Thursday, February 26, 2009

The Party of Beavis and Butthead

Krugman:
And leaving aside the chutzpah of casting the failure of his own party’s governance as proof that government can’t work, does he really think that the response to natural disasters like Katrina is best undertaken by uncoordinated private action? Hey, why bother having an army? Let’s just rely on self-defense by armed citizens.

The intellectual incoherence is stunning. Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.

You have to wonder how Jindal could have honestly believed that people would've reacted to his poking fun at "volcano monitoring" with a "yeah, how wasteful is THAT?!"

Shockingly, his choice of project to poke fun at is even sillier than that "fruit flies in Paris, France!" turd Sarah Palin flung in the last election. At least in her defense, most Americans are probably not immediately aware that a huge proportion of genetic and biological research is done on fruit flies because of, for instance, their extraordinarily rapid reproductive pace, and that French scientists are major players in the scientific community. Thus, if you're a redneck, millenarian wackadoo trying to hoodwink 200 million voters into giving you the keys to General George's digs, and you want to pick on scientists who do important work by obscuring and mutilating their research in such a way that it sounds wasteful, "fruit flies from Paris, France" is not a bad way to go. I would wager, however, that most people who hear "volcano monitoring" know exactly what you're talking about, and why funding it is probably a good idea.

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