Climate Change Deniers and Boiled Frogs: Redux

By (O)CT(O)PUS

Last week, the White House released this 800-page report on Global Climate Change. Its conclusions are disturbing: Global Climate Change is no longer a theoretical construct or a distant threat, but a real and present danger to our country, our economy, and the world. Droughts, intense storms, floods, heat waves, melting ice, torrential rains, wildfires, rising sea levels, and higher levels of ocean acidity – these are examples of extreme weather conditions that have devastated every region of the country. Even more alarming, our infrastructure is designed for the climate we had in the past, not the climate we have at present, and certainly not the retrograde conditions we are likely to face in the future.

Incredibly, the Republican Party remains monolithic in opposition to these findings, and the reasons are several: An estimated $21 trillion investment in current energy technology, $$$ billions in political slush money to protect these assets, and the prospect of changing a deeply entrenched way of life that many people refuse to acknowledge or accept – these account for the ‘Flat Earthers’ and ‘Truthers’ of Climate Change who continue to deny the evidence.

Regrettably, the White House Report did not receive the coverage it deserved by a mainstream media that considers every scandal de jour as more newsworthy than a dire challenge to the future survival of humanity. That is why I consider it a moral imperative to cover it here.

There is no need to write a new post; the fundamentals of climate change science have been known for decades. In the interest of conservation – and brevity - here is a recycled older post that is just as relevant today as it was almost 5 years ago (originally posted December 10, 2009):

Credit: AZRAINMAN

Whatever you call it, a silly anecdote or imperfect metaphor, the boiling frog story serves a useful purpose, and it goes like this. If you place a frog in boiling water, it will immediately jump out. However, if you place the same frog in cold water that is heated slowly, it will not notice the gradual rise in temperature but will stay in the water until it boils to death. No frogs were harmed in the writing of this post, but the boiling frog story serves as a useful metaphor to describe how people refuse to recognize a threat that occurs gradually.

Climate change deniers are akin to slow boiling frogs. For most folks, the climate change crisis is vague and impalpable. You cannot see it, touch it, or watch it happen on cable news. It lacks the immediate drama of a hurricane or tsunami. Climate change may not be noticed for a decade or even within a lifetime. Yet, it exists today as a set of observations and data points that are too arcane and abstract for many people to grasp. But make no mistake: Global climate change is here … a dark cloud hanging over our lives and future generations. Despite the preponderance of data, there are skeptics, doubters, and boiled frogs. A case in point (source):

When a climate scientist looks at this graph, the most obvious feature is the red trend line [my addition]. This graph plots rising temperatures from different data sources. The skeptical boiled frog might look at these data and say: “So what! It proves nothing.”

There are two statistical concepts to bear in mind. Some data points conform to a pattern while others appear randomly scattered. When data points fall outside a trend line, we call these “outliers,” a fancy word for random distribution. The skeptical boiled frog focuses on the random jitters and ignores the trend line. “So what,” croaks the frog, “Mother Earth has mood swings.” My point: Statistical outliers turn boiled frogs into outrageous liars.

Still skeptical? Next slide (Fossil fuel combustion as a component of total greenhouse gas emissions):

What this graph shows are the various types of greenhouse emissions, such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorocarbons from various sources. Most importantly, the graph shows the source of each greenhouse gas: From forest fires, natural decay, agriculture, from waste, and fossil fuel combustion. Notice the large red area dominating the bottom half of the graph. This represents carbon dioxide as a product of fossil fuel consumption. What does this mean?

It means climate change is a man-made phenomenon. People burn fossil fuels in their cars, homes, and factories. Skeptical boiled frogs have claimed that greenhouse gases come from natural sources ranging from forest fires to flatulence, or from the rise and fall of some geologically unknown Dow Jones. These data tell a different story. It means that more than half of all greenhouse gases (56% of total emissions) have a human origin. Hence, the term “anthropogenic,” meaning “caused by human beings.”

One more slide for a skeptical boiled frog (Spatial distribution of greenhouse gas emissions):

This color-coded map shows the distribution of carbon dioxide around the world. Notice how concentrations of CO2 emissions correspond with areas of human population density and, most especially, with areas having the highest levels of industrial output. These data confirm the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and human activity.

Overall, the latest observations show that globally averaged levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) have reached new highs in 2008: Higher than those of pre-industrial times (before 1750) by 38%, 157% and 19%, respectively. Within the past 10 years alone, levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have increased 26.2%.

Admittedly, the boiling frog story employs a flawed metaphor. Experience has shown that most frogs are too restless to sit still long enough for any pot of water to reach the boiling point. However, the definitive experiment was performed in 1869 by the German physiologist, Friedrich Goltz, who was searching for the location of the soul and demonstrated a fundamental truth. Frogs that had their brains removed will remain in slowly heated water; whereas frogs with intact brains will promptly escape.

Thus, I end my post with this observation:  Climate change deniers, unlike their intact amphibian counterparts, have neither brains nor souls.

BENGHAZI! BENGHAZI! BEN-FUNDRAISING!

Would the button-popping proud patriotic Gee-Oh--Pee-ers  use a heart-breaking tragedy to fill their political coffers and demean the lives of the men who died in BENGHAZI!?


Would those flag-waving, Kenyan-President-hating Goopers stoop to gutter politics and use the deaths of four Americans to squeeze money out of their gullible base and prolong the investigation of what Charlie Pierce calls "a banquet of nothing burgers?"  Would they continue to Darrell Issalize this terrible misfortune and use it as a grubby tool to raise filthy lucre for the upcoming 2014 elections?  And is Trey Gowdy just another preening hemorrhoid who's emerged from the deep dark fissures of Teabaggistan?

Is it true that the very same people, who condemned the Obambi administration for being tyrannically callous and deceitful over what happened on September 11, 2012, in Libya, would callously and deceitfully exploit that tragedy?

The Gee--Oh--Pee-ers' only goal is to get out their fat cat donors' money bags  the factlings and find out what really happened that night.  Their motives are noble and pure. They seek only the truth--a truth which they've been trying to get their unbiased factlets to conform to for almost two years and which has cost American tax payers millions of minimum wage dollars.  We can be sure that they will report their fair and balanced flying monkey poop, (with absolutely no Hitlery Klintoon or Obummer bias, to the American people, and those factoids will have nothing whatsoever to do with how much cash the they can get the TeaPublicans to stuff into those pure white envelopes and send to the RNCC.

Oh what difference does it make! This is America, and we all love really good scandalesque diversions. 

John Boehner dodges on Benghazi fundraising


"Asked again if it is proper for the National Republican Congressional Committee to use this committee money, Boehner said, “Our focus is getting the truth for these four families and for the American people.”  

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), whom Boehner tapped to chair the committee, has already said it’s inappropriate to try to raise political money off the investigation. Visitors to the NRCC web site who clicked on a Benghazi-related post this week were then asked to donate money to “stop Democrats from controlling all of Washington.” 


Morning Joe Slams GOP For ‘Undermining the Credibility of Benghazi Committee’ with Fundraising

Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the chairman of the House select committee on Benghazi, said Republicans should not fundraise off “the backs of four murdered Americans.” 


House Republican Candidate Fundraising Off Of Benghazi Investigation

$$$$$$$$$$ BENGHAZI! $$$$$$$$$$

How Dwarf Clairvoyants Unleashed the Zombie Apocalypse

In December 2008, weeks before our newly elected president took the oath of office, Rush Limbaugh said, ”I hope he fails.” These words gave the GOP their master plan to nullify a landslide election and kill off what little remained of democracy in America.  Destroy a newly elected president by saying ‘NO’ to everything.  Demonize him with ‘Birtherism” and color him the illegitimate Manchurian candidate from Kenya.  Portray him as unaccomplished in life with nothing to say and nothing to contribute.  Start with this predetermination: You denounce every thought, word and deed - past, present and future - as utterly worthless and devoid of merit.  If you defame and discredit the president-elect in advance before his presidency even begins, then only one of two hypotheses must be true:

One:  You have secret access to his mind, know all there is to know, possess full foreknowledge of all possible future outcomes, and have a crystal ball that portends the destruction of a once great and powerful nation, the nadir of civilization, and the dreaded End Time.  You report your findings to the Guardians of Party Piety and Purity.

OR …

Two.  You just can’t get beyond the fact that president #44 is biracial.  Some will show open contempt by forwarding emails of racist cartoons.  Others will disguise their contempt under coded messages of snicker-n-wink: “He’s the President of Moochers and Takers,” mock the Makers and Job Creators with derision and scorn.  You will be fixated day and night on ways to block his legislative agenda for any reason you can muster with bluster and filibuster, or find ways to impeach him outright.  The Libtard-Socialist anti-Christ must be stopped, says every freedom-loving, God-fearing Christian whack-job fixated on Hellfire and Perdition.

Either way, you unleash the Eumenides of legislative gridlock and deadlock to make sure he fails (and thereby punish the 69 million voters who voted for him, plus the 60 million voters who didn’t). Collateral damage notwithstanding, all libtards and their ilk must be taught a lesson and turned from the Dark Side of the Farce, they vow with reckless abandon.

In due course, corporations morph into people, and money becomes the currency of free speech. You slash funds for education; aid and abet joblessness by declaring war on reproductive rights; let our national infrastructure crumble; allow polluters to poison our air and water; and shut down the government. In due course, all GOP Congress critters anoint themselves as authoritative experts in science - claiming to be even smarter than the best scientific minds in the known Universe.

Will we ever find respite from the Dwarf Clairvoyant Escapees of the insane asylum who unleashed this madness?  Hardly!  The small-minded mediums are still at large.

Only for Christians

You can laugh a bit and console yourself that it doesn't matter all that much if an Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice tells us the first Amendment only applies to Christians -- maybe even if you are like me, not a Christian. It's only Alabama, right?

They didn't bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship, the Mayflower,

Justice Roy Moore announced to the mob at the Pastor for Life Luncheon. Maybe you'll remember that Jefferson owned one however and that he wasn't shy about warning us of religious tyranny. Maybe you'll remember Moore as the former justice who was removed from office for fighting to erect the Ten Commandments in the courthouse, but like that tumor you thought the chemo got rid of he came back two years later singing the same tune:

Let's get real. Let's learn our history. Let's stop playing games.

I would agree with that, but as we know, to the religious right, history is baked fresh every morning. The English colonists brought slaves, white and black, and Moore's ideological ancestors fought like hell to keep them, Bibles in hand.

Buddha didn't create us. Mohammad didn't create us. It's the god of the Holy Scriptures,

said Moore with the authority not granted him by anyone in particular, and grossly misrepresenting Jefferson and Madison and the U.S. Supreme Court with a stream of non sequitur he insisted that freedom of religion is only for Christians.

A newly-released video shows him expounding all this and worse in Jackson, Mississippi last January to a group called Pro-Life Mississippi. Of course it's hardly a game he's asking us to end, it's secular democracy, the pride of the age of Reason and Humanism, and like a stag at bay it's destined to be torn to ribbons and its head displayed on some courthouse wall. For nothing in our Constitution is as important, as hallowed by the blood of patriots, as the cracks, the loopholes, the weak spots that may just allow traitors and secessionist sons of the Confederacy to eviscerate it, hang it from its heels, bleed it and gut it like an animal to be sacrificed to his tyrannical, bloody-handed God.

Liberal Nazis don't want you to know this!

Lots of things are happening in the world that Cable News disciples don't seem to notice or know about.  Lots of crazy stuff is swept under the racist team owner, missing airplane, sunken ferry rug every day.  It's a revelation.

I read today about another one of those wonderful preachers who seem to have a handle on our real problems -- the kind of stuff we need to read more of.  I'm talking about Brother Dean Samuel who showed up a a screening of  a film about 1998 Miss World Pageant winner and rape survivor Linor Abargil last month, wearing a T-shirt saying "You Whore."  It's her fault for being raped, he says, she should have stayed home.

He's right.  That neighbor across the street who leaves his garage door open is just inviting me to steal his Ferrari  and it's his own damned fault if I do. Don't you just love Christianity?  Do what thou wilt is the law - for men of course.  Hey, don't argue, God's a man, or two men and a bird, but don't ask.  The answer gets kind of weird.

And then there's that moral and righteous Newt Gingrich who got all Puritan on us when Bill Clinton got caught with his pants down, cheating on his wife while Newt was doing the same thing?  I'm glad I didn't get distracted by the Missing Plane and got to read how "Liberal Nazis" forced Condoleeza to cancel her commencement speech at Rutgers. He blamed an "elite Media" for this horror:  "an elite media that would have been screaming if right-wing groups had done this to a Somali woman and an African-American woman."  'This' meaning calling her to task for helping to falsify information about Iraq,  ignore information about al Qaeda and justify a war that killed hundreds of thousands, helped punish critics, destroyed a country that had nothing whatever to do with 9/11 and bankrupted our economy.   Thanks Newt, you're a real piece of Patriot.  Who else could conflate opposites and accuse others of your own sins with a straight face?

There's so much going on with those damned Liberal Nazis elsewhere we need to know about.  Take the outrage perpetrated on a California school district superintendent, Mohammad Z. Islam who wanted 8th graders to research the Holocaust to see it if ever happened or the Jews actually made the whole thing up for money.  Those Liberals didn't want us to know about this so we couldn't offer Mr. Islam our support for his freedom of speech!

If you only watched commercial, for-profit news (other than Fox) you'd probably never know that the people of Oklahoma have no blood on their hands for the grizzly execution that took 43 minutes to kill Clayton Lockett, bound to a table and zapped with a cattle prod so they could continue to pump agonizing chemicals into his groin. It's true - he didn't bleed.  Damn bleeding heart liberals anyway -- too busy telling us we're not a Christian Nation to help hold the guy down.

And again, are the Liberals trying to keep you from hearing Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court tell us we need a new constitution to protect us from "gays and Ruth Bader-Ginsberg?"  The same judge who bravely asserted that "Buddha didn't create us so the first amendment only applies to Christians?"  Liberals don't want you to know the truth.  Not like Fox News who aren't afraid to tell you that people who want to take prayer out of state supported schools are like Hitler.

No all this stuff that makes me proud to be an American and I had to find it on the web because the liberals don't want us to know!

Walk like an Egyptian

All the kids in the marketplace say
Ay oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh
Walk like an Egyptian

 

 
Remember that song from 1885? Like old soldiers and all hits, it's faded slowly away.  The Bangles however are still around despite some split-ups and re-unifications. You never know what's going to last. You never know what's going to persist ad nauseam either, but things that started out nauseating tend to go on nauseating us for a long time.

Take that new song from Fox and the Fabricators for instance:  Benghazi! Benghazi!  It doesn't matter really, whether or not Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or the Democratic party can be blamed for the debacle any more than it matters that the Republicans withheld requested funds to beef up security beforehand.  Facts rarely matter in affairs of the heart or politics and although the Macarena may be long gone, the Republican chorus line at Fox will be doing the Benghazi Boogie until the remains of the US are divided up between Mexico and Canada.  Benghazi! Benghazi!

Fox turned their back on a recent press conference about what's arguably the big story and the big worry of  the day, the Russian attempt to invade and annex Ukraine, tanks, bombers, fighter jets and helicopters and more boots on the ground every day, but they weren't doing the Benghazi! which according to Fox is BREAKING NEWS!  Even CNN cut away from the really important 24 hour coverage of the absence of anything new about the missing airplane, because really, anything that might lead to World War Three should at least get passing notice before we get back to interpret the total lack of anything new in an old case. But not Fox

As TBogg says on Raw Story: When all you've got is #Benghazi, everything looks like #Benghazi.  Also #BENGHAZI!  No matter how many 'select committees' convene and adjourn with less to show for the time and effort and money than they came up with during the Whitewater debacle, the need for another bogus scandal requires yet another committee and there's a call for one from yet another "conservative" sabotage group saying that there are now e-mails suggesting that the administration was concerned with its image.  After all, defending against dishonest and relentless attacks by the culpable party is admission of something isn't it?  And besides, anything said often enough becomes true no matter how ridiculous or dishonest.  Ask Vladimir Putin, the Russian dictator Fox news constantly praises as the leader Obama should emulate.  Even if Putin has brought on a nuclear apocalypse by 2016, we can expect to be doing the Benghazi! Boogie, because, as the man says -- it's all they've got at this point since none of their dire and hysterical predictions has proved out.

You know it's bad when even a partisan like Lindsay Graham is worried it will all backfire at the midterms. “If we’re playing politics with Benghazi, we’ll get burned,” Said Graham on   “Face the Nation.” yesterday, but he may have more faith in the American People or at least fear of their honesty and intelligence than I do.  My vision is apocalyptic:  the  world engulfed in war and chaos while the Right wing does the Benghazi boogie -- and a poor, dirty, ignorant and superstitious populace?

Ay oh whey oh, ay oh whey oh

Walks like a Republican

Respect your elders - we vote

One of the things that annoys me the most about living in the most crimson county in a red state is the presumption by the inmates that you couldn't possibly be anything else but one of them.  The lack of inhibition allowing them to launch into some vicious right-wing verbal assault, packed like a fat kid's lunchbox with unhealthy swill gives me no end of grief, but of course there are times when it backfires on them.

Republican Governor Rick Scott had one of those precious moments the other day, naturally assuming that a group of retired folks in nearby Boca Raton would, like a juke box, play his song when he pushed the right buttons. Wrong. The expression on his face tells it all.

Scott, who is filling my TV screen every evening with scurrilous lies and sleazy half truths about his Democratic opponent, blaming him for the recession, but worse, blaming him for not hating Obama and everything he's done enough -- Scott who oversaw what was at the time the largest medicare fraud in history, expected the doddering old folks to respond Republican-style to his questions about just how much they hated Medicare and The Affordable Care Act.

What he found was a satisfied group with few complaints, says the Sun Sentinel.  Some actually praised "Obamacare."  One woman, some years younger than I responded that if young people don't have insurance the rest of us will have to pay their bills and if there really were cuts necessary under the ACA to provide equal care for others, as Scott claims it would, ( he lies) then people like her weren't going to fight to keep every last benefit because "it isn't the United States of senior citizens."

Another older fellow said if there really were cuts to Medicare, he hadn't seen them and that's of course because the cuts aren't to the beneficiaries but to service providers.  Perhaps people with some time to read noticed that the "cuts" were actually Medicare cost-savings passed by a Republican Congress.


Other people confirmed that they had seen no cuts, that they were satisfied.  Others affirmed that contrary to Scott's claims no doctors were quitting.  We get used to the image of everybody over 65 as feeble, barely rational and uninformed.  That's as wrong as Scott's (did I mention that he ripped off Medicare for billions?) similar presumption that they aren't only drooling morons but Republican stooges.  Is that redundant?

Did Scott's condescension and presumptions irritate his audience as much as his corruption and apparent dishonesty?  Who knows?  Stealing so much money from Medicare that he can become a governor through paid TV lies about Medicare, makes me glad I wasn't there at the Volen Center in Boca Raton to comment.  I'm old enough, of course, but sorry to bust the stereotype, I'm more likely found in other venues like gun ranges, waterfront dives and Biker bars where we've seen too damned many liars and con men like Rick Scott and remember him all too well to be fooled again.

You can get anything you want

You hear a lot about "enlightened self-interest" and mostly from people who think Ayn Rand's fiction illustrates a paved path to a better world. Of course I can't argue against enlightenment in principle or against the fact that as living beings we must put self-interest on a high plane. My problem though, is with the slipperiness of the term.  In general it resembles self-interest wearing a nice Sunday suit, but everyone has his own ideas, from the ascetic practicing Ahimsa, to the libertine, to the employer or Investor amassing wealth.  It's hard to pin down, but your idea and your degree of enlightenment is in the eye of the beholder.

In an age where religion as a moral teacher and ethical authority has exceeded the credulousness of many Westerners -- and in an America where the most audible religion has receded into vicious threats and angry condemnation of most things other schools of enlightenment might accept or even applaud there are too many tempting choices on the menu.   This Alice's Restaurant style religion  really doesn't serve to direct us away from the authoritarian self-interests of  its merchants if it has a direction at all. You can get anything you want, but will the waitress let you eat it?

Take Arizona Pastor Steven Anderson, for instance, whose obsession with regulating sexual thought and behavior and the consequences of defying preachers isn't much different than other sticky things left in the bottom of the religion barrel like sludge as the lighter substances in the crude evaporate off.  For his ilk, birth control is just an evil thing, because it introduces an element of freedom, an element of personal choice.  It allows that God's plan for unrestrained procreation be tinkered with by other concerns like health, economics or that Humanist blasphemy: the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

He's not content to give us his malediction without condiment however. He has to spice up the Crazy Christian Chalupa by insisting that women who don't feel like getting pregnant are whores and that women were meant to suffer in childbirth and probably suffer with the commandment to ignore her own needs and desires as well.  He has to point out to an audience  that needs, none the less, to give a false nod to science and pragmatism and public health, that birth control is somehow harmful to their bodies, unlike cigarettes and alcohol and punishment from the husbands to whom they are commanded to submit. After all, the woman not burdened and suffering as the Biblegod requires, is likely to "sin" which in general means to pursue life, liberty and all that happy evil  -- and that specifically means she's likely to have not only sexual thoughts, but act on them despite authority.

In general Steve, like the rest of the Oldest Profession, wants to tell us the freedom of not having to choose between love and suffering is  "ruining the country" which is really the admission that he and the other voices of ancient evil are losing control. It's also an unnoticed admission that the idea of Democracy is essentially and unavoidably sinful. 

Few of us would contest that enlightenment in the vague way most of us would define it, is the enemy of self-justified moral authority and divine but ambiguous wisdom, but who do we have to teach us just when altruism is required and how much and for how long?  Who will set guidelines with regard to how we treat others who compete with us or work for us -- or for whom we work?  Face it, the Bible leans both ways if we can discern any concern for human well being in it at all. The Bible in fact does not approve of democracy nor did Jesus and without democracy all we have left is -- well you know: people like Pastor Steven Anderson. He's no help.

So can we stop talking about enlightenment and begin to talk about our right to choose -- everything? Nobody is going to enlighten us without a self-interest of his own design and that means we have to settle for consensus and when 70% of America wants not only to have a minimum wage but to raise it, that's enlightenment enough and warring theories about what is good or bad or what Pastor Steve, Rand Paul, great yelping Yahweh or St. Loonie up the cream bun thinks are irrelevant.  Democracy is the best we can do and the only way we have to give everyone's enlightenment a voice. And what does that say about those who argue for limiting it to those with a specific interest?

WYSINWYG: The GOP Operating System

The GOP brand has become so enmeshed with the Lunatic Fringe – anarchists, fanatic fundamentalists, gun-toting militias, homophobes, misogynists, racists, and nihilists of all stripes – party operatives have been engaged in full-time damage control.  Containment was evident last week when the Fringe raised a deadbeat cattle rancher, Cliven Bundy, to instant hero status only to disavow him days later.  Containment was also evident this week when rightwing talk show jingoist, Rush Limbaugh, miscast another racist de jour as a Democrat; in fact disgraced Clippers owner, Don Sterling, turned out to be a registered Republican.  Among the party faithful - and pitiful - squawking and stalking points matter more than facts.

Lost in this circus of raging racists is Jim Thompson, Chairmen of the Winnebago County Republican Central Committee (WCRCC), who wrote in his official party newsletter:

Media update for the week:  saw on the news this week the offspring of a donkey and a zebra, black and white legs, rest all donkey.  Not sure why this is news: now if we can teach him to read a teleprompter, we could have two living creatures the media will fawn over that is part white part black and all a**!

Chairman Thompson was NOT referring to a zebroid, a rare zebra-donkey hybrid born in Mexico last week, but to President of the United States, Barack Obama. Called to account, the incidental racist issued this retraction:

I would like to offer my sincere apology to those who were offended, and I regret including this item in the newsletter. In the future, it most certainly won’t happen again.

So what do Thompson, Bundy, Sterling, and Limbaugh share in common - besides racist rants? Collectively and periodically, they undergo ritual cleansing in the form of apologies, denials, deceptions, or distractions to cover-up their gaffes.

No list of blunderers would be complete without Todd ‘Legitimate Rape’ Akin and Richard ‘Rape is the Will of God’ Mourdock.  Pre-gaffe Akin was favored to win over incumbent Claire McCaskill. Post-gaffe Akin lost by a margin of 55% to 39% due to backlash from women voters.

Pre-gaffe Mourdock – endorsed by ultra-conservative groups such a Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, Citizens United, and the NRA - defeated the moderate GOP incumbent Richard Lugar in the GOP primary of 2012.  Post-gaffe Mourdock lost to Democrat Joe Donnelly in the general election.

Given these examples of GOP self-sabotage, here's a thought experiment:  Suppose the buffoons of blunder, bluster, and bombast never said what they said and kept their mouths shut?  Public opprobrium can also have an unintended consequence as whack jobs go underground to hatch their nefarious plans under cover of stealth and guile.  Which leads us to the problem of WYSINWYG: What you see is NOT what you get. Under veils of apology, deception, denial and distraction, the true intent of the candidate can never be known – leaving you unable to make an informed choice at the polls.

Recall what happened in 2010 when Tea Party candidates swept state houses on a platform of “jobs, jobs, jobs.”  Once in office, new GOP dominated legislatures passed bills limiting reproductive rights, voting rights, and union rights – but not a SINGLE jobs bill. What you saw is NOT what you got, in other words: WYSINWYG. Smoke and mirrors. Caveat emptor.

Having alienated important constituencies, the GOP wants desperately to win them back:

Teaching Republicans how to talk to women

GOP Playbook Urges Outreach to Women, Millennials, Minorities

Imagine an alternate reality where poles are reversed; where up is down and down is up; where papers of incorporation have sprung to life as legal persons; where employers have the right to view your medical records in the name of religious freedom; where state-sanctioned vaginal probes take precedence over job creation; where a photo ID confers more citizenship rights than a birth certificate; where tax cuts have left you poorer than before - this is the alternate reality of today’s GOP.

Will the new GOP Playbook also include a primer on Truth in Advertising? Will the GOP change course, change policies, or attract candidates more attuned to the aspirations of mainstream America?

Hardly!  Everyday is Ground Hog Day in the Republican Playbook, and the GOP will do what they have always done: Invent new ways to repackage old swill in new bottles and turn an honest fact into a partisan lie.

This Month's Right Wing Hero: Cliven Bundy

I suppose that it's possible that you've been stuck in a cave for the last two weeks or so - maybe you're an amateur spelunker (I suppose those still exist). Or perhaps you actively avoid even looking at anything about Nevada (and who could blame you?)

If so, let's recap. We have a cattle rancher in Nevada named Cliven Bundy (apparently, "Cliven" is a reasonable choice for a name if you're from those parts). For the last twenty years, Bundy has been grazing his cattle on land owned by the Bureau of Land Management. That's not a crime: the BLM allows ranchers to do that all the time. The thing is, they charge a fee. And Bundy has never paid his grazing fees in over two decades.

He's claimed that he inherited grazing rights from his grandmother, because some of her ancestors kept cattle in the Virgin Valley since 1877. If this was true (and there's no evidence that it is), that just means that Bundy comes from a long line of criminals: the US Government has owned that land since it was given to us by Mexico (you know, after we took it from them) in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.

Let's just look at it this way: if you had flowers growing wild in your backyard, and your neighbor kept kicking down your fence and picking those flowers, you might get a little cranky, right?

Now the grazing fees aren't exactly exorbitant - they haven't changed in decades, and tend to be about $1.35 per animal per month. That's a lot less than feed costs, but Bundy didn't want to pay it. He's used a lot of different arguments over the years, but his latest one is kind of fascinating: he doesn't recognize the existence of the US government.

(The fact that he made that statement immediately raised red flags for me. That philosophy, and his use of the phrase "sovereign," is a mark of what's called the Sovereign Citizen Movement, a group of right-wing terrorists who don't believe that they need to follow pesky things like "laws.")

Once he made some noise about being anti-government, our intrepid insurrectionists over at Fox "News" decided to make a working-class hero out of him, without doing even the most basic research into whether he was a dangerous lunatic.

And sure enough, once Fox "News" started trying to make a hero out of a man stealing from the government, some of his Sovereign Citizen friends (and a bunch of other random nutjobs) came along to help him fight off the government trying to collect the money he owed them.

On Salon, Eric Stern put together almost two dozen of the various lies Fox "News" was trying to spread before Cliven started speaking his mind in public, and there's some real winners there. One of my favorites was actually made by a member of the Nevada legislature:

"Nobody has seen any bill for $1.1 million. It doesn't exist." (Michelle Fiore, R-Nevada Assembly, on MSNBC) Bundy says he has "never been sent a bill" but also says he never opens mail from the U.S. government because he does not recognize the U.S. government’s existence.

That just about says it all, doesn't it? But that's where it starts to get really interesting. Because then, somebody in the conservative media made the mistake of letting him talk on camera.

What happened was, Bundy liked being the center of attention, and he started holding daily press conferences. And even when the press dwindled down to (on this particular day) one reporter and one photographer, Bundy kept talking. Unfortunately for him, the reporter in question was from the New York Times.

"I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro," he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, "and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn't have nothing to do. They didn't have nothing for their kids to do. They didn't have nothing for their young girls to do.

"And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?" he asked. "They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I've often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn't get no more freedom. They got less freedom."

It was probably right about that point that the right-wing media screamed and ran away. But Bundy wasn't done - not by a long shot. He had an all-access pass to the media, and decades of evil built up in his soul. He wasn't going to shut up just because his new "friends" stopped taking his calls.

He started appearing on any talk show that would have him, basically repeating the mantra that "I'm not a racist," and interspersing it with statements like this.

If I say 'negro' or 'black boy' or 'slave' … if those people cannot take those kind of words and not be offensive (sic) then Martin Luther King didn't do his job.

Or he'd double down on his remarks.

Are they happier now under this government subsidy system than they were when they were slaves, and they was able to have their family structure together, and the chickens and garden, and the people had something to do? And so, in my mind I’m wondering, are they better off being slaves, in that sense, or better off being slaves to the United States government, in the sense of the subsidies. I’m wondering. That’s what. And the statement was right.

Proving, if nothing else, that he had no idea what slavery really was. On the other hand, in an interview on CNN, he proved that he understood how Fox "News" worked.

The CNN host suggested that Bundy had been abandoned at Fox News, something he said was apparent by the fact that the rancher was appearing on his network and not Fox.

"I don't think I've been abandoned. I think maybe they misunderstood me a little bit," Bundy said. "But I think Fox and I, I think, Hannity and I are just right on. I have no doubt that he would support me if he understood really what's in my heart. And I think he does understand me."

There was a time in America when the right wing had some reasonable members. But as they've gradually drifted down the rabbit hole, they've begun embracing more and more radical ideas. And now they've reached the point where everyone they embrace as a hero, from Ted Nugent to George Zimmerman, and now Cliven Bundy, has proven to be not just deeply flawed, but pathologically insane.

Perhaps they should take the hint, and realize that the problem lies, not in their heroes, but somewhere deeper in their philosophies.

Meanwhile, off in the distance, Cliven Bundy continues to spout authentic frontier gibberish.