Even Intelligent People Are Acting Irrationally Partisan — Take, for Example, the Usually Admirable Kathleen Parker’s Column Denigrating President Obama — and Eugene Robinson’s Insight regarding What Is Actually Going on

27 October 2012

If this were my lifeboat, I would throw every deliberately brainless twit overboard

Who needs a bunch of feuding monkey brains — a Buddhist expression that I find occasionally useful — in a survival situation?

We Americans are living in dream in which emotional diarrhea serves as reality. The messy illness is so contagious that even ordinarily sensible people have caught it.

To wit, one of my favorite columnists, political conservative Kathleen Parker.

Citation — to Kathleen Parker’s irrationally biased column (yesterday)

Kathleen Parker, Still fighting the same old culture war, Washington Post (26 October 2012)

Here is what she said

Apparently trying to turn the Republican Party’s excess of Caucasian geezer testosterone from flaw to strength (by diverting our attention from it), Ms. Parker wrote:

It is no accident that the war of competing economic theories has devolved into the same old culture war, beginning with the debate about the contraception mandate under the Affordable Care Act.

Ever since, the Obama campaign has strategically tried to push the Republican Party and Mitt Romney into a corner by advancing the war-on-women narrative.

Can you guess where she’s going with this? — My absolutism is better than yours

We’ll have to give her points for wading into the inferno:

Yet Mourdock’s view, that a child conceived by rape is God’s will, deserves some perspective.

Obviously, he wasn’t endorsing rape. He apparently belongs to that sliver of pro-lifers who insist that even babies conceived of rape are worthy of protection. They, too, are God’s children.

Although most Americans, including those who are enthusiastically pro-life, support exemptions for rape and incest, Mourdock’s argument is not nonsensical. If life begins at conception, then one life is not worth less than another owing to the circumstances of creation. The embryo bears no blame.

Not quite so simple

Yes, the embryo bears no blame. And neither does the unwitting mother. Which is the whole point.

Dissecting the interests of embryo and mom are not as easy, or as absolute, as the nuance-avoiding nitwits on both sides of the argument would like it to be. For example, the Republican Party platform likes to ignore the implications of its position on life, when it comes to war, drones, and the death penalty.

So, why did Ms. Parker found her argument on this bit of superficial foolishness?

From her glass house, Parker began flinging stones

She says that reviving the “culture wars” was the President’s fault:

The contraception issue never would have come up but for Obama’s decision to force the hand of the Catholic Church.

By placing religious institutions in the position of having to provide health insurance to pay for contraception as well as sterilization, which, agree or not, are against church teaching, Obama created the conversation.

Reality’s inherent nuances expose thoughtless intellectual positions

What is government to do, when health matters affect everyone and not everyone working for a religious institution shares its belief system?

What is a secular leader to do, when the nation foolishly put its health insurance system in the hands of, and on the backs of, its employers?

This governance issue is not so simple as Ms. Parker and the “my God is your God” crowd would like it to be.

I grant that the Democratic campaign has been a deplorably base one — but then, Governor Romney has been about as deceitful a presidential candidate as this nation has ever generated

Mud tends to stick to everyone in competitions such as these. Especially so, when media and public have debased politics into becoming a pernicious form of entertainment.

Parker’s column is hypocritical on three fronts

First, if there are culture wars in American society, the One Percent started them with their depredations on everyone else. That Democrats are finally waking up to the fact that the Republican Party enables the One Percent at every opportunity hardly makes President Obama solely responsible for the divisiveness that the elite are trying to camouflage.

Second, Governor Romney has fled a true and truthful discussion of the issues at every opportunity.

It is impossible to meaningfully debate someone who refuses to hold any position for more than a few seconds. Romney’s contemptible spinelessness is hardly President Obama’s fault.

Third, “the issues” do not really exist in the way that Parker thinks they do. The alleged debate regarding government versus enterprise is based on concocted icons of paradigmatic purity that do not exist and never did. Both Parties argue with factually empty constructs that stimulate emotional outbursts, but not fact-based thought.

In essence, both political camps are slinging untruths at each other, trying to see which Lie has the biggest following.

“So, Pete, what is the 2012 election about?”

I think that Eugene Robinson may have nailed it:

The intensity of the opposition to Obama has less to do with who he is than with the changes in U.S. society he not only represents but incarnates.

What I’m saying is that Obama’s racial identity is a constant reminder of how much the nation has changed in a relatively short time.

Within a few decades, there will be no white majority in this country — no majority of any kind, in fact. We will be a nation of racial and ethnic minorities, and we will only prosper if everyone learns to give and take.

Our place in the world has changed as well.

[O]ur capacity for unilateral action is diminished; we can assert but not dictate, and we must learn to persuade.

Obama’s great sin, for some who oppose him, is to make it impossible to ignore these domestic and international megatrends. Take one look at Obama and the phenomenon of demographic change is inescapable. Observe his approach to international crises in places such as Libya or Syria and the reality of America’s place in the world is unavoidable.

Now combine Mr. Robinson’s points with the reservoir of prejudice against blacks and Latinos that the Associated Press uncovered

From the news story:

In all, 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.

Citations — to the Associated Press survey and its interpretation

GFK, Racial Attitudes Survey, Associated Press (26 October 2012) (survey data)

Josh Pasek, Jon A. Krosnick, and Trevor Tompson, The Impact of Anti-Black Racism on Approval of Barack Obama’s Job Performance and on Voting in the 2012 Presidential Election, Stanford University (October 2012) (scholarly survey interpretation)

Linking Mr. Robinson’s insight back to Kathleen Parker’s errant essay

Knocking someone as intelligent and thoughtful as Ms. Parker off the intellectual rails is hard to do. Naturally, one wonders how she came to denigrate the Obama campaign, without simultaneously saying a pejorative word about Governor Romney’s own ethically atrocious performance.

Intellectually fair minded, she was not.

Eugene Robinson’s explanation about a crumbling world view, and the President’s symbolization of it, may explain what happened to Ms. Parker.

When we’re knocked off balance, objectivity often flees.

The moral? — Even bright and usually calm people have trouble staying objectively rational, when times are changing

Compliments to Eugene Robinson for coming up with a sound hypothesis for why this election has been disconcertingly ugly and intellectually vacuous.

PeteFree.com

Even Intelligent People Are Acting Irrationally Partisan — Take, for Example, the Usually Admirable Kathleen Parker’s Column Denigrating President Obama — and Eugene Robinson’s Insight regarding What Is Actually Going on