...the hydra is a piker next to rightwing stupidity.

TPM: Report: Obama Taps Sebelius For HHS Secretary

TPM: The conservative activists at the CPAC conference will grant tonight the high honor of their "Defender of the Constitution Award" to Rush Limbaugh.

Think Progress: Limbaugh Takes On Gingrich: ‘We’ve Got To Stamp This Out Within This Movement’

Today, Limbaugh came out swinging, insisting that conservatives need not concern themselves with policy ideas whatsoever and slamming conservatives who want to move beyond Reagan.

Everybody asks me — and I’m sure it’s been a focal point of your convention — well, what do we do, as conservatives? What do we do? How do we overcome this? … One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat them is with better policy ideas. […]

Our own movement has members trying to throw Reagan out while the Democrats know they can’t accomplish what they want unless they appeal to Reagan voters. We have got to stamp this out within this movement becausue it will tear us apart. It will guarantee we lose elections.

Think Progress: CPAC audience cheers: ‘The only way we will be successful is if we listen to Rush Limbaugh.’

After his speech, CPAC presented Rush with a “Defender of the Constitution” award, which included a document signed by Benjamin Franklin. The presenter then compared Rush to Franklin:

The king of England sat with his advisers, and they read the writings of Ben Franklin. They said, “The colonists will never be successful if they read what he writes.” Just as the king’s successor, who is in the White House, said the other day, that conservatives will never be successful if they listen to Rush Limbaugh. The only way we will be successful is if we listen to Rush Limbaugh!

Update. Besides swiping at his competition, Limbaugh sought to prove his leadership bonafides by reiterating his hope that President Obama "fails," insisting that racism was a problem of the left and not the right, and calling liberalism a "psychosis" and liberals "deranged."

The blog Balloon Juice has a fascinating mix of bloggers, with John Cole as a reformed wingnut who understands the radical RW movement from the inside out, and liberal biomedical researcher Tim F. They are both well educated, write about a broad range of issues, and take particular delight in mocking RW stupidity. Their BlogRoll even has a "Blogs we monitor and mock as needed" category.

Needless to say they have been having great fun with the escalating RW outrage that a liberal is now president and is enacting a progressive agenda. But first ...

A blast from last year with Tim F's classic Fear Is The Mind Killer (18-Sep-2008) in its entirety.

Fear can be useful with respect to decisions like, say, whether or not to chase a bear with a stick, but for higher-level thinking the frightened state of mind blows goats. People do irrational, stupid, senselessly violent things when motivated by fear.

Naturally fear has its political uses. Steering a frightened public towards a stupid policy is, so to speak, frighteningly easy. When terrorists attacked America a normal leadership would have gone out of its way to reassure people and calm nerves. The GOP went the other way, maybe disgracefully, but in naked terrorist fear Republicans found a winning meal ticket at a time when national polls put them on the wrong side of virtually every issue.

Anyhow, on the topic social science that we should probably leave alone but due to some personal flaw just can’t, here are two more editions of science revealing what we already know.

First, an unpleasant surprise frightens conservatives more than liberals.

[Subjects] were attached to equipment to measure skin conductivity, which rises with emotional stress as the moisture level in skin goes up. Each participant was shown threatening images, such as a bloody face interspersed with innocuous pictures of things such as bunnies, and rise in skin conductance in response to the shocking image was measured. The other measure was the involuntary eye blink that people have in response to something startling, such as a sudden loud noise. The scientists measured the amplitude of blinks via electrodes that detected muscle contractions under people’s eyes.

The researchers found that both of these responses correlated significantly with whether a person was liberal or conservative socially. Subjects who had expressed a high level of support for policies “protecting the social unit” showed a much larger change in skin conductance in response to alarming photos than those who didn’t support such policies. Similarly, the mean blink amplitude for the socially protective subjects was significantly higher, the team reports in tomorrow’s issue of Science. Co-author Kevin Smith says the results showed that automatic fear responses are better predictors of protective attitudes than sex or age (men and older people tend to be more conservative).

To be honest this result is so un-novel that it’s almost a tautology. One basic definition of conservatism is a negative reaction to whatever is new and shocking at a given point in time, whether the problem du jour is interreligious marriage, interracial marriage or gay marriage. Social progress generally involves accepting things that shock most people who see it for the first time relatively late in life. The liberal deals with his shock and gets over it where the conservative internalizes his discomfort and transforms it into a Kantian moral imperative. Finding out that unpleasant surprise impacts the conservative more strongly therefore beats reporting that the sun will come up in the east tomorrow, but not by much.

On the other hand, it’s curious to find that disproving rightwing lies only makes them believe it more.

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration’s prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation—the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration’s claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

A similar “backfire effect” also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might “argue back” against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same “backfire effect” when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration’s stance on stem cell research.

Now you know why Atrios calls them “zombie lies.” But on reflection ‘zombie’ still doesn’t cover the perversity of this phenomenon. In most movies a zombie will go down if you hit it in the head hard enough. Rightwing lies aren’t just hard to kill, they get stronger the more thoroughly you kill them. Wingnut rumors function more like that mythical critter that grew two heads every time Hercules cut one off, except even the hydra eventually died. By comparison about 29% of America continue to think that Saddam had a WMD program and sat down with bin Laden to plan 9/11. In that sense the hydra is a piker next to rightwing stupidity. There’s nothing like it.

John Cole Crowd Size, Then And Now

I was going to do a big post comparing the rhetoric downplaying the size of protests in the 2003 era and the current tea party, but what it boils down to is I am just too lazy to do the research. Instead, I will just use pictures.

John Cole Out of Ideas. No, Really. They Are Just Out of Ideas.'

Yesterday at Outside the Beltway, James Joyner, who is attending CPAC, listed Newt Gingrich’s 12 point plan for the GOP to recapture the hearts of America (and I have cut the descriptions of the items down, you can visit OTB for the full list):

1. Payroll Tax Stimulus.
2. Real Middle-Income Tax Relief.
3. Reduce the Business Tax Rate.
4. Homeowner’s Assistance.
5. Control Spending So We Can Move to a Balanced Budget.
6. No State Aid Without Protection From Fraud.
7. More American Energy Now (Energy exploration).
8. Abolish Taxes on Capital Gains.
9. Protect the Rights of American Workers (from… Unions)
10. Replace Sarbanes-Oxley.
11. Abolish the Death Tax.
12. Invest in Energy and Transportation Infrastructure.

... (details for each)

So there is their big laundry list of ideas- tax cuts, deregulation, union bashing, and spending projects they have repeatedly opposed. And that doesn’t even go into the fact that they just, a few weeks ago, voted against massive tax cuts for 95% of the country.

What a breath of fresh air. By way of comparison, here is there list of ideas as presented in the Contract with America. You may or may not agree with the ideas, and they were centered around a reform agenda, but at least they were honest to goodness ideas.
...
This is a sputtering, rudderless, idea free movement. There is a reason the only thing they can do is yell “socialist” and attend tea parties (although given the turnout, it looks like they are just sticking to yelling socialist).
...

Tim F. On The Positive Side, .005% Of Unemployed Plumbers Will Support Them To The End

It occurred to me that good strategic reasons explain why the Republican party has become sandwich board silly. Let’s run through the institutional advantages that have kept the party afloat until now.
... .... ....
As the old saw goes, when you have the facts you bang the facts. When you have the law you bang the law. When you have neither, you bang the table. Too bad for the GOP they can’t even compete at that.

Tim F. Peak Wingnut And Other Imaginary Things

That was such an awesome theory.