See Dick hate Hillary Clinton. See Jane Hate Hillary Clinton. Don’t you hate Hillary Clinton, too?

July 2, 2005

Guest Post by Morbo

If you haven’t read Richard Cohen’s recent column on Edward Klein’s new Hillary Clinton-bashing book, The Truth About Hillary, get online immediately and take a look. It’s hysterical.

Cohen argues that the fact that a book like this is flying off the shelves proves one thing beyond all doubts: Many right-wingers are dumb.

All of that Klein documents either vaguely or not at all is so beyond belief and good taste that the very fact his book is selling like proverbial hotcakes starkly exposes the anti-Clinton people as the village idiots of our time. It takes one to buy this book.

For a long time I have resisted believing that right-wingers are, on average, dumber than progressives. It sounds so elitist and feeds Red State paranoia. But I think Cohen has a point. To paraphrase his position, only a bunch of idiots would buy the same book over and over again. Only idiots would fail to realize that when a book has absolutely no data backing up its claims, it is suspect.

Yet the right-wing publishing syndicate routinely cranks out books like this and sell them by the millions. And only idiots could stand to read such books.

If you doubt me on this, I recommend you visit your local bookstore and look inside any volume written by Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh. You will quickly see that these books are written on about the fourth-grade level, and that their footnotes, if there are any, are usually to newspaper articles and right-wing websites. They are an insult to any thinking person.

Note the sentence structure and the level of argument, if you can call it that. Note that the books rely on rhetorical devices such as name-calling, innuendo and the granddaddy of all right-wing arguments, the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Note, above all, that none of these books challenges the reader to think or reconsider any of their previously held positions. Instead, these tomes simply pander to base prejudices. They don’t lift up, educate or stimulate. Instead, they merely drag readers into the darkest corners of the psyche and leave them there to wallow in their hate.

I like a good left-wing jeremiad as much as anyone, but I’m not so insecure in my opinions that I need to have constant infusions of dumbed-down flummery laced with schoolyard taunts. I’m up to the challenge of having my opinions tested; I’m even capable of changing my mind.

In the end, I feel sorry for the consumers of Klein’s book. If this book is indicative of what they normally buy, it’s obvious that intellectual life is passing them by. If all conservatives have to offer us by way of intellectual engagement are a slew of books penned by Fox News Channel on-air personalities and right-wing hatchet jobs so poorly executed that even The Wall Street Journal can’t drink the Kool-Aid, then progressives have won the day intellectually.

Of course, a fat lot of good that does us.

I like a good left-wing jeremiad as much as anyone, but I’m not so insecure in my opinions that I need to have constant infusions of dumbed-down flummery laced with schoolyard taunts. I’m up to the challenge of having my opinions tested; I’m even capable of changing my mind.

No you ain’t. You’re a devotee of Paul Kurtz, of Secular Humanist fame. What he believes, you believe.

  • For a long time I have resisted believing that right-wingers are, on average, dumber than progressives.

    Continue to resist that thought; they probably aren’t. What does seem to be the case is that there are two distinct groups of right-wingers, the well-off leaders and the badly-off followers. The former manipulate government to their own advantage and to the disadvantage of the latter (and many others). The latter are obviously voting and believing things that are against their own interests; this seems to me to indicate that the second group is dumb and the first group is smart. On average, they’re average.

  • No you ain’t. You’re a devotee of Paul Kurtz, of Secular Humanist fame. What he believes, you believe.

    Comment by David Roell — 7/2/2005 @ 11:19 am

    Morbo sez:

    Nah. Kurtz is even more to the left than I am.
    There is only one person I am a devotee of, only one person whose pearls of wisdoms I accept without doubt and never question. That person is, of course, the Carpetbagger.

  • The distinction between the leaders and the followers
    is fundamental, but I’d resist the term “right wingers” for well off corporate Republicans, who really run the country. I think the Bushies are
    anomalies. Having spent many years in the executive
    wing of a corporation, before early retirement, I
    can only conclude that they are not obsessed with wedge issues like abortion, religion, gun control et al. Perhaps amused by them. Or indifferent. They
    are interested in unfettered capitalism. Money. Power. The good things in life. Deregulation. Profits. That’s what drives them.

    Actually, if anything, I found their views on
    many wedge issues like mine – pro choice, not
    religious, sensible gun control etc.

    Fascinating topic. Are there fundamental differences between progressives and right wingers,
    and I’m talking the second group here, not the
    elite Republicans.

  • I doubt very much that corporate execs or self-styled libertarians read much of this crap. It’s clearly intended for what Eric Hoffer called the “true believers” out there in wing-nut and religious-whacko land.

    The essence of the true believer is that s/he has no interest in empirical evidence, logic, type of argument, sentence structure. All that’s important is an easy and constant “resonance” with their core prejudice (literally, “before judging”). Like hyenas or coyotes in chorus, their sense of self comes to them, not through thought, but only by being part of a mindless collective reinforcement.

    They adore things like hymns and flag-waving, military parades and playing taps, group applauding and collective jeering of their opponents, gotchas and slapdowns, emailable cartoons, hate radio diatribes which expand a ten-second soundbite into three hours, Barbara Bush’s spoiled brats, NASCAR noises and endless laps with occasional crashes, supposedly religious TV preachers, wet t-shirt contests and mud wrasslin’, boring porno, line-dancing by fat ugly people in cowboy boots, patterned mangling of the English language (y’all), Texas “swagger”s which look like you’re carrying a load in your pants, proclaiming how proud they are too be ignorant as a post, calling intelligent and self-confident women lesbians or whores, and so on ad nauseam.

    Klein and his publishers know the market well.

  • Nah. Kurtz is even more to the left than I am.

    Thanks. I’m glad you clarified that.

  • it’s worth pointing out that, by and large, the right-wing books don’t “fly off the shelves.” what happens is that they get bought by the truckload by right-wing organizations who then distribute them.

  • Ed, I almost felt guilty as I laughed out loud at your post. Like Morbo, I try to resist the sense of elitism when I reflect on the intellectual vapidity of the consumers of books by Coulter et al. On a day to day basis, like in doing business with this crowd (and they are a crowd), one wouldn’t notice any retardation, but what characterizes them is pretty well laid out here: a lack of logic and rationality—an ignorance of the basics of logic, in most cases—and an acceptance of groupthink which is also an integral part of organized religion. Hence the ease with which fundies meld with the Republican machine, despite its antipathy to the higher angels (rhetorically speaking) of Christianity.

    Like many of us, I’ve watched this sort of mentality up close and personal, embarrassingly close from a genetic standpoint. It seems that the ultimate result of any reasoned argument with fundies finally arrives at the point where reason is abandoned in favor of pronouncement based on some perceived higher authority. I’ve engaged in these type of time wasters so often that I just avoid them anymore. Ultimately, it’s a choice (albeit often unconsciously made) between logic and “faith,” or whatever one might call the willingness to accept a tidy (sometimes) package of “truths” to take the place of the burden of reason.

    So does that make these people idiots? I guess it depends on your point of view. I remember reading some aphorism along these lines: To the religious person, the rational person looks foolish, and vice versa. I’ve found that to be true, and have taken to using that in order to short circuit pesky fundies who are looking for an argument. Hey, you think I’m a fool and I think you’re a fool, so why talk about it? You wanna waste your time talking to fools? I don’t.

    Another great post, Morbo. Rock on!

  • What Ed said.

    The people making up the Republican base are http://www.landoverbaptist.org come to life. Just read the message boards at the Free Republic. If I didn’t know it was for real, I would have thought that FR was a parody site. I cannot believe that human beings living in the United States are so ignorant.

  • Trying to reason with fundies is like herding cats.
    You only get frustrated. You can never win a debate.
    Their “thinking,” their “logic” simply defies
    analysis or understanding.

    Boise, Idaho has its own long standing Ten Commandments monument controversy. The monument was
    finally placed on private land. A movement to reinstate it was thoroughly defeated by the courts.
    Case closed?

    Not on your life. Now that the Supreme Court has
    ruled that the Commmandments, as religious symbols,
    are unconstitutional, these thousands of fundies
    have crawled out of the woodwork to proclaim
    vindication by the Court, and are demanding that the
    monument be restored. Mind you, this monument stood
    by itself. There was not even a pretense on the part of the fundies that it was something other
    than a religious proclamation endorsed by the local
    government. And they think the Court has ruled in
    their favor. They’re out celebrating in the streets.

    Go figure. I can’t. And now we have to waste our
    time fighting this issue all over again, while
    important matters go unattended.

    You can’t beat stupid. It wins every time.

  • Mr. Flibble:

    I had never seen the landoverbaptist site before.
    Thanks. Devilishly clever. The Biblical references
    in the quizzes are fiendishly ingenious. I also
    checked out the FR site. Not impressive at all.

    Speaking of fundies, does anyone know how the creationist crowd explains the apparent contradiction concerning the origin of human beings in Genesis I and II? In Genesis I-26 God creates man and woman on the sixth day. Then he seems to forget, and on the seventh day in Genesis II-6 thru 26 he sets about conjuring up Adam and Eve. I’ve asked several people, and no one seems to know.

  • There’s another contradiction there, too, hark. In Genesis 1 God creates Adam and Eve after he made the beasts and the birds. In Genesis 2 he creates Adam, then the beasts and the birds, then Eve.

    This isn’t an argument about how long the Genesis day was or whether Hebrew had a specific past tense (a common argument is to say that “God made” could also have meant “God had made”). It’s a simple matter of sequencing. Both versions cannot be true.

    But then here we are discussing logical consistency, about which the faith-based base of the GOP doesn’t give a hoot. In fact they’ve already got it covered, so far as they care, in First Corinthians 1:27 – “But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise”. God seems to me to have either a strange set of values or a twisted sense of humor. It’s easy to see why the fundies adore a self-proclaimed ignoramus like Dumbya and why their 19th Century counterparts took pride in calling themselves “Know Nothings”.

  • In many of the book listings on Amazon.com, there is a section called ‘Inside the Book,’ where Amazon lists statistical analysis of the text of the book. The analysis includes several different ‘reading level’ measures and and ‘statistically improbable phrases.’

    I see that Sentinal has not submitted the text of the book for the ‘Inside the Book’ feature. Neither has “Unfit for Command,” “Men in Black…”, “How to Talk to a Liberal…”, “100 People Who Are Screwing America…”

    For Al Franken’s book, “Lies and the Lying Liar…,” here are the statistically improbably phrases are: insolent pleasure, lucky duckies, wing media, corporate speeches, attack journalism. The book is at the 8th grade level, according to the Flesch-Kincaid Index.

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