Category Archives: parallel GOP universes

Parallel Universes Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive GOP Claims, Myths & Canards, April 22-27, 2013

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As for due process, the greatest danger to liberty would be to allow more such attacks that would inspire an even greater public backlash against Muslims or free speech or worse. The anti-antiterror types on the left and GOP Senators who agree that the U.S. isn’t part of the battlefield are making the U.S. more vulnerable

The greatest danger to liberty is to allow civil liberties? The greatest threat to Muslims is to not single them out for racial profiling? These kinds of Orwellian logic are Fascism 101.

“Enemy Combatants in Boston”, WSJ

For example: how is the War on Poverty going?  We spent a trillion dollars on that, back when a trillion dollars was a lot of money for Uncle Sam.  Actually, we’re spending almost a trillion dollars per year on means-tested federal and state welfare programs these days.  Our reward for this is more poverty – poverty levels higher than they were in the late Sixties.  Under the current definition, one in six Americans live in poverty… but even the definition of poverty is the subject of much debate, because it doesn’t include the enormous value of those War on Poverty welfare programs, which can leave an “impoverished” family with more disposable income than “middle class” families enjoy.

Does this constitute success or failure for large-scale government welfare programs?  If the objective of the War on Poverty was to reduce poverty, it must be judged one of the most astonishing failures in American history.  Poverty won in a rout.  On the other hand, if the objective was to make poverty more comfortable, by raising the standard of living for poor Americans, the war could be viewed as an impressive success.  Most of the world’s poor live in conditions of awful deprivation; America’s poor wrestle with chronic obesity.

Food-stamp recipients eat better than the middle class? Didn’t this government-by-anecdote approach ride into the sunset with Reagan?

“Government Without Objective,” Red State

“This week, we have reason for great doubts in our culture’s ability to assimilate those who come here into good Americans, and our government’s ability to examine potential citizens and weed out those who would seek to harm us.”

“The Boston Bombers and the Collapse of Assimilation,” Jim Geraghty, National Review.

“It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle. But that does not mean it is right…Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife.” (John Cornyn, July 2004)

Lock up your female box turtles!

So does America’s Welfare System create Jihadists in a vacuum? No. But it certainly could engender the type of hatred and contempt for worthless humanity that makes it possible for a dehumanized and brutal egoist to be brainwashed into blowing up 8 Year-Old boys without the slightest lilt of remorse or regret. America’s Welfare system dehumanizes man. Dehumanized men are more likely to commit crime. The Russians certainly told us this was coming. After seven decades under Communist tyranny; they certainly were the ones who would know.

“Does the US Welfare System Benefit Jihadists?,” Red State

The logic here seems to be that taking food stamps “robs” you of your humanity and tips you toward becoming a terrorist.

 

 

When a communist assassinated President Kennedy, somehow the American Right got the blame. Lyndon Johnson translated that myth into a campaign of slander against Barry Goldwater, casting him as a crypto-Nazi emissary of “hate.” After the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton saw fit to insinuate that Rush Limbaugh and his imitators were partly to blame….Occupy Wall Street was an idealistic expression of democratic protest, but the tea partiers are brownshirts in khakis…Barack Obama was friendly with a convicted domestic terrorist.

But to even bring these things up, never mind invest them with significance, is considered outrageous guilt by association. And you know what? Maybe it is.

But if that is outrageous, what do you call the paranoid style of liberal politics that has confused normalcy with fascism for more than half a century?

 

“The Right’s Undeserved Stigma,” Jonah Goldberg, National Review

 

This is a tricky double move. It’s not paranoid to accuse Obama of masterminding a socialist takeover of America because the GOP occupies the high ground on “normalcy.” Paranoia is the new normal in Tea Party America.

the West has imported vast numbers of people who hate our guts and would love to slit our throats. Political correctness has replaced self-preservation. The Boston Marathon killer who set a bomb down right next to an eight-year-old child is only the latest in an ongoing series of such people.

Today, virtually every group has its own “leaders” promoting its separate identity and different way of life, backed up by zealots for multiculturalism and bilingualism in the general population. The magic word “diversity” is repeated endlessly and insistently to banish concerns about the balkanization of America — and to banish examples provided by the tragic history of the Balkans.

We are importing many foreigners who stay foreign, if not hostile. Blithely turning them into citizens by fiat, rather than because they have committed to the American way of life, is an irreversible decision that could easily turn out to be a dangerous gamble with the future of the whole society. What happened in Boston shows just one of those dangers.

“Immigration Gambles,” Thomas Sowell, The National Review

The Boston bombings prove that diversity, multiculturalism, bilingualism and tolerance are destroying the American way of life.

The problem created by the welfare state is thus not best understood as…the illusion of an impossible independence—an individualism so radical it renders all human relationships, including our relationships to the weakest and most needy of those around us, into non-binding optional arrangements, ignoring the realities of human life that make it necessary to guard human beings in their most vulnerable moments through an array of unchosen—or at the very least non-optional—obligations, especially in the family. The Left’s statist radical individualism that masquerades as a kind of communitarian collectivism pretends to offer a way for people to act together, but in practice it offers an escape from all mutual dependence and from the neediness of people who are not well positioned to pretend to be utterly autonomous.

 

“More Than Dependency,” National Review

Statism and radical individualism at the same time sounds like an oxymoron, but Republicans always seem able to square the circle by making something—in this case, communitarianism and welfare—into its opposite—in this case, radical individualism and social breakdown. A moral imperative is turned inside out and twisted into seeming like into an immoral disavowal of social obligation and community.

In just a short time, they would be entitled to the same massive array of government programs as everyone else, including expensive retirement income and health programs that are already severely underfunded. The average unlawful immigrant has a 10th grade education, and low-skill immigrants on average take more in government benefits than they pay in taxes at every stage of their lives.

America’s families are already burdened with taxes to support a bloated welfare and overburdened entitlement system that is badly in need of reform. This situation would get far worse under amnesty.

 

“American Families Cannot Afford the Cost of Amnesty,” Heritage Foundation

Immigrant bashing personified.

Parallel Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive GOP Claims, Myths & Canards, April 12-18, 2013

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In the 2000s, America tried to use a debt-fueled real-estate boom as a substitute for real wealth creation. The Fed’s loose money, government endorsement of private credit-ratings agencies and reckless promotion of homeownership created a housing bubble. The bursting of this bubble created a financial crisis. We do not want to repeat the experience

Housing bubbles are only caused by federal regulatory laxity and easy Fed money, and not in any way linked to private sector greed and deception?

“Can We Afford Another Housing Boom?”, WSJ

Another hallmark of the Bloomberg style is its insufferable condescension. One need only have heard the tiniest whine of a Bloomberg speech to know what I’m talking about. The preening attitude of superiority manifests itself in a form of moral blackmail. Adversaries of the Bloomberg-Obama agenda are not simply mistaken. There is, it is implied, something wrong with them personally.

Opponents of superfluous gun regulations are viewed as accessories after the fact to the latest mass shooting. Opponents of an immigration amnesty are either racist or nativist or cruel. Skeptics of the relevance or efficacy of efforts to halt climate change are “denialists” similar to the cranks who say the Holocaust did not happen. “The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence,” wrote Oscar Wilde. That is a fair description of American political discourse in the age of Bloomberg and Obama, when the rich and liberal exploit pity, shame, and guilt to further their agenda.

Obama’s opponents are all either mass-murderer sympathizers, racists, or science denialists?

“The Bloomberg Presidency”. Washington Free Beacon.

“If babies had guns, they wouldn’t be aborted,” Rep. Steve Stockman (R-OK)

The real philosophical question is how to do a background check on a fetus.

One of the dangerous inconsistencies of many, if not most, gun-control crusaders is that those who are most zealous to get guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens are often not nearly as concerned about keeping violent criminals behind bars. Leniency toward criminals has long been part of the pattern of gun-control zealots on both sides of the Atlantic. When the insatiable desire to crack down on law-abiding citizens with guns is combined with an attitude of leniency toward criminals, it can hardly be surprising when tighter gun-control laws are accompanied by rising rates of crime, including murders.

“The Fact-Free Gun Control Crusade,” Thomas Sowell, National Review. Right, gun control advocates care more about the rights of prisoners than those of gun owners.

Anecdote, the age-old enemy of logic, now reigns supreme and trumps induction — as if the exception is always proof of the rule, as if the public will always forsake reason for emotion. Forget the statistics on Obamacare — my Uncle Joe was denied coverage after he lost his job. The economy is getting better, because my friend Will was offered a job today. Why enforce federal immigration law, when there is no nicer window washer than Herlinda, who comes to my house every Tuesday? It hailed in June here; therefore the world must be experiencing climate change. I would never shoot an AR-15, and therefore there is no need for anyone else to. My nephew is gay, and he’s a great guy; therefore gay marriage is great too. Sally yesterday lifted heavier weights than did three guys in the gym: Presto, female soldiers can do anything that male soldiers can.

“1984 + 29,” Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

reductio ad absurdum personified

Nobody knows what’s going on behind closed doors as the current bombing investigation continues, yet media scribes, foreign journalists, and social-media sideliners are convinced: The tackler is racist. Anyone who mentions the nationality of the tackled student is racist. Forget terrorism. RAAAAAAACISM is the real homeland-security threat to our nation.

“America’s Empty Slogan: ‘See Something, Say Something’”, Michelle Malkin, National Review

 

Liberals believe that racism is a greater threat to the country than terrorism: this is how Malkin justifies racial profiling.

“We know that al Qaeda has camps with the drug cartels on the other side of the Mexican border…We know that people are now being trained to come in and act like Hispanics when they’re radical Islamists. We know these things are happening, and it’s just insane to not protect ourselves and make sure that people come in — as most people do, they want the freedoms we have.”

Louis Gohmert (R-Texas), on CSPAN

The feds may think $3 million is all you need after a lifetime of work, but that’s roughly the value of a California police sergeant’s pension if she works for 30 years, retires at age 50 and lives to normal life expectancy.

Out in the private economy, people generally have to work longer than that before they retire, and some of them do manage to save significant amounts. We’re talking about people who work for decades and abstain from buying the bigger house or the new car so they can contribute the maximum to their 401(k)s or IRAs. The people who defer gratification and build a nest egg to avoid becoming a burden on their kids or their fellow taxpayers. The people whose savings finance productive enterprise. You know, the bad guys.

$3 million is not enough to retire on? Obama wants to keep people dependent on the state via 401(k)s?

“Now He’s After your 401 (K)” WSJ

Parallel GOP Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Myths, Claims and Canards, April 5-12, 2013

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The perpetual Obama campaigning, the endless “pay your fair share” boilerplate, the courting of the 1 percent fundraising elites, the appointment of insider grandees such as Jack Lew, and the presidential aristocratic lifestyle in hard times have made the reformist, egalitarian sermons of 2008 a cruel joke. Utopian dreams of U.N. intervention in arms sales, radical reform of the way food aid is purchased and dispensed, and opposition to Keystone and new federal oil and gas leases have bewildered a lot of Democratic Senate and House members. All of the above takes place in an economy that officially got out of recession almost four years ago, but is in a permanent rut of chronic high employment, continual massive deficits, ballooning debt, radical spikes in entitlement costs, and near-zero percent interest rates. Dystopic America: A Paranoid Overview“Two Views of the State of the Nation,” Victor Davis Hanson, National Review 
The most effective tool in spurring growth is private investment. Obama may not like it, but major investors tend to be well off. They have money to invest. Rather than encourage them to invest in growth and jobs, Obama does the opposite. By raising their taxes and leaving a strong impression he’d like to raise them even more, he discourages investment.In the fiscal cliff deal, Obama not only hiked the top rate on individual income, he increased the tax rates on two incentives to invest, capital gains and dividends. In addition, in Obamacare, he imposed a new tax specifically on investment income. In effect, Obama is waging a war on investment. Obama hates investment????“Obama’s War on Growth,” Fred Barnes, Weekly Standard
the President who promised to rid the world of nuclear weapons is setting the stage for their greatest proliferation since the dawn of the atomic age. Nuclear disarmament=nuclear proliferation???“The Coming Nuclear Breakout,” WSJ
Has the great American work ethic suddenly vanished? Doubtful. A more likely explanation for the shrinking workforce is a failing education system that doesn’t give young adults the skills they need to compete in the information economy.Another probable culprit is the rapid expansion of government payments—jobless insurance, food stamps, Medicaid, disability and various tax credits—that provide millions with an alternative income to getting a job. Obama’s war on work?????“Making Work Not Pay,” WSJ
Back before the clever new notion of “proportional” response became the vogue, our response to Pearl Harbor was ultimately Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And Japan has not attacked or even threatened anybody since then. Nor has any war broken out anywhere that is at all comparable with World War II.Which policy is better? There was a time when we followed the ancient adage “By their fruits ye shall know them.” The track record of massive retaliation easily beats that of the more sophisticated-sounding proportional response.Back in ancient times, when Carthage attacked Rome, the Romans did not respond “proportionally.” They wiped Carthage off the face of the earth. That may have had something to do with the centuries of what was called the Pax Romana — the Roman peace. Nuke ‘em all!“Proportional’ Response,” Thomas Sowell, National Review
several studies have shown that as industries face increased competition through deregulation or international trade, the gender pay gap shrinks. And the pay gap is larger in monopoly markets without competition and smaller in start-ups and small businesses that must be productive in order to survive. So women need more markets, more enterprise, and more opportunity, not more regulation and litigation. Gender gap, what gender gap? Let the market end the gender gap?“77 Cents on the dollar: An unequivocally bogus statistic,”  Andrew Biggs, American Enterprise Institute

Parallel Republican Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Claims, Myths and Canards 3/1/13—3/13/13

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“Indeed, the Obama modus operandi is based on a familiar constant over his time in the public eye: His “nontraditional,” post-racial persona, his youth, his teleprompted eloquence, and his spell over the media have convinced him that he can talk, pout, and tantrum his way to out-pointing others in lieu of concrete achievement. The thrill is found not so much in successful compromise as in perpetual acrimony and division. Think up a fantasy us/them wedge issue — millions of assault weapons slaughtering the nation’s youth, Latinos being deported while buying ice cream, the seas soon to lap over our cities, gay couples hounded by homophobic reactionaries, a nation of African-American victims like Trayvon Martin and Professor Gates in need of editorial support, the parents of tens of millions of children without sufficient food stamps or unemployment and disability insurance, planes falling out of the sky for want of federal air-traffic controllers — and then demonize the opposition, hit the campaign trail, and finally, exhausted, end up relaxing and golfing with the nation’s plutocrats and celebrities — until the next round of us/them theatrics..” Victor David Hanson, National Review, 3/13/13
Obama picked the weakest possible candidates—Hegel, Brennan, Lew—“in order to force Republicans to oppose them and thus earn the wages of ‘obstructionism’”. National Review, 3/13/13
A carbon tax would actually increase emissions by exporting jobs to China Red State, 3/13/13
“The tax increases are everywhere on the Democrat agenda. Never you mind that they have no intention of even trying to balance revenues against expenditures. They intend to grab the revenues. They intend to grab the power over your life that the revenues will give them. The Democrats are after your wallet by any methodology they can use to horn in on its contents… [you will lose] your ability to make volitional decisions that will impact your own life”. Red State, 3/13/13
“the dangers of the homosexual movement and why some of its members seem prone to violence, terror and “treason” Proposed Accuracy In Media panel at CPAC
If Obama succeeds in maneuvering the Republicans into positions that cause them to lose control of the House of Representatives in the 2014 elections, then as a president who never has to face the voters again, he would be in an ideal position to create a big spending liberals’ heaven.But it will be far from heaven for the economy, with Obama-appointed bureaucrats burying businesses in red tape and job-killing costs, while expanding the size and arbitrary powers of government. We could become the world’s largest banana republic. Thomas Sowell, Real Clear Politics, 3/5/13
The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) increases the death rates from domestic abuse by making women less reluctant to call the police. “The best way to protect women..from domestic violence would be to encourage more women to marry” Mona Charen, Real Clear Politics, 3/5/13
VAWA, free contraceptives, suspended deportation, agitation against Voter ID laws—all part of Obama’s “permanent campaign” Mona Charen, Real Clear Politics, 3/5/13
“taxes are a drag on everything, a killer of the spirit of guts and endeavor..muscle, efficiency…confidence…Obamacare is why people are being laid off…Obama plans “little spring shots of doom” Peggy Noonan, WSJ, 3/8/13

Inside the GOP’s Parallel Universes, Feb. 28-March 3

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“The only thing the federal government can do to protect women is to pass a universal right-to-carry law. Everything else is just big government demagoguery.” Red State, 2/28/13, on the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act Annie Oakley’s America?
Obamacare is forcing insurance companies to charge more. These rate increases are coming about “the same reason Ghengis Kahn impregnated women all over Asia. Thanks to Obamacare, the insurance companies now can.”  Red State, 2/28 and 3/1 “Risk premiums” are the latest excuse for hospitals and insurance companies to charge as much as they want to. Is this what happens when the “free market” is really unfettered?
Let’s keep the federal campgrounds open by leasing shale gas acreage in the Rockies Karl Rove, WSJ, 2/28 Let’s whitewater raft the fracking runoff!
“Mr. Obama and his circle divide the economy into separate parts. In the Obamaian universe, the units of the private economy—companies large and small—are satellites orbiting the great fixed planet of public spending. All material and economic life in the Obamaian model radiates out from a central source of public spending.” Daniel Henninger, WSJ, 2/27 Is this a call for the “maximum elimination of the public sphere, as prophesied by George Lakoff this week?
“For each F-22 Raptor not built, about another 20,000 families could receive food stamps for a month.” Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2/28 Politiscript irony alert: this sentence can be used by both the Left and the Right. Hanson of course is acidly riffing on Obama’s “redistributionism” and his reckless dismantling of the US defense system.
“A shortage of solar panels and windmills, not impending cuts in the US military….is Kerry’s idea of existential dangers on the global horizon.” Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2/28 They get another four years to belittle Kerry—here turning him into a Kerry/Gore amalgam
In 1982, Section 2 of the act was amended to say that the measure is violated whenever nomination and election processes “are not equally open to participation” by minority voters. And equality of participation is said to be denied whenever minority voters “have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to . . . elect representatives of their choice.” And representatives “of their choice” has been construed to mean representatives who are members of the same minority. This expresses two tenets of progressivism’s racialism. One is identity politics: Your race is your political identity. The other is categorical representation: Members of a race can be understood and represented only by members of this race. By this reasoning the Voting Rights Act has become an instrument for what Roberts has hitherto called “a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”  George Will, Washington Post, 3/1/13 “progressivism’s racialism”: a new wedge argument for perpetuating racial discrimination. It’s twisted logic seems to be that  the mere act of  trying to mitigate disparate racial outcomes is itself a form of racism. It’s like when Stephen Colbert  archly says that he “doesn’t see race”, and thus is free to use any racial stereotype he wishes.

Parallel Republican Universes: Hyperbolic and Counter-Intuitive Claims, Myths & Canards 2/15/13—2/26/13

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The minimum wage has nothing to do with poverty and employment. WSJ editorial, 2/15/13
Higher wages actually punish minority youth by making jobs scarcer WSJ editorial, 2/15/13
Obama is to blame for any economic downturn because if he doesn’t get everything he wants, he’s willing to inflict maximum pain on everyone else WSJ editorial, 2/19/13
The sequester is pro-growth because any spending relief means more money for the private sector. Larry Kudlow, National Review Online, 2/20/13
Anti-poverty programs cause poverty– the so-called ”culture of dependency”. WSJ editorial, 2/20/13
Any civil rights or voting rights initiative is based on a sense of “African-American victimology”. Charlotte Allen, The Weekly Standard Online, 2/25/13
Obama’s ultimate aims are “free education, free public health, myriad free government services, the evisceration of the private sector…Obama doesn’t want to create wealth, he wants to redistribute it to the urban poor, The Government Party’s client base”. Devin Nunes, National Review Online,   2/15/13
Obama  is using the same tactics that Lenin used to destroy the private sector WSJ editorial, 2/15/`13
ObamaCare is making couples get divorced to keep their insurance WSJ editorial, 2/23/13
 “our trajectory toward national insolvency and a nanny state” continues William Kristol, on the Weekly Standard Online, 2/23/13
“For Democrats, tax reform is about filling ‘loopholes’ to make government larger. For Republicans, tax reform is about eliminating biases to make the private economy larger.” John Hood, National Review Online, 2/17/13

 

Inside the GOP Parallel Universe II: False Memes and Canards

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As the GOP struggles to re-litigate the 2012 Presidential election and undercut any significant Democratic policy advances, they increasingly are retreating into parallel universes that have no foothold, really, in evidence-based reality. 

change the “messaging”, not the policy As Red State so revealingly puts it,

We, as the low-tax & personal responsibility party cannot waltz into a low income housing area, look around, shake our heads and say “Hey, when are you guys going to stop being idiots and voting for people that think you’re stupid — also, you don’t pay enough taxes.”

 

 

Whether or not we view that as what happened, the people we’re talking to certainly did.

 

 

In the same vein, we cannot waltz into a border town and say “Hey, you know your high school football star? Yeah, his parents came here illegally 17 years ago when he was one. Sucks to be him but dammit, THEY TOOK OUR JOBS!! Deportin’ time!” There just might be a better way to engage that conversation.

 
Now before my twitter timeline fills up with people screaming “AMNESTY!!” take a breath and grab a glass of regulated water. No one, certainly not me, is asking for anyone to change their principles, beliefs, or policy positions. But maybe we should consider offering our principles, beliefs, and policy positions, in a way that doesn’t make people want to set us on fire.

 

 

As the headline says, “It’s the messaging, stupid. It’s the stupid messaging.”

 Arcane and perverse ObamaCare incentives are solely intended to “gather ever more health care spending under federal control”.

A new decade of war is beginning—America not only can’t lead from behind, but can’t even follow from behind (pace, Benghazi, Iran, Syria, North Korea). All as Obama “guts” defense.

Limits to growth mean limits to hope. Don’t tax work and investment. Mona Charen  envisages a coming Doomsday: “A shrinking private sector drowning in regulations, a voracious public sector always in search of new ways to waste money…and the inexorable ticking, louder every day, of the debt bomb.

The anti anti-terror Left. The Left is not only against wars and foreign entanglements, but acyually opposed to any defense against terrorism.

Increased minimum wages will make the country uncompetitive, just as new taxes will “corrode work and investment incentives”. Wage increases are also a boon to the Chinese manufacturing sector still dependent on cheap labor”.  Such “artificial wage increases” cost jobs and cut the bottom rung off the economic ladder. In other words, the Republicans oppose paying America’s poorest workers more per hour because doing so will hurt their economic prospects, but it’s OK to give the rich more money through tax cuts.

Obama has a “campaign” to “prevent entitlement reform”.

The federal  government forced investors to rely on Moody’s & S&P and Fitch, and the government should sue the SEC for rigged credit ratings, not S&P.

Enforced equality rather than personal liberty is the new national creed

Energy regulation is forced economic contraction, especially new emissions controls, which “make overseas industries relatively competitive”, and “threaten US-made cars and US-produced oil”.

Online education is the future of higher education,  behind the disingenuous calls for “increased access to higher education,” online education is tied to workforce readiness and a new business model for colleges and universities .

The sequester is the GOP’s main negotiating leverage. “The sequester will help the economy by leaving more capital for private investment”. Huh?

States will lose budget autonomy to the “carrots and sticks of ever-larger government”

Barack Obama now only wants to tell us what Uncle Sam will do for us so that we need do nothing for ourselves. If he is successful we will each be too dependent on the federal government to set our own course in life.

Parallel Republican Universes

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Bill Maher talks a lot about the Republican Bubble, which was aptly explained by Marshall Fine in the Huffington Post last September

“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” as one Romney pollster put it, while even Fox News called bullshit on much of vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican National Convention. Because, hey, what does it matter if they’re lying? Half the country already assumes they are; the other half wants to swallow the lie whole, like a large pill washed down with cod-liver oil.

More like castor oil. With the same results.

It’s not like this is anything new. Go back to 2004, when an unnamed George W. Bush aide (later identified as Karl Rove) scoffed at a newspaper reporter as being part of the “reality-based community.” Rove went on to say, “When we act, we create our own reality.”

Or as Humpty Dumpty told Alice in Through the Looking Glass, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” To which Alice replied, “The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

To which, like Humpty, the Republicans reply, “The question is, which is to be master — that’s all.”

To note some recent Parallel Universes posited by the Wall Street Journal editorial team:

  • civil liberties are to blame for recent mass shootings because the rights of the mentally disturbed are protected (12/25/12)
  • a $5 million dollar exemption on estate taxes is a “mere pittance” to people who have worked all their lives and should be allowed to keep their money (1-1-13)
  • the AIG lawsuit against the government bailout of AIG is entirely warranted (1-9-13)
  • defense cuts will be used to fund ObamaCare (1/11/13)
  • drilling & fracking will solve the carbon emissions crisis and turn the economy around (1/2/13)
  • privatizing highways is in the public interest (1/15)/13)
  • mandating ethanol production is “the sort of thing that created the Protestant Reformation”

Stay tuned for more GOP Loony Tunes.