There’s not a lot of news to comment on right now. Maybe we should give ourselves a break and just make Thanksgiving a whole month, and not let Christmas eat into it.

Here’s another story about how right-wing whackjobs in Texas dictate what goes into everybody’s textbooks. A couple of comments.

One, speaking as one who worked in the textbook industry for years — Publishers for many years have cranked out separate “Texas editions” of their textbooks. In fact, any state that has a committee deciding what books get adopted for the state gets its own edition. Usually the differences from one edition to another are very subtle. Often most of the differences are in the teachers’ editions and not the books the children use. To save money, publishers do try to make the state and national editions as uniform as possible so that, when the books are being printed, the printers only have to change the black plate (to change the text) but not the plates that print the colors in the illustrations.

But if Texas demands become too extensive to make that work, I’m not sure what the publishers would do. The costs involved in hiring an entirely separate Texas textbook division to create Texas-salable books might cause publishers to abandon Texas, at least in some subject areas like social studies and science, even if it is a huge market. The Texas market is a crapshoot, anyway, because it sometimes happens that publishers invest a lot of money and time catering to the Texas textbook committee and still fail to get “adopted” for some capricious reason. (For the record, that has happened with California too, sometimes.)

Second, when I hear about bozos like Don McLeroy, interviewed for the article, it makes me wonder how someone that stupid can not only survive, but achieve success. As a species, we don’t seem to be selecting for intelligence very efficiently. There was a time when the early hominid McLeroys would not have survived to procreate, you know. He might have mistaken a Arctodus simus for a Megalonyx jeffersonii and try to pet it. He might have tried to walk across a tar pit. Now he wears nice suits and dictates textbook content. I fear for humanity.

Yesterday the Mahadaughter and I got out of cooking by going to the Thanksgiving buffet at a fancy local hotel. The food was OK, but I really miss pigging out on the leftovers for the rest of the weekend. So think of me when you bite into your turkey sandwiches.

Some stuff for your post-feast digestion — first, noting that I’m generally ambivalent about Noam Chomsky, I really did appreciate his response to a truther:

The truthers’ response to the video is typically trutherish. The truther in the video cited a “consensus” of 2000 architects regarding Building 7, apparently saying its destruction was a planned demolition, or something. Chomsky dismissed the 2,000 as an inconsequential number. “Noam please do your math. Over 2000 architects does not equal a few,” said one commenter. Um, out of how many architects in the U.S. now? Not to mention engineers and physicists? And the consensus of the truthers is that Chomsky — Noam Chomsky, mind you — is now a lackey of the U.S. government. MIT gets significant funding from the Pentagon, after all (wink, nudge).

I don’t always agree with Noam, but I respect him for his independence. And if there’s any group of people on the planet more irrational than baggers, it’s truthers.

See also “A Realist’s Take on Obamacare,” “Obamacare’s Secret Success” and “Rooting for Failure.”

Take a day off from politics, and try not to argue with your right-wing relatives too much!

Paul Krugman is not one to exhibit irrational exuberance, so his saying this gives me hope:

I suggested yesterday that we’re probably heading for a turning point in the health reform discussion. Conservatives are operating on the assumption that it’s an irredeemable disaster that they can ride all the way to 2016; but the facts on the ground are getting better by the day, and Obamacare will turn into a Benghazi-type affair where Republicans are screaming about a scandal nobody else cares about.

And it’s already starting to happen.

A CNN poll indicates a majority of Americans still have an open mind about whether the ACA will work, which is remarkable considering the relentless screaming coming from the Noise Machine.

Just to show it isn’t just righties who can be irrational — I give you Lambert and his readers, who still believe we’d have a single-payer health care system today if Obama hadn’t sold us out. Scott Lemieux snarks back.

Dana Milbank notes that Republicans began screeching about “appeasement” and “distracting attention from O-care” before any of the details of the recent temporary deal with Iran were announced.

A couple of minutes after 9 p.m. on Saturday, word crossed the news wires that negotiators in Geneva had reached an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Then, at 9:08 p.m. — before any details of the pact were known — Ari Fleischer delivered his opinion on the agreement, via Twitter.

“The Iran deal and our allies: You can’t spell abandonment without OBAMA,” he wrote. …

… Three minutes after Fleischer’s tweet came one in agreement from Ron Christie, another veteran of the Bush administration. “Precisely,” he wrote, also without the benefit of knowing what was in the agreement. “A disgraceful deal.”

An hour later — still before Obama detailed the accord in a statement from the White House — John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, had analyzed the administration’s motives in reaching the deal.

“Amazing what WH will do to distract attention from O-care,” he tweeted at 10:15 p.m., 19 minutes before the president spoke.

Of course, the fatal flaw in the recent deal was that it was negotiated by the Obama Admnistration. Milkbank goes on to document the mounting worse-than-Hitler hysteria in the rightie echo chamber, but most of you know about that, so let’s go on …

Charles Pierce reminds us what a Republican-negotiated deal looks like.

I am a simple man. Years ago, I made it a policy of mine that I would approve of any deal with Iran so long as it didn’t involve selling missiles to the mullahs. I developed this policy in January of 1981, when I was in Washington covering the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, and the Iranians, in one last attempt to stick it to Jimmy Carter, refused to release the remaining American hostages until Reagan had taken office. Almost immediately, the propagandists in the employ of the new president started floating to a credulous media that the Iranians had done so because they were terrified of the awesome awesomeness of Ronald Reagan. Turns out, of course, that they did it in exchange for Reagan’s unfreezing their American assets and also because Reagan’s people opened up a yard sale at the Pentagon where the Iranians could get good deals on TOW missiles. Ronald Reagan, as we all know, would never negotiate with — let alone sell weapons to — nations that sponsored terrorism. That is why Ronald Reagan was a great man who has many large and ugly buildings named after him.

(Whether or not these deals were cut by officials of the Reagan campaign prior to the election — in other words, whether or not Bill Casey et. al. committed something like treason by undermining American foreign policy in order to win an election — is still very much an open question. But there were, ahem, precedents.)

So, unfreezing assets as part of a deal that might make the world safer from nuclear weapons is bad. Unfreezing assets as part of a deal to elect a Republican to the White House is good. Let’s remember to keep that straight.

Didn’t I mention recently that righties tend to exaggerate? Get a load of this —

Munich II
By James Jay Carafano

No, that’s not a facile, partisan jab. What just went down in Geneva is, in fact, a replay of the greatest diplomatic tragedy of the 20th century.

The Munich deal rested on the ridiculous notion that Hitler could be satiated. The new pact builds on the equally ludicrous idea that Iran would give up the means to build a nuclear weapon that will serve as the tip of its foreign-policy spear.

Seriously. Carafano — vice president of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the Heritage Foundation — went there. And they wonder why we laugh at them.

Carafano says that the only outcome acceptable to right-thinking Americans is regime change, and sanctions must not be modified until the current regime utterly collapses. The possibility — probability, seems to me — that a new regime might be even more radical and anti-western than the old one is not on Carafano’s radar.

John Holbo explains why Carafano’s preferred scenario boils down to, oh, what the bleep, let’s just nuke ’em now. In Carafano’s world, potential enemies are enemies, period, and they must be treated with extreme prejudice and not be allowed any opportunities to moderate or become less of a threat. We make sure they remain enemies until they do something awful enough that we are justified in killing them.

It’s a bit like the righties who say they never hear about moderate Muslims, which is mostly because their definition of “Muslim” is “psychopath anti-Christian mad-dog terrorists who wear strange clothes.”

There was an article in the September 2013 issue of Harper‘s that described in detail exactly how the sanctions are affecting Iran, and it’s actually pretty horrific and not, I don’t think, likely to win the good will of the Iranian people. So if we want to compare Iran to the Third Reich, we might consider how a nation became radicalized by a policy of humiliation and economic hardship. Anything that smacks of “appeasement” is anathema to the Right, but I don’t recall when rock-hard rigidity ever forced a good outcome, either.

See also “How Bush Let Iran Go Nuclear.”

Just want to point your attention to a couple of items in the NY Times. The first, Right vs. Left in the Midwest, looks at the neighbor states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. In 2010 gubernatorial elections Wisconsin elected Scott Walker; Minnesota elected the progressive Mark Dayton of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Minnesota has been more progressive even as Wisconsin lurched right. So guess which state is enjoying economic growth and which isn’t?

The other is Two Gunshots On a Summer Night, an in-depth look at the death of a young woman that was ruled a suicide, but which probably wasn’t. The woman’s boyfriend was a deputy sheriff, and he claimed the shooting was a suicide, and his brother-cops just believed him and barely investigated. It’s a chilling thing to read, and in some ways reminds me of how the cops handled Trayvon Martin’s shooting.

If this had been meant ironically it would have been amusing:

Amazing what WH will do to distract attention from O-care

— JohnCornyn (@JohnCornyn) November 24, 2013

They’re like a dog with a bone, you know. Once they’ve got their teeth sunk into a tasty talking point, they don’t let go.

This morning I read Fred Kaplan’s take on the Iran deal:

The Iranian nuclear deal struck Saturday night is a triumph. It contains nothing that any American, Israeli, or Arab skeptic could reasonably protest. Had George W. Bush negotiated this deal, Republicans would be hailing his diplomatic prowess, and rightly so.

Of course, right after that I saw reactions from the Right, screaming bloody murder. John Bolton thinks it represents an abject surrender. Bibi Netanyahu thinks it is a historic mistake. If those two are against it, it must be brilliant. See also Business Insider for a reasonably nonpartisan analysis..

From all the screaming on the Right, you’d think Senate Dems were a tribe of ax-wielding Visigoths. Rush made a really creepy rape analogy. The usual stuff.

Steve M. reminds us that righties always see themselves as picked-upon (but noble) victims. Whatever happens is never their fault.

Bullies claiming to be bullied — does that remind you of anything? It reminds me of a wife beater who gets a restraining order against the wife he beats, and who otherwise claims that he’s the real victim. Fight back against a guy like that, even strictly in self defense, and he’ll show off every tiny bruise as proof that you’re the monster, not him.

Explains why they so fervently embrace George Zimmerman as one of their own.

Paul Rosenberg writes about the rightie proclivity to exaggerate. Any misstep on the part of the Democrats is “worse than Watergate” or “Obama’s Katrina.”

Case in point: As early as April 2010, Media Matters had counted eight different things that had been touted as “Obama’s Katrina,” including the BP oil spill (Limbaugh, Drudge, Fox.etc. vs. facts here); the GM bankruptcy (Politico, June 8, 2009); the H1N1 flu (Rush Limbaugh, Nov. 3, 2009); the Fort Hood shootings (Human Events, Nov. 11, 2009); the Christmas underwear bomber (Pajamas Media, Dec. 29, 2009); the Haiti earthquake (Wall Street Journal, Jan. 25, 2010); the Kentucky ice storms (Confederate Yankee, Feb. 1, 2010); and even housing policies in Chicago back when Obama was a state senator (Mickey Kaus, Slate, June 30, 2008).

They’re also prone to comparing anything they don’t like to slavery. While I don’t entirely agree with part of his premise, Rosenberg makes one interesting point. The Fundamentalist right, Jerry Falwell et al., did not immediately jump on abortion as their signature issue right after Roe v. Wade. At the time, they were still locked in the final battles of their war on racial desegregation. Many seem to have embraced pregnancy enforcement only when they realized segregation was lost.

For several decades now, conservatives have clung to abortion as their great moral equalizer, which they consequently just love to equate with slavery. Ever since its meteoric rise in the late 1970s, the religious right has clung to the abortion issue as the foundation of its claims to moral superiority — and for good reason, since their true, sordid origin story lies in fighting to preserve segregation, as Max Blumenthal explained in the Nation magazine at the time of Jerry Falwell’s death (“Agent of Intolerance“). …

…Remarkably, Falwell and his ilk were so focused on defending segregation, that they rebuffed early Catholic attempts, spearheaded by Paul Weyrich, to turn their attention to abortion. They only broadened their issue agenda to include abortion some years later, as they came to realize they needed allies who had little motivation in helping them preserve the separation of the races.

I well remember there was plenty of antipathy to abortion among religious and political conservatives even before Roe v. Wade (1973). But the degree to which the Right has made abortion the ground of Armageddon itself might be partly explained by their position on what they think is moral high ground. They’ve lost or are losing every other moral/social issues fight of the 20th century, but they’ve still got abortion. Plus, it gives them an excuse to slut-shame sexually active women. So they aren’t likely to let go of abortion anytime soon, even if it’s beginning to cost them elections.

My quibble with Rosenberg comes up in this paragraph:

What connects all these patterns is that they involve bad things that conservatives were responsible for in the past, things they still, apparently, feel appropriately guilty about. but cannot consciously admit to, and hence, keep on trying to find liberal versions of, in order to unburden themselves by pushing their guilt onto others. It’s an example of what psychologists and psychiatrists know as “projection,” and the rest of us know as “the pot calling the kettle black.” But often it’s actually even worse than that — it’s not just the past bad behavior that’s being projected, but ongoing bad behavior as well, in part because of this same refusal to come to terms with past mistakes.

Yeah, sorta, but I don’t think it’s guilt they feel. Maybe, but I doubt it. It’s more like existential fear. They are so utterly invested in their own moral certitude that it has become who they are. Any challenge to their inner core of white-hot righteousness about whatever is a mortal threat.

This accounts for another tendency, the way in which admired historical figures must be assimilated by the Right. Thus the absurd argument that Martin Luther King was a rightie — they sure didn’t think that when he was alive — or the belief that John Kennedy was a conservative, even though he called himself a liberal. It must not be that anyone who was “good” could not have been one of theirs, and not one of the hated liberals.