I have been writing occasionally on the instances of Jethro Bodine-ism in Republican elected officials. Bodine-ism is the condition where a person will cheerfully and apparently with no irony or bad-faith repeat the talking points of their party, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to contrary of the points. This is the logical outcome of the Republican war on expertise and facts.
It seems that Bondine-ism is not just limited to Republican elected officials. There is a new survey by Public Policy Polling (PPP) which will be released today that for 28% of Republicans the recent BP Deep Horizon disaster makes them more likely to support off shore drilling.
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
You read that right. Even though there is on certainty, at this point, that we will be able to cap the well that is spewing over 200,000 gallons a day of crude oil into the source of 20% of our commercial seafood nearly a third of the Republicans surveyed think it makes the case that we should do more off-shore drilling not less.
There have been jokes that about the sanity of the Republican Party (Bill Maher said that in the last twenty years the Democrats have moved to the right and the Republicans have moved to the insane asylum) but the evidence seems to be mounting that there really is a solid core of the Republican base that either can’t or won’t process reality in a way that the rest of us recognize.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. really knew what he was talking about when he said:
Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
One of the premises the Founders of our nation held was that an informed electorate would make the best decisions in terms of who should govern them. The problem is quickly becoming what well informed means. We can have an argument about whether we should be using fossil fuels or not. We can argue about how we should acquire them if we are going to keep using this limited resource, but argument is only fruitful when the facts are applied.
The 28% who see this ongoing ecological disaster as a rallying cry for "Drill, Baby, Drill" are not basing their thinking on facts. They have succumbed to the authoritarian impulses of the Republican and conservative movements. They can only repeat the slogans and positions of their leaders, even in the face of new and devastating information.
Perhaps what is saddest about this new survey is how little they understand the oil markets themselves. Even if their point of view prevails, even if we throw caution to the winds and drill everywhere there are thought to be reserves of oil off our shores, it does not mean that oil is going to be the United States oil.
Oil is a commodity, it is bid on world wide and unless the fields are State owned, the oil goes to the highest bidder. So even if we take the risk of our shore lines to develop more off-shore production, it does nothing the energy needs of the United States, it merely makes companies like BP (which is not even a U.S. company) richer.
Not that any of this matters to those who live with Bodine-ism. For them the it is all about being able to say the talking points with a smile and the assurance that they might not know much, but they know what they have been told to think and say.
The floor is yours.