The Grand Psychopathic Party (And the Media Who Love Them)

Now there's this predictable "analysis/advice" from Newsweek's Jon Meacham who advises that Obama be more like Reagan, because he "has grandly failed so far in doing what presidents must do, which is to lead the nation emotionally as well as rationally. It would be great if politics were fact-based, but it is not, and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House."

Besides being repulsively patronizing, Meacham is spouting retread conventional wisdom that--with some decent point about communication within it--champions the simplistic and emotional over the complex and rational that happen to reflect reality.

So what does he have in mind? Something simple and emotional like this not untypically simple and emotional GOPer statement by Andre Bauer, current Lt. Governor and candidate for governor in the GOPer primary in South Carolina--a state with a high percentage of African Americans, and with more than half of all children in the free and reduced school lunch program? Because Bauer compared giving people government assistance to "feeding stray animals."

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better," Bauer said.

The fact is that most simplistic and emotional appeals being made these days are by the Rabid Right, and they are overwhelmingly racist, ignorant and lies. Reagan's simple formulations and formulas had emotional appeal, because who can fail to be made happy by the idea that you don't have to pay taxes and you still get what you expect from the government? Or that the Contras in Nicaragua were "freedom fighters" instead of hired thugs? Or that we had to invade Iraq to prevent mushroom clouds over American cities? Or that "Obamacare"= death panels? This is the kind of crap that benefits politicians and ruins the country, impoverishes, maims and kills people, and kills the future.

It's not fun to watch Democrats soul-searching when they lose, or to open themselves to ridicule and lies by trying to communicate the nuances of policy that matches the nuances of reality. But if the choice is between that and deliberate simplistic emotionalistic lies justified by politics or by some warped version of faith, untrammeled fulminations from the dark unconscious masked as political dialogue, I'll stick with my soul and hope it sticks with me.

The charge that Obama doesn't relate policy to the emotional reality of people can be made only by people who don't cover his speeches. But the simplistic and emotionally charged stuff does make reporters' jobs easier, and certainly plays well in the media, where it fits in so well with simplistic, emotionally charged and often lying commercials. Maybe that's a big reason that politics isn't fact-based or nuance-based.

And we have to wonder just what emotions count in politics. President Obama utters the word "empathy" and the Rabid Right is up in arms, because apparently when you try to feel what others in different circumstances are feeling, this is not Christian anymore but socialistic. Yet there is a word for people without empathy: psychopaths. Is that the politics the media finds so sweet to empower?