and soon gives up…. unreason, cheered on by cable news, has won the day. We have undeniably gone sour on interfaith tolerance. We have turned inward in sullen exhaustion.

Andy Sullivan adds:

It is as if America is intent on destroying itself, its civil society, its fiscal future, and its next generation in an endless fit of mutual recrimination, neurotic nationalism, and religious division.

Yes, but this has been true for some time, and as I recall Andy was doing his bit to help it along not that long ago.

Now, we hear from Digby:

The fact that the VORI* and all of his worshipers among the intellectual elite fail to acknowledge (or even notice) the radicalism of his opponents is just as much of a problem as the radicalism itself. They have enabled it all along the way. In fact, I would have to say that it’s also a form of “epistemic closure” at this point. Anyone who is writing about the unreasoned radicalism of the right wing as if it just manifested itself out of nowhere has at least been in denial for well over a decade and a half.

[*VORI = Voice of Reason Incarnate, a sarcastic reference to President Obama]

The term “epistemic closure” apparently has been kicked around in certain conservative circles of late as a shorthand for ideological intolerance and misinformation. For the record, some conservatives have come out against these things.

Bruce Bartlett, a veteran of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush’s administrations, wrote that in the last few years, “epistemic closure” had become much worse among “the intelligentsia of the conservative movement.” He later added that the cream of the conservative research institutes, including the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, had gone from presenting informed policy analyses to pumping out propaganda.

It’s as if Barlett and others are waking up from a dream and haven’t acclimated to reality yet. The AEI and Heritage have always existed to pump out propaganda. They’ve been doing it from the beginning. The propaganda didn’t become propaganda in the minds of Bartlett et al. until, for some reason, they began to lag behind in the Right’s lemming dash to the cliffs. They’ve dropped out of the stampede to watch the other lemmings dashing by, so to speak, and now they see that the lemmings are irrational. What they haven’t yet admitted to is that the lemmings always were irrational, and that they also are lemmings.

Put another way, the American Right (which is not necessarily the same thing as American political conservatism) has been motivated by greed, bigotry, paranoia and ignorance all along. But awhile back some highly educated righties came along and slapped a veneer of intellectualism, or at least a whiff of eastern Ivy League-ism and big words (like “epistemic”), on top of the mess, to make it socially presentable. William F. Buckley is coming to mind here, although there were others.

But Buckley is gone, in more ways than one. “Movement conservatism” has broken completely with any pretense of rationality and reverted to its anti-intellectual roots. In doing so, it is leaving behind those conservatives who were trying to stay in the Buckley mold and pretend (especially to themselves) there was a rational foundation to their greed, bigotry, paranoia and ignorance.

Meanwhile, all these years, the rest of the nation’s media and political elite have been stuck in polite denial that the Republican Party was being taken over by barking mad whackjobs. It’s like a family in denial about Uncle Frank’s pedophilia or Aunt Ruthie’s alcoholism. It was right in front of them, but they wouldn’t see it. Some, like Ben Smith, still refuse to see it (“At the same time, it’s a lot easier to think this when your side is losing politically.” — it’s just politics as usual, see).

But I’ve wandered off a bit from the stated topic, which is can the people be trusted? The problem is not the people. The people, I think, are capable of making reasonable and rational decisions when they understand an issue. But to understand an issue, you have to have knowledge of an issue. Knowledge, as in actual facts.

And that’s the rub, because the American people are not getting clear, factual explanations of anything. Whether the issue is global warming, health care reform, extending the Bush tax cuts, or an Islamic center in lower Manhattan, the American people are forming opinions based on lies and propaganda, because that’s all they’ve got to go on. They are confused and exasperated, and understandably so. “Sullen exhaustion” indeed.

It all comes back to whether news media are able, and willing, to stop being the submissive conduits of misinformation and resume the job of informing and educating rather than entertaining. And it also depends on a lot of people in politics and media waking up from the polite denial and facing reality. I’m not holding my breath.