Know-nothing politics

I often find Krugman a bit shrill, and even think he loses a little of his argument in this piece, but he is on to something when he suggests that the GOP has become the party of the stupid:

"Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.

What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”"

That is certainly how it looks. This drilling policy is simply ridiculous--as a policy. Maybe we should drill in some of those areas (I don't think so) but it should be part of some kind of plan, not a political stunt.

But it isn't just drilling, it is abstinence only, attacks on science, and tax-cuts regardless of the situation. It is a party that has demonized government to the point where the logical extension of their platform is disaster. Hard to implement killing the government in an effective and efficient way.

And, as Krugman notes, the Patron Saint of the GOP's turn to "dumbness" is George W. Bush. They used to worship this man as some kind of idiot savant who didn't need "no fantsy booklarning" to govern. He just needed his "gut."

“Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man,” declared Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2004. “He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.”

And it has already started again this year. Obama is the "elitist" who likes "arugula" instead of regular food, while John McCain is "one of the people" who wears 500 dollar shoes while his wife says that the only way to travel around Arizona is in private plane--you know, like normal people. Meanwhile John McCain switches gears on drilling to utter "we should drill here, and drill now" after saying that it would do nothing for us. He thinks that the voters are too dumb to notice.

Eight years of Bush has made me far too sad to disagree.