Let Them Eat Gold-Plated Cake

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Following up the SOTU preview post on President Bush’s health care plan — Paul Krugman explains the obvious —

On the radio, Mr. Bush suggested that we should “treat health insurance more like home ownership.” He went on to say that “the current tax code encourages home ownership by allowing you to deduct the interest on your mortgage from your taxes. We can reform the tax code, so that it provides a similar incentive for you to buy health insurance.”

Wow. Those are the words of someone with no sense of what it’s like to be uninsured.

Going without health insurance isn’t like deciding to rent an apartment instead of buying a house. It’s a terrifying experience, which most people endure only if they have no alternative. The uninsured don’t need an “incentive” to buy insurance; they need something that makes getting insurance possible.

Most people without health insurance have low incomes, and just can’t afford the premiums. And making premiums tax-deductible is almost worthless to workers whose income puts them in a low tax bracket.

Whenever some wingnut proposes to solve X problem by offering tax deductions to make something more “affordable” I want to tear my hair and scream. For people in low tax brackets this really is the same thing as “Let them eat cake.”

Even if we took Bush’s comparisons to mortgage interest deductions seriously — the mortgage interest deduction doesn’t exactly make it possible for everyone to own his own home, does it? It’s a great benefit for people with average and above incomes, but owning a home is still way out of reach for people with lower incomes.

Of those uninsured who aren’t low-income, many can’t get coverage because of pre-existing conditions — everything from diabetes to a long-ago case of jock itch. Again, tax deductions won’t solve their problem.

Indeed. Bush’s plan “is tied to the average cost of family health coverage, which is currently $11,500 a year,” according to this article. I don’t have data handy, but I strongly suspect that if the insurance companies were not allowed to reject “undesirable” (i.e., sick) customers, that cost would be even higher.

While proposing this high-end tax break, Mr. Bush is also proposing a tax increase — not on the wealthy, but on workers who, he thinks, have too much health insurance. The tax code, he said, “unwisely encourages workers to choose overly expensive, gold-plated plans. The result is that insurance premiums rise, and many Americans cannot afford the coverage they need.”

Again, wow. No economic analysis I’m aware of says that when Peter chooses a good health plan, he raises Paul’s premiums. And look at the condescension. Will all those who think they have “gold plated” health coverage please raise their hands?

Krugman writes that what’s behind this nonsense is a theory currently popular in wingnut think tank circles — that too many people have been spoiled by their health insurance, and if they had to pay for more of their health care costs out of their own pockets they’d be more frugal and do without luxury items. (Such as … ?)

In the real world I ‘spect not a whole lot of people demand medical procedures unless doctors tell them they should have them, and insurance companies can always refuse to pay for procedures they deem unnecessary, anyway. In my experience if you press a wingnut to explain what these luxury procedures are, usually the first item they list is “unnecessary tests.” Doctors are supposed to do a better job of guessing what’s wrong with you and not rely so much on the “luxury” of medical technology, in other words.

I realize there are people who demand tests for ailments that doctors know they don’t have. These people are called “hypochondriacs,” and most of ’em would benefit from seeing a shrink. But the wingnuts don’t want to pay for that, either.

What’s really striking about Mr. Bush’s remarks, however, is the tone. The stuff about providing “incentives” to buy insurance, the sneering description of good coverage as “gold plated,” is right-wing think-tank jargon. In the past Mr. Bush’s speechwriters might have found less offensive language; now, they’re not even trying to hide his fundamental indifference to the plight of less-fortunate Americans.

As I wrote here — once upon a time the British government chose not to provide food aid during the Irish potato famine because (they believed) the Irish were lazy and backward and too accustomed to being impoverished farm laborers, and a little hunger might make them more ambitious. Beside, importing cheap food undercut food prices (bad for business), and if the Irish were given food without working for it they’d become dependent on government handouts.

So, more than a million Irish starved to death. If only they’d had more of those gold-plated potatoes.

Drafty

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Andrew J. Bacevich has an intriguing op ed in today’s Boston Globe that presents another side to the question, “to draft, or not to draft.” His argument is that an all-volunteer army has created a U.S. Army that is completely estranged from U.S. society. I’m not necessarily endorsing a draft, but I am presenting Bacevich’s view for your consideration.

Historically, Americans had viewed a “standing army” with suspicion. After Vietnam they embraced the idea. By 1991 they were celebrating it. After Operation Desert Storm — with its illusion of a cheap, easy victory — soldiers like General Colin Powell persuaded themselves that “the people fell in love with us again.”

If love, it was a peculiar version, neither possessive nor signifying a desire to be one with the beloved. For the vast majority of Americans, Desert Storm affirmed the wisdom of contracting out national security. Cheering the troops on did not imply any interest in joining their ranks. Especially among the affluent and well-educated, the notion took hold that national defense was something “they” did, just as “they” bus ed tables, collected trash, and mowed lawns. The stalemated war in Iraq has revealed two problems with this arrangement.

The first is that “we” have forfeited any say in where “they” get sent to fight. When it came to invading Iraq, President Bush paid little attention to what voters of the First District of Massachusetts or the 50th District of California thought. The people had long since forfeited any ownership of the army. Even today, although a clear majority of Americans want the Iraq war shut down, their opposition counts for next to nothing: the will of the commander-in-chief prevails.

The second problem stems from the first. If “they” — the soldiers we contract to defend us — get in trouble, “we” feel little or no obligation to bail them out. All Americans support the troops, yet support does not imply sacrifice. Yellow-ribbon decals displayed on the back of gas-guzzlers will suffice, thank you.

Bacevich is a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran with 23 years of service in the U.S. Army. Today he is a professor of international relations at Boston University.

It so happens I have an advance review copy of Chalmers Johnson’s upcoming book, Nemesis. I’ve read enough of it to know that lots of you folks will probably want to read it. Anyway, Chalmers Johnson quotes Bacevich,

Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. To a degree without precedent in U.S. history, Americans have come to define the nation’s strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action, and the fostering of (or nostalgia for) military ideals. [Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 2]

Now, lots of us have noticed that while righties romanticize the military, and they fancy themselves great supporters of the military, they aren’t real big on joining the military. This seems to me to support Bachevich’s thesis. To see an example of the weird way the Right objectifies the troops, see this recent post by Dean Barnett. Barnett has a snit because Pelosi referred to the late Marine Corporal Jason Dunham, who died in Iraq at the age of 22, as a “young man.” Barnett writes,

I know the Democrats have developed as one of their pet Lakoffian tics the habit of describing our warriors as defenseless children. Thus, when Pelosi refers to Dunham as a “young man” and the men he saved as “other young people,” she’s merely falling into a bad habit.

But it’s a real bad habit; a truly offensive one. This is a matter of more than just mere semantics. Jason Dunham was a Marine. So, too, were the men he saved. They see themselves as warriors, and that’s what they are. The term “young people” is meant to demean them, and in Dunham’s case denies him the dignity that he has so completely earned.

A 22-year-old man is a young man. This is not demeaning. I don’t see anything demeaning about referring to people as, well, people, young or otherwise. And soldiers are people. But not to Barnett, it seems.

Additionally, the failure to use the word “soldier”, “Marine” or any other term that acknowledges a connection between Dunham and the military is borderline grotesque. In Pelosi’s formulation, it almost sounds as if some random “young people” were frolicking in Iraq and stumbled upon a live grenade.

One other thing: If Dianne Sawyer really wants to see human beings that are like “galvanized steel,” she might consider turning her journalistic gaze to Iraq and the Marines still there like Jason Dunham.

It is not an insult to Marines to acknowledge that they are human beings. But to Barnett, Marines are not people. They are not made of tender flesh and blood, but galvanized steel. They aren’t human, but objects.

Let’s go back to Bacevich’s Boston Globe column:

Stipulate for the sake of argument that President Bush is correct in saying that failure in Iraq is not an option. Then why limit the “surge” to a measly 21,500 additional troops? Why not 50,000? With the population of the United States having now surpassed 300 million, why not send 100,000 reinforcements to Iraq?

The question answers itself: There are not an additional 100,000 Americans willing to commit their lives to the cause. Even offering up 21,500 finds the Pentagon scraping the bottom of the barrel, extending the tours of soldiers already in the combat zone while accelerating the deployment of those heading back for a second or third tour of duty.

After the Cold War, Americans came to see war as something other than a human enterprise; the secret of military superiority ostensibly lay in the microchip. The truth is that the sinews of military power lie among the people, who legitimate war and sustain it.

For the United States to remain a great military power will require a genuine reconciliation of the military and American society. But this implies the people exercising a greater say in deciding when and where American soldiers fight. And it also implies reviving the tradition of the citizen-soldier so that all share in the burden of national defense.

Now, I’m sure it’s the case — it’s what everybody says, anyway — that from a purely military perspective a professional force is superior to an army of draftees. But what about what Bacevich writes, about the relationship between society and the military?

Add to this what I wrote in an earlier post, that America will have to choose between being an empire and being a republic; we cannot be both. I am more and more persuaded this is so, and that we have already reached the fork in the road (if not passed it).

Dinesh D’Souza Jumps the Shark

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I haven’t read Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. Nor have I read any of D’Souza’s old books. D’Souza resides in Deep Wingnuttia, a place I do not go. But if Alan Wolfe’s review of Enemy is halfway accurate, D’Souza’s fellow wingnuts might be having second thoughts about him.

D’Souza has told interviewers that his book is about the causes of 9/11. According to this interview, these causes can be traced back to President Jimmy Carter’s failure to prevent the Shah of Iran from being overthrown — a variation on the Right’s traditional “who lost China?” theme. The other cause is “values that are being globally pushed by the left.” These “values” are what persuaded Muslims that America is their enemy. Corporatism, economic globalism, U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, support for Israel — D’Souza denies that any of these things triggered bin Laden’s fatwas against America. No, it was the Left’s values — “gambling, adultery, fornication, prostitution, undermining the family.”

According to Alan Wolfe, D’Souza respects bin Laden as a righteous guy doing what had to be done:

At first Dinesh D’Souza considered him “a dark-eyed fanatic, a gun-toting extremist, a monster who laughs at the deaths of 3,000 innocent civilians.” But once he learned how Osama bin Laden was viewed in the Muslim world, D’Souza changed his mind. Now he finds bin Laden to be “a quiet, well-mannered, thoughtful, eloquent and deeply religious person.” Despite being considered a friend of the Palestinians, he “has not launched a single attack against Israel.” We denounce him as a terrorist, but he uses “a different compass to assess America than Americans use to assess him.” Bin Laden killed only 3,000 of us, with “every victim counted, every death mourned, every victim’s family generously compensated.” But look what we did in return: many thousands of Muslims dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, “and few Americans seem distressed over these numbers.”

There’s enough stuff in that paragraph alone to keep you gasping for a while. But let’s go on —

D’Souza’s cultural relativism hardly stops with bin Laden. He finds Ayatollah Khomeini still to be “highly regarded for his modest demeanor, frugal lifestyle and soft-spoken manner.” Islamic punishment tends to be harsh — flogging adulterers and that sort of thing — but this, D’Souza says “with only a hint of irony,” simply puts Muslims “in the Old Testament tradition.” Polygamy exists under Islamic law, but the sexual freedom produced by feminism in this country is, at least for men, “even better than polygamy.” And the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statement that the West has a taboo against questioning the existence of the Holocaust, while “pooh-poohed by Western commentators,” was “undoubtedly accurate.”

D’Souza’s in mid-shark jump at this point. Wolfe continues (emphasis added),

Dreadful things happened to America on that day, but, truth be told, D’Souza is not all that upset by them. America is fighting two wars simultaneously, he argues, a war against terror abroad and a culture war at home. We should be using the former, less important, one to fight the latter, really crucial, one. The way to do so is to encourage a split between “radical” Muslims like bin Laden, who engage in jihad, and “traditional” Muslims who are conservative in their political views and deeply devout in their religious practices; understanding the radical Muslims, even being sympathetic to some of their complaints, is the best way to win the support of the traditionalists. We should stand with conservative Muslims in protest against the publication of the Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Muhammad rather than rallying to the liberal ideal of free speech. We should drop our alliance with decadent Europe and “should openly ally” with “governments that reflect Muslim interests, not … Israeli interests.” And, most important of all, conservative religious believers in America should join forces with conservative religious believers in the Islamic world to combat their common enemy: the cultural left.

The shark, it is jumped.

I can’t help but think of what Richard Hofstadter wrote of McCarthyist Cold War redbaiting in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Vintage/Random House, 1962), in particular pp. 41-42 (emphasis added):

The inquisitors were trying to give satisfaction against liberals, New Dealers, reformers, internationalists, intellectuals, and finally even against a Republican administration that failed to reverse liberal policies. What was involved, above all, was a set of political hostilities in which the New Deal was linked to the welfare state, the welfare state to socialism, and socialism to Communism. In this crusade Communism was not the target but the weapon, and it is for this reason that so many of the most ardent hunters of impotent domestic Communists were altogether indifferent to efforts to meet the power of International Communism where it really mattered — in the area of world politics.

Alan Wolfe also brings Joe McCarthy to mind when he writes,

“The Enemy at Home” is clearly designed to restore his reputation as the man who will say anything to call attention to his views; charging prominent senators and presidential candidates with treason can do that.

That was McCarthy’s pattern, also. He began by charging foreign policy experts in the State Department with treason, and by the end of his volatile career he had charged General George Marshall, President Dwight Eisenhower, and the United States Army with treason. He had no one left to charge but God.

But I give D’Souza credit — he seems to be dragging the social pathology that is Wingnutism into the light, if not all the way into the petri dish. Many of us have noticed for a long time that there are frightening parallels between extreme Christian fundamentalism and extreme Muslim fundamentalism. Many of us have noticed that righties’ full-throated cries in support of freedom of speech only apply to Danish cartoonists, not to critics of the Iraq War or Christian fundies or anyone else the Right identifies as fellow tribesmen. It has been well noted that righties are, at heart, authoritarians who are terrified of freedom (per Eric Fromm).

But while most righties lack the moral strength and courage to be honest with themselves about themselves — their literature promotes “freedom” and “liberty” as ideals even as they crusade to destroy freedom and liberty — D’Souza’s latest rantings might be seen as an attempt at honesty, transparency, even. Perhaps he has looked deep into himself — well, half an inch into himself, anyway — and realizes that freedom must be crushed if his vision of moral utopia will ever come to pass. At some level he may be dimly aware that achieving his moral vision requires surrendering to totalitarianism. And if that’s what it takes, he thinks, so be it.

Alan Wolfe concludes,

Like his hero Joe McCarthy, he [D’Souza] has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible. People on the left, especially those who have been subjects of D’Souza’s previous books, will shrug their shoulders at his latest screed.

And that would be too bad, because we may never find a clearer revelation of the dark heart of wingnutism. We liberals should take D’Souza’s book firmly in hand and commence bashing the Right with it.

Jane Hamsher

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John at Crooks and Liars reports that Jane Hamsher is doing well after her recent surgery. Christy at firedoglake says she might be out of the ICU by tomorrow.

Miss Lucy, of course, commiserates. Miss Lucy is proof that with some TLC and plenty of attitude, a person (or cat, as it were) can come roaring back from breast cancer. The first few days after surgery is always a rough time, however, so keep sending Jane those healing thoughts.

Update: John at Crooks and Liars reports that Jane is out of the hospital entirely. Two days after major surgery and then dropped-kicked ot the door. Doncha love American health care?

SOTU Preview!

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I know you all are eager to hear the State of the Union address, which I will live blog. I’m not promising to live blog it sober, mind you, nor do I promise not to channel surf if it gets too painful. But I will do my bloggerly duty.

In tomorrow’s New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Robert Pear provide us a preview — Bush’s plan for national health care!

You’ll like this, my lovelies. It’s as good as his Social Security plan.

President Bush intends to use the State of the Union address on Tuesday to tackle the rising cost of health care with a one-two punch: tax breaks to help low-income people buy health insurance and tax increases for workers whose health plans cost more than the national average.

“I will propose a tax reform designed to help make basic private insurance more affordable,” Mr. Bush said in his weekly radio address on Saturday, “whether you get it through your job or on your own.” He did not offer specifics, but an administration official provided details of the plan late Friday afternoon. …

… The basic concept of the president’s plan is that employer-provided health insurance, now treated as a fringe benefit exempt from taxation, would no longer be entirely tax-free. Workers could be taxed if their coverage exceeded limits set by the government. But the government would also offer a new tax deduction for people buying health insurance on their own. …

… Supporters say the plan would expand coverage to some of the 47 million uninsured. But critics say it would, in effect, tax people with insurance to provide coverage to those without it.

Now, here is the bestest part.

In his radio address on Saturday, Mr. Bush described his proposal as a way to “treat health insurance more like home ownership,” giving people tax deductions for their health insurance in much the same way as they get tax deductions for home mortgage interest. He said the current system “unwisely encourages workers to choose overly expensive, gold-plated plans,” driving up the overall cost of coverage and care.

I’ll pause here to let you read that last paragraph two or three more times. It takes a while for the breathtaking — help me here; I need a noun that means “clueless” and “arrogant” at the same time.

And isn’t this the same attitude that got Marie Antoinette decapitated?

More clues about the SOTU:

White House officials say Mr. Bush has decided to forgo the traditional formula for the State of the Union — a laundry list of ideas, many of them dead on arrival — in favor of a more thematic speech that will concentrate on a few issues, like health care, immigration and energy, on which he hopes to make gains with the new Democrat-controlled Congress.

Yeah, that health care proposal is going to knock ’em dead.

As he heads into the address, his first delivered to a Congress controlled entirely by Democrats, Mr. Bush faces intense skepticism from lawmakers over his new strategy in Iraq. But while he will not be able to avoid the subject of Iraq in the speech, White House officials hope to use the address to shift the national conversation away from the war and toward the possibility of bipartisan cooperation in Washington.

I can’t stand it.

Steppenwolf

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Since we’ve been talking about the antiwar movement or lack thereof –at the Washington Post, John McMillian writes a column called “Missing in Antiwar Action” wondering why young people aren’t engaging in the antiwar movement. McMillian is a Harvard history professor, and his column is mostly about the low-key reaction to the war by his students. An obvious reason is the lack of a draft, of course. McMillian suggests some other reasons:

First, today’s young people claim to be under more pressure to succeed than we were. I believe this is true, and I’ll elaborate in a minute. But I think it’s a lame excuse.

Second,

… today the gauzy idealism that circulated among teenagers in the 1960s seems almost freakishly anomalous. According to a recent U.S. Census report, 79 percent of college freshmen in 1970 said that “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” was among their goals, whereas only 36 percent said becoming wealthy was a high priority. By contrast, in 2005, 75 percent of incoming students listed “being very well off financially” among their chief aims.

Certainly, acquiring wealth was less of an issue for us because we grew up at a time when the American middle class got more affluent every time it breathed. The road ahead didn’t seem all that intimidating when viewed from the 1960s — a big reason, I suspect, we may have felt less pressured than students today. We would have a harder time than we realized, since the post-World War II economic growth that seemed endless to us peaked about 1972. The economy slowed down after 1973 and never quite recovered. Although it may be that Boomers as a group are less frugal than our parents were, we struggled more than our parents did — with two-income families, for example — to keep up appearances. And I think our children will find appearances slipping no matter how hard they work. It’s bleak out there.

Some of my students suggested that they might not even be capable of experiencing the kind of indignation and disillusionment that spurred many baby boomers toward activism. In the Vietnam era, the shameful dissembling of American politicians provoked outrage. But living in the shadow of Vietnam and Watergate, and weaned on “The Simpsons” and “The Daily Show,” today’s youth greet the Bush administration’s spin and ever-evolving rationale for war with ironic world-weariness and bemused laughter. “The Iraq war turned out to be a hoax from the beginning? Figures!”

As I wrote last week, we Boomers were raised to be naive and idealistic. As we caught on to what our government actually was doing, we felt betrayed. Most of us remained idealistic, however, even as we protested the government. Consider also that our parents had gone from being the Greatest Generation in the 1940s to being the “Gray Flannel Suit” generation in the 1950s — from military regimentation to social and cultural regimentation, creating a society so oppressively conformist that if the hem of one’s skirt deviated by even a half inch from standard specifications — mid-knee length in a below-the-knee year, for example — eyebrows were raised. Of course, hair length on the boys was every bit as regimented, and facial hair (other than the occasional rakish mustache à la David Niven) was a no-no.

Naturally, when the Boomers hit adolescence the cry of rebellion was heard throughout the land. We decorated ourselves with beads and feathers and wore our hair and our skirts any length we damn well pleased. The books we all read were mostly about either oppression, liberation, or transcendence — 1984, Animal Farm, Hesse’s Siddhartha and Steppenwolf (although you might not have made it all the way through Steppenwolf), The Prophet, Jonathan Livingston Seagull (you tried to forget that one, didn’t you?), The Lord of the Rings.

What are the young folks reading these days? I don’t even know.

McMillian’s piece ends rather bleakly:

“Just like [in] the 1960s, we have an unjust war, a lying president, and dead American soldiers sent home everyday,” one student wrote me in an e-mail. “But rather than fight the administration or demand a forum to express our unhappiness, we accept the status quo and focus on our own problems.”

That’s sad, considering the status quo is even bleaker for them than it was for us. All the taxes we’re not paying now are going to end up in their laps, for example.

On the other hand, this study from UCLA says —

This year’s entering college freshmen are discussing politics more frequently than at any point in the past 40 years and are becoming less moderate in their political views, according to the results of UCLA’s annual survey of the nation’s entering undergraduates. … the percentage of students identifying as “liberal” (28.4 percent) is at its highest level since 1975 (30.7 percent), and those identifying as “conservative” (23.9 percent) is at its highest level in the history of the Freshman Survey, now in its 40th year.

Good luck, young folks. You’ll need it.

Be Worried

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A hypothesis has been rattling around in my head for a while, and if any social psychologists (or anybody) reading this know of actual data that might support it, please let me know.

Humans are social animals, and as such we tend to take our social and emotional cues from people around us. This “cue-ing” is so much a part of being human that most of the time we don’t notice it. My hypothesis is that our brains — the non-cognitive parts — often cannot distinguish between “real” people and people in electronic mass media, especially television and radio. Thus, people who spend at least part of every day plugged into television or radio are taking emotional cues from whatever they are watching.

Earlier this week we spent some time discussing the antiwar movement. Many people here and elsewhere express frustration that so much of the American public seems apathetic about the war. Although a solid majority (65 percent, according to the latest Bloomberg poll) of Americans are opposed to the war, the only way you’d know that is by reading polls.

By the same token, I’ve spent part of nearly every day for more than four years documenting the nonsense coming out of Washington. Sometimes I think the only reasonable reaction to the Bush Administration is to dash about with my hair on fire, yet I sit here, blogging. And outside my window the sun is shining and squirrels are frisking about in the bare tree limbs, and I know if I were to turn on the TV there’d be the usual inane talk shows and reruns. This time of day even the news shows are mostly populated by attractive and well-groomed young people who are ever calm and cheerful as they report on the many ways the world is going to hell.

So, even people who have some grasp of current events are not all that worked up about them. The emotional cues they’re getting from television say that nothing extraordinary is going on, beyond Muslim congressmen taking the oath of office on a Q’ran.

In my earlier post I expressed doubt that the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era really had much of a measurable effect in ending the war. I think news media had a much bigger impact on eroding public support for the war. In those days nearly the entire nation tuned into one of the early evening news shows broadcast by one of the three major networks, because that was pretty much all that was on. And every evening people saw real carnage and miserable young soldiers, and the reporters who covered the war spoke in grim and serious tones. The emotional cue was, “This is really bad. Be worried.”

Now, even those people who opt to watch television news instead of whatever else is on the 300 cable channels don’t see that much of Iraq. Instead, they see “pundits” and politicians, comfortably seated, dispassionately discussing this policy or that policy and whether it will impact the 2008 presidential elections. As if what’s going on is all perfectly normal.

The exception to the dispassion is on the Right. You know the unwritten rule — righties can scream until they turn purple and pound tables and hyperventilate and say any outrageous thing that pops into their heads and that’s OK. The second a “leftie” expresses mild disgruntlement he’s out of control. I think this works both for and against the Right. People inclined to buy the swill they’re selling are passionate about it. Whatever critical thinking skills they might have had are overrun by emotions.

On the other hand, displays of really strong emotion — rage, screaming, hysteria — can frighten people away as much as draw them in. This might seem to contradict my emotional cue theory, but I don’t think it does. I think we might have an instinct — at the very least, strong cultural conditioning — that causes us to steer clear of someone whose strong emotions seem grossly out of place.

For example, if you are walking down the street on a lovely day and find someone screaming in rage for no apparent reason, you would most likely walk way around that person, wouldn’t you? If not call the cops? This makes some sense as a survival instinct, because such a person might be dangerous. Now, it could be that the screaming person has good reason to scream, but if you don’t know anything about this person you are likely to assume he’s nuts. Yes, admit it; you are. I know the social psychologists have piled up a ton of p values and chi squares to prove this.

As I wrote here, I think their apparent hysteria is one reason a majority of Americans stampeded away from the Fetus People during the Terri Schiavo death watch.

However, when there is an apparent reason for strong emotion, like bodies floating in New Orleans flood waters, a little shouting and strong language from news reporters is not only warranted; it underscores the severity of the event. If the newsies had covered post-Katrina New Orleans with the same business-as-usual tone they adopt for everything else, I’m willing to bet many viewers would have been soothed into thinking that bodies floating in flood water is no big deal. Happens all the time.

I say that what went on yesterday in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing was the equivalent of bodies floating in flood water. These events deserve more than dispassionate explanation. The emotional cue we should be getting is “This is really bad. Be worried.”

I’m free associating this morning and possibly not making sense. More free association in the comments is welcome.