Mario Piperni dot Com

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And Democrats are smiling…

Only in America: $50 million dollars of his personal fortune later, Rick Scott is the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Florida.

The mainstream Republican party had a reason to fear Scott. He carries with him the baggage of the $1.7 billion in federal fines leveled against his company, Columbia HCA, for Medicare fraud. Plus he’s extremely conservative, which could be a tough sell in a general election fight.

Republicans got themselves a radical, crooked, teabagging nutcase as their candidate which is exactly what Democrats and Dem candidate Alex Sink had hoped for.  You can expect Scott to spend another $50 million or more of his own filthy money to battle Sink but here’s the bottom line: Scott represents everything which is wrong with the Republican party and if Dems cannot beat the person who ran the biggest Medicare scam in history, then U.S. politics is in a worse place than anyone ever imagined.

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From a HuffPo reader:

“The most powerful men in the repub party generally have come from the most uneducated, intolerant, and impoverished states. They’ve done nothing despite all their years in the Congress to lift their constituents out of poverty and ignorance. And they seem hellbent on dragging the rest of the country down to their level.“

Any truth to this?  I think so.  It clearly serves their purpose to keep ‘em ignorant.

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With crazy about to blow the roof off the house, it’s nice to see someone trying to make logical sense of it all.

Ignorance has become a feature where it used to be a bug. Formerly it was the job of the media to correct ignorance, insofar as it was possible (and, truthfully, it wasn’t very possible). Now though it’s increasingly the job of the media to manage ignorance. To make a space for the ignorant, and to ensure that those kept in managed ignorance get just enough news, and never more than they need to remain exactly where they are.

We were probably due for some measure of managed ignorance, what with the already stupefying mix of rational ignorance, the cable news cycle, cognitive dissonance, and in-group loyalty that shapes public opinion today. But still, consider: We found WMD in Iraq. We only tortured really, really bad people, we did it only in non-fatal ways, and they provided us worthwhile information. Same-sex marriage is going to force churches to do things they don’t believe in. There will be death panels deciding your grandma’s fate. Climategate destroyed global warming science forever.

All are untrue, but there are those who believe every one of them, and these people’s opinions about where to go from here don’t count any less just because they’re based on untruth. Those who propagate such beliefs know them to be untrue, and they know it’s not worth the average person’s time, cognitive investment, and loss of group loyalty to discover otherwise.

Yes, these examples all show conservatives as the beneficiaries of managed ignorance. I’ve tried hard to resist the conclusion, but conservatives seem to bank on it a lot more than liberals. More than anything else, it’s this style of politics that turns me away from the Republicans. I’d pick “well-informed on basic facts but ideologically divergent” over “mis-informed on basic facts and ideologically divergent” every single time. Not that I’d enjoy the choice. But what other alternatives are there?

This is one of the better analysis of exactly what the left is confronting each and every day in their battle against misinformation.  The right correctly surmised a long time ago that if they repeated the same lie enough times, no matter how outrageous, the seed of doubt would be planted.  And when you’re waging political battle, doubt is your ally and the edge often needed to win over a populace too unwilling or lazy to seek the truth.

Managed ignorance indeed.

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This take on the current version of the Republican party is bang on.  This piece is in reference to Republican Rep. Bob Inglis who got defeated in the primaries by a tea party favorite.

The current Republican Party, one hijacked by hustlers and extremists, not only looks to destroy President Obama. It even starts to kill its own.

Rep. Bob Inglis, a voice of reason at a dumb, unreasonable time in American politics, is one of them. Inglis (R-S.C.) will be out of a job soon for not hating Barack Obama nearly enough. The irony, he says, is that he disagrees with Obama on almost everything.

Inglis, a conservative Republican from a state so red you worry it might set itself on fire, used to go after Bill Clinton with everything he had. But these days he comes up an even better American than a Republican, speaking his own mind, refusing to join a chorus of idiots and call Obama his enemy, or an enemy of the state. Inglis’ state or anybody else’s.

“I figured out early in the race I was taking a risk by being unwilling to call the President a socialist,” Inglis says. “I’d get asked a question and they’d all wait to see if I’d use the word – socialist – they were throwing around. I wouldn’t. Because I don’t think that’s what he is.

“To call him a socialist is to demean the office and stir up a passion that we need to be calming, rather than constantly stirring up.”

Listen to the guy. He doesn’t sound like some sore loser. Instead, Bob Inglis sounds like the ignored conscience of an increasingly crackpot party.

A voice of reason in a party now completely devoid of any sense of decency or fair play and Inglis is considered the outsider.  These last lines sum it up well.

“But then what do I know?” Bob Inglis says. “I lost.”

His district did. His state did. His party did. He did not.

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