They satisfy themselves instead with their talking points, taking their cues from pundits like Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, or any one of a myriad of FOX News personalities, or, more and more frequently, one of the near-ubiquitous leaders on the Christian Right. The conservative knowledge base seems to be defined by sound-bites, neat little 140-character answers to every issue and problem. Since these are conveniently issued from on high in the manner of user’s manuals, there is no need for voters to look anything up themselves.
Nor do they seem to be inclined to question what they hear, see, or read. Interview Republicans and you will get the same general answers and from the same sources. You will hear the above-mentioned names, or the Drudge Report or some similar source. You will see a lot of scare-mails going around as well, either making up new lies to scare the base or retreading old ones, some of which we have covered here. No matter how many times a Democrat fails to take the guns from the good old boys, you can count on it being repeated each campaign and the base being duly riled.
Einstein said the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result and the GOP knows what works and sticks to it. This isn’t Karl Rove’s first rodeo, after all. Give the man credit: he knows how to dumb it down to the level of the audience.
I wanted to share with you a representative conversation I had with a Republican the other day, which went on for about three hours and covered a wide range of topics. I have chosen three topics out of all those discussed:
Me: No, she did not have a lot of good ideas. Yes she did take that government money you say she refused, hand over fist. And no, she did not really stop the Bridge to Nowhere, she is simply the one who accepted its defeat. Look at the facts, if you will:
Me: There is obviously a great deal more wrong with this sentiment than getting the facts wrong about Sharron Angle but where even to begin? First of all, most women who are raped are not women who are out partying and getting drunk and putting themselves in harm’s way (which still does not excuse rape, by the way). Again, let’s look at some facts about rape:
When I corrected him with regards to Angle’s rape comment, that it was directed not only at women who he claimed “had it coming” but all women who are raped, he said, “Oh, I don’t know nothin’ about that.” The only possible answer to this is, “No, you don’t, do you? Nothing at all. And that’s the problem.”
Me: It’s difficult to not simply laugh in response to statements like this. We have covered the hyper-hypocritical Hannity in these pages many times. The one thing you can count on Hannity doing is accusing Democrats of something Republicans are doing or have already done, in most cases, many times. The other think you can count on is that he is just plain dishonest. As a source of information, it is difficult to think of anyone who has less value. But the claim encapsulates in a nutshell the basic problem with the Republican knowledge base.
There was also a comment that religion is “dead” to both parties, to which I could only answer with a blink. I was speechless. And you can only wonder how a voter manages to stay so ill-informed as to not see the linkage between the Christian Right and the Republican Party. But sadly, there was no time to get into this, because I would love to have had his reaction to things like Newt Gingrich’s plan to begin his administration with the creation, through Executive Order, of a Presidential Commission on Religious Freedom in the United States.
What is surprising is that the conversation began like this: “I suppose since you’re a liberal you don’t pay much attention to what’s going on with Republican Party.” The implication is, of course, that the speaker does. And clearly, my hopes in that regard were dashed to the ground within minutes.
You have to wonder how much of what they say and how they vote is based on ignorance, and how much of a difference actual facts would make. Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic but based on conversations I’ve had with more reasonable Republicans (even Evangelicals), it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that if at least some Republicans would just think enough about what they were hearing to investigate it, they would not support the policies they so currently so violently defend. But here the old biblical “pearls before swine” thing comes into play – you can’t force-feed people information they do not want. You can put it before them, but you can’t make them read, listen, look, or think. And the information is already out there, making relevant the question, “Just how much actual use is education?” in general terms. It is often presented as the thing most needed to correct injustices, but as I have tried to argue here, there is good reason to think most of it is falling on deaf ears.
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