{pic by luna715}

Judging from the signs and slogans which are so often on display during “tea parties,” “9-12” protests, and other tawdry public gatherings of the Radical Right, there seems to be a lot of confusion within the United States about the meaning of the word “socialism.” As described by the political shock jocks of Talk Radio and Fox News, “socialism” is a dictatorial, freedom-hating ideology characteristic of the Obama administration, North Korea, Nazi Germany, and France. If this seems to cast a nonsensically wide net, it is because Right Wing demagogues and their thoughtless minions tend to use the term “socialism” as an expression of emotion rather than an intellectual concept… somewhat akin to yelling “fuck you!” If, for whatever reason, you don’t like someone—because he or she is too “liberal” or spendthrift or dark-skinned or well-spoken for your taste—then you simply yell “socialist!” as a means of conveying both your anger and your ignorance.

Of course, anyone who has bothered to do any reading about socialism knows that it is an inherently democratic ideology which bears little resemblance to the ego-maniacal authoritarianism of Stalin or Pol Pot. For instance, The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels describes the revolutionary struggle of the working class as “the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.” Even the politically bland Columbia Encylopedia makes clear that socialism is about “cooperation and social service”—in contrast to capitalism’s emphasis upon “competition and profit.”

From a capitalist perspective, the problem with socialist ideology is not that it is insufficiently democratic, but that it is a little too democratic. Socialism calls for real democracy in which people can exert control over the political and economic forces that impact their lives. But modern capitalist mythology depends on the fiction that it is possible to have political democracy and obscene levels of economic inequality at the same time. Even though most people would admit that billionaires like Rupert Murdoch have far more political power than dishwashers and janitors, we are all supposed to pretend that, because Rupert casts only a single vote on election day—just like us—his vast investment portfolio and media empire are politically irrelevant. However, a malcontent socialist might ask how it’s possible to have true democracy when one person’s private property (Rupert’s News Corp.) is another person’s means of survival (working as a janitor for News Corp.)—or how that janitor’s single vote on election day stacks up against Rupert’s unparalleled access to elected officials thanks to his billions, or his ability to single-handedly underwrite political campaigns with his billions, or his power to shape all manner of political and policy debates through his personal control of national media outlets.

Needless to say, these are rather heady concepts which fall far beyond the intellectual grasp of the average Glenn Beck fan or Rush Limbaugh listener. More often than not these days, the Right-Wing charge of “socialism” is directed at particular legislative initiatives which emanate from the Obama administration—like health care reform that could conceivably expand the availability of health care. Right Wingers are particularly worried that the United States might one day end up with a form of national health insurance that resembles that of {gasp!} France, where people live longer and suffer fewer preventable deaths despite lower per-capita health care expenditures. Of course, the United States already has a form of national health insurance for old people (Medicare), not to mention national retirement benefits for old people (Social Security), so one might ask why the Right Wingers aren’t calling for an end to those seemingly “socialist” programs as well. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that many of the opponents of health care reform are themselves old people who are dependent upon Medicare and Social Security.

At any rate, the convoluted mis-understanding of the term “socialism” which is so often on display in Right Wing circles was captured perfectly in one of the year’s most amusing Right Wing protest signs: “Don’t steal from Medicare to support socialized medicine.” {Sigh.…}

{pic by Big Dubya}

Now, I don’t know much about what you might call “knowledge.” In fact, it’s probably safe to say that I know less than nothing when it comes to history, politics, economics, science, and all those other fancy subjects that liberal university-type people think are so important. But one thing I do know is that this Obama administration and this Democrat Congress are socialist. It’s not that I really know what the word “socialism” means, mind you. I mean, I know it’s like what they have in China and Russia and Cuba and places like that. It’s kind of like when a Big Government takes your money and spreads it around to everyone—sort of like the Feds do with Medicare and Social Security, except that I like my Medicare and Social Security, so don’t mess with them. But I don’t want anything else like Medicare and Social Security because that would just be too socialistical. I’d be against Medicare and Social Security, too, if we didn’t already have them and I didn’t already like having them…

But that’s not the point. The point is that people on the T.V. and the radio like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter tell me that Obama and the Democrats are socialist, and I believe them. It’s kind of like accepting that my 1978 edition of the New International Version of the English translation of the Bible is the Word of God. It’s something you just have to take on faith, and asking for proof kind of ruins the whole thing. I mean, demanding “proof” that the Bible is the Word of God is pretty much proof that you’re an atheist, right? So demanding proof that Rush and Glenn and Ann are telling the truth about Obama being a socialist is pretty much proof that you’re a socialist.

I just know what I know, you know?

I am brimming over with ill-defined pride and faux patriotism—and nothing you say could ever change my mind.

I am an All-American Fool.

{pic by luna715}

The idea of secession from the United States is often bandied about in Far Right circles as if it were the dire Nuclear Option within the conservative political arsenal. Just last week, on September 4, conservative economist Walter E. Williams broached the topic on the Rush Limbaugh Show. Williams—an occasional fill-in and hand puppet for the Dark Lord himself—was discussing the not-quite-mass movement for secession that is afoot in New Hampshire and opined that secession didn’t work “last time” (that unpleasant Civil War incident), but it did work “the first time in 1776,” and it would be nice to “see whether we could break the tie” and “have a sovereign nation.” Similarly, Texas Governor Rick Perry, appealing to the nebulous Right Wing populist rage at one of the Fox News “Tea Parties” last April, floated the possibility of secession “if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people” (apparently, he forgot which party won and which party lost in the elections last November). And there is no shortage of neo-Confederate hate groups, such as the League of the South, which are devoted to the idea of secession as a means of escaping federal intrusion upon the God-given right of states to enslave human beings for fun and profit.

Implicit in Right Wing chatter about secession is the assumption that it somehow constitutes a “threat”; that the inhabitants of a newly shrunk United States would bemoan the day they lost the invaluable contributions which the Far Right makes to Human Progress. But let us consider what would actually be “lost” were the United States of America (U.S.A.) to jettison the original 11 members of the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.): Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Even a cursory examination of available data indicates that the U.S.A. might benefit enormously from a southern-style divorce of this kind.

For instance, at a time when reigning in health care expenditures is a top priority for nearly every policymaker in the country, the Secession Option makes fiscal sense. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that the U.S.A. spends more that $75 billion on obesity-related medical expenditures each year, and the C.S.A. states account for roughly 30% (or $22.3 billion) of that total. In fact, the C.S.A. states have some of the highest rates of obesity in the nation. Based on my own calculations using the CDC’s obesity-rate data for each state and the U.S. Census Bureau’s state-population totals from the 2007 American Community Survey, I estimate that secession would permit the U.S.A. to shed roughly 26 million medically expensive obese individuals, which would reduce the size of the obese population in the country by one-third.

However, the benefits of secession go far beyond the fiscal advantages of shedding excess baggage from the health care system. Allowing the C.S.A. states to secede would eliminate nine of the 22 “red” states that swung Republican in the 2008 election. More precisely, based on popular-vote totals compiled by the U.S. Electoral College, secession would remove 36% (or 21.6 million) of those U.S. voters who thought that a McCain-Palin administration would have made a nice sequel to eight years of Bush-Cheney.

Shedding surplus Republicans from the U.S.A. would be advantageous not only from a partisan political perspective, but would vastly improve the general state of knowledge among the reduced U.S. population. The base of the Republican Party consists of Evangelical Protestants, a rather Taliban-esque group that tends to frown upon Enlightenment-era ideals such as scientific discovery and the use of human reason. For instance, 65% of Evangelical Protestants believe that all forms of life have always existed in their present form ever since a magical Supreme Being zapped them into existence—the fossil record and genetic mutation be damned. Not surprisingly, Evangelical Protestants are heavily concentrated in the C.S.A. states. Based on state-level estimates of religious affiliation from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, and adult-population totals reported for each state by the 2007 American Community Survey, I conclude that secession would remove 44% (or 25.5 million) of all Evangelical Protestants from the U.S.A.

In short, the secession of the C.S.A. states might be just the sort of fiscal, social, and intellectual stimulus that the U.S.A. needs to move forward into the 21st century rather than backward into the Middle Ages. There is an apocryphal quote that is widely attributed to Miriam “Ma” Ferguson (Governor of Texas, 1925-1927 and 1933-1935), and is said to have been uttered in response to a question about the use of the Spanish language in Texas schools: “If English was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for Texas schoolchildren.” I think that pretty much says it all.

With flu season nearly upon us, the attention of public-health experts and hypochondriacs is turning to the potential perils of the H1N1 pandemic. But there is another, far more insidious disease in our midst: Demagogic Fever. We have grown accustomed to witnessing the maniacal rants and incoherent ramblings of high-profile individuals who suffer from this affliction and are therefore employed by light-weight infotainment outlets such as Premiere Radio Networks (Rush Limbaugh), Fox News (Glenn Beck), and CNN (Lou Dobbs). But it would behoove us to keep in mind that there are quite a few infected men and women who hold positions of power in the U.S. Congress. Given that Demagogic Fever is characterized by a dangerous degree of delusion, this is a matter of grave concern not only to public health, but to national security as well. Witness for yourself the degree to which the intellectual faculties of some of our nation’s lawmakers have been impaired by this debilitating ailment:

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who currently occupies a seat in the House Financial Services Committee, believes that “global warming” cannot be real because it involves a warm-and-fuzzy atmospheric gas known as “carbon dioxide,” which not only “is a natural byproduct of nature,” but “occurs in earth” and is essential even for the life of “the fowl that flies in the air”:

In a related vein, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, believes that “global warming” is a hoax perpetrated by a Leftist cabal that includes Hollywood Elitists, the United Nations, and The Weather Channel:

Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), Ranking Member of the House Financial Services Committee, believes that precisely 17 of his fellow congressional representatives are openly socialist, although it remains unclear who they are or if Bachus actually knows what the term “socialism” means:

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who fills a chair in the House Rules Committee, believes—somewhat defensively, perhaps, given her advanced age—that the health-care reform legislation slowly making its way through Congress would allow the federal government to put senior citizens to death (although there does not appear to be a Euthanasia provision in any of the bills currently circulating):

It should give one pause to realize that these individuals, who are clearly not in their right mind, possess some degree of power in shaping the fate of the United States. More alarming still is the fact that a majority of the electorate in the locales from whence they come are equally ill. It may be time to start spiking the nation’s drinking water with Zyprexa.

{pic by Burns!}

It is by no means clear when a word becomes violent. Murkier still is the question of when a word becomes so violent that the person who stands behind it deserves imprisonment or some lesser form of legal censure. And trying to decide what degree of responsibility is borne by a speaker of violent words for the violence committed by others who were inspired by those words tends to be a circular exercise in ethical futility.

The many gradations of meaning and intent that transform Free Speech into Hate Speech into Verbal Violence have been on prominent display over the past month or so as the Radical Right—already apoplectic over the ascendancy of dark-hued liberalism in the nation’s Capitol—has cloaked itself in health-care drag and infested the Town Hall Meetings that congressional representatives feel inexplicably obliged to conduct during their August recess. Much of the Right Wing’s theatrics in this regard have been farcically delusional in nature. Drones who receive their marching orders from intellectual luminaries such as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck parrot patently absurd talking points about Fascism, Socialism, and “death panels” while parading around with pictures of Barack Obama sporting a Hitler-esque mustache. During a recent Town Hall Meeting in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, Representative Barney Frank (D-4th/Mass.), Chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, illustrated quite brilliantly just how seriously these kinds of histrionics should not be taken based on their merits (or lack thereof).

Unfortunately, Hate Speech is not all fun and games in which the intellectual deficiencies or mental instabilities of Right Wingers can be mocked for sport. Hate Speech can be deadly in its consequences, unintended or otherwise. For instance, Washington Monthly notes that Pittsburgh cop-killer Richard Poplawski suckled at the ideological teats of Fox News and the National Rifle Association in feeding his fantasies that the Obama administration was about to seize his beloved weapons. And the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights points out that the anti-immigrant rhetoric spouted by “high profile national media personalities” such as Lou Dobbs and Michael Savage “correlates closely with the increase in hate crimes against Hispanics.” Of course, correlation does not prove causality—and blaming the demagoguery of Dobbs and Savage for anti-Latino hate crimes is akin to blaming Marilyn Manson for the Columbine massacre because shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris liked his songs.

Regardless of the precise relationship between Hate Speech by one person and violent acts committed by another, the question remains of what one can actually do about it. In Europe and Canada, for instance, certain forms of public hate speech are simply illegal—although these laws have not exactly succeeded in eradicating either hate crimes or Right Wing hate groups. In the United States, on the other hand, freedom of speech as encoded in the First Amendment to the Constitution is generally held in high regard; and for good reason. As the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) succinctly notes: “History teaches that the first target of government repression is never the last.” In other words, let the government ban the speech of your enemy and it may ban your speech next. It is for that reason that the ACLU sometimes finds itself in the uncomfortable position of defending the free-speech rights of utterly vile hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan—and opposing progressive students who seek to ban Right Wing hate speech on campus. As the ACLU argues rather persuasively: “Where racist, sexist and homophobic speech is concerned, the ACLU believes that more speech—not less—is the best revenge.…when hate is out in the open, people can see the problem.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean one must sit back and do nothing when mainstream media “commentators” who are bankrolled by major corporations spew forth hate rhetoric day after day. For instance, the Color of Change campaign seems to be having some success in persuading advertisers to pull their ads from Glenn Beck’s show. Ultimately, however, peddlers of hate like Beck will fade away only when they no longer have a mass audience dumb enough to believe their lies. Darkness flourishes where the bulbs are dimmest. Conservative ideology tends to be a refuge for the ignorant… it is people who don’t know what “socialism” actually is who are the most likely to believe that the centrist Obama administration is “socialist.” For better or worse, an educated populace is the only viable, long-term solution to the social problems and quandaries posed by Hate Speech and Verbal Violence.

{pic by TCM Hitchhiker}

As difficult as it might be to believe, there is a healthcare crisis in the United States that has gone largely unnoticed. Although the negotiations now taking place in the U.S. Congress over healthcare reform have focused a great deal of public attention on the many failings of the U.S. healthcare system, this particular health crisis remains largely invisible to policymakers and media commentators. It is a crisis of mental health, and it seems to be growing ever more severe within Right Wing political circles. From the plebeian mosh pit of Talk Radio to the rarefied Halls of Congress, conservatives unable to come to terms psychologically with the election of President Barack Obama are becoming unhinged; their minds consumed by paranoid delusions which can only be described, clinically speaking, as psychotic.

Lest the reader think I merely jest, the National Institute of Mental Health defines “delusions” as manifested in “schizophrenia” as “false personal beliefs that are not part of the person’s culture and do not change, even when other people present proof that the beliefs are not true or logical.” Furthermore, individuals suffering from “paranoid schizophrenia can believe that others are deliberately cheating, harassing, poisoning, spying upon, or plotting against them or the people they care about. These beliefs are called delusions of persecution.”

Now, consider the persistent claims of so-called “Birthers” such as G. Gordon Liddy and Rep. John Campbell (R-CA), who harbor the belief that Obama is not actually a native-born U.S. citizen and is therefore ineligible to serve as President. With Lou Dobbs generously providing a high-profile venue for the airing of these dark fantasies, the Birthers insist that Obama was born not in Hawaii, but in Kenya, and that there is a vast conspiracy afoot to hide this from a gullible American public. And no amount of evidence to the contrary will change their minds.

Or consider the claims of Healthcare Denialists such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) that there is not actually a healthcare crisis in the United States. There is, of course, an abundance of evidence that tens of millions of Americans do not have access to employer-sponsored health insurance, cannot afford to buy health insurance or pay for healthcare out-of-pocket, and forgo medical treatment as a result. Yet the Healthcare Denialists persist in their belief that the notion of a “healthcare crisis” is simply an alarmist ploy by Leftists intent on a socialistic federal takeover of the private U.S. healthcare system.

Finally, consider Climate Denialists such as George Will, Pat Buchanan, and Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), who claim that global warming is not occurring. Despite the weight of the scientific evidence in this regard, the Climate Denialists insist that the very idea of “global warming” was concocted as part of a shadow-strewn conspiracy to siphon away the political and economic sovereignty of the United States and transfer it to a nebulous World Government.

Although it is easy to become angry at the inflammatory ramblings of deluded souls such as these, they warrant our compassion—not our hate. In the spirit of Hippocrates, we should want, and work towards, their recovery from the psychosis that afflicts them. As the National Institute of Mental Health has also pointed out, the atypical antipsychotics such as Risperdal, Zyprexa, Seroquel, Geodon that were developed in the 1990s have proven highly effective in treating the psychotic symptoms from which far too many members of the Republican Caucus and the Fox News staff suffer. With the right medications, and intensive therapy, even Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh could “improve enough to lead independent, satisfying lives.”

{pic by stevegarfield}

Let us hope that Sarah Palin’s erratically graceless exit from the governorship of Alaska does not portend her exit from the national stage of electoral politics. We need her not merely in the same way that any village has a collective psychological need for its idiot, but in a more pragmatic, political sense as well. The woman is beloved by the GOP’s ever-shrinking “base” of angry white Bible Thumpers. In fact, a mind-numbing 84% of white evangelical Republicans profess a favorable view of Palin despite (or, perhaps, because of) her numerous and well-publicized instances of stupidity and dubious judgment. They even kept loving her after she demonstrated her foreign-policy erudition to Katie Couric by explaining that “as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska… It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state.” Truly inspiring words to the faithful.

At any rate, if the Republican Party is to assume its rightful place in the U.S. political landscape as a permanent minority party that provides a reliable source of fodder for late-night comedians, it is essential that Palin become the GOP standard-bearer. And, if Palin is to effectively rise to the top of the Republican Party, she must be on the GOP presidential ticket in 2012. But every presidential ticket requires two candidates, so let us hope that another conservative heavy weight can be persuaded to join her. Specifically, I’m thinking of another darling of the Republican base; the jowl-jiggling hero of the 2009 Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual meeting; the man who thinks that both global warming and the health-care crisis are elaborate hoaxes perpetrated by socialist Democrats and liberal media elites; the Right Wing’s favorite pain-killer junkie: Rush Limbaugh.

If ever there were a ticket that could energize the GOP base like no other, and—in the process—alienate most of the Democrats and Independents needed to actually win a presidential election, it’s Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh. Given Palin’s superior star power and hair styling, she should probably be at the top of the ticket, but that would probably be denounced by Limbaugh and his fans as a Femi-Nazi plot to emasculate the red-blooded American male. Real men are always Tops; never Bottoms. So Limbaugh-Palin 2012 it must be.

{pic by PsychoBauble}

According to Russell Kirk, who qualifies as a deep thinker in conservative circles thanks in large part to his authorship in 1953 of a book called The Conservative Mind, a key attribute of conservatives is that they “are champions of custom, convention, and continuity because they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t know.” In other words, fear the unknown, and cling to what little you do know regardless of how wrong it might be. While there is certainly some value in the desire for social stability that this mentality reflects, the “conservative” mindset is not particularly helpful when it comes to the acquisition of knowledge. In fact, history reveals that the “conservative” mind tends to glorify whatever forms of ignorance are most prevalent in any particular era. For instance…

… Back in the early 1600s, Galileo Galilei dared rely upon astronomical observations and mathematical calculations found nowhere in The Bible to conclude that the earth is not the immovable center of the universe, but actually orbits the sun. The “Theological Qualifiers” of the Inquisitorial tribunal which tried him reached a more conservative, faith-based conclusion; namely, that Galileo’s belief was “absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.” In fairness, the Catholic Church did get around to admitting the error of this decision in 1992. Now that a few centuries have passed, most modern conservatives in the United States admit that the earth probably revolves around the sun despite The Bible’s failure to explicitly mention this fact.

… In 1925, a jury in Dayton, Tennessee, heard the case of John Scopes, a high-school biology teacher charged with violating state law by teaching the theory of evolution. William Jennings Bryan, speaking conservatively on behalf of a prosecution team led by the appropriately named Herbert and Sue Hicks, claimed that “if evolution wins, Christianity goes,” since the creation fable of The Bible states quite clearly that everything in the world was magically zapped into existence in six days. However, under questioning by Clarence Darrow for the defense, even Bryan admitted that not everything in The Bible can be taken literally, and that a “day” in the Book of Genesis may not have been 24-hours long. It is a tribute to the staying power of blind faith in devout ignorance that many modern conservatives act as if there is still some sort of “debate” over the scientific underpinnings of the theory of evolution. According to their worldview, there is far too little tangible evidence to support the idea of evolution, but plenty to support reading The Bible as a textbook in both history and science.

… In 2007, reflecting the consensus of scientists worldwide, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the available evidence on global warming is now “unequivocal,” and that it is “very likely” carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced by human industrial activities are responsible for the phenomenon. Yet many conservatives continue to take it on faith that this is simply impossible. Columnist George Will claims that global warming isn’t even occurring, while scientific luminaries like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck argue that carbon dioxide couldn’t possibly be harmful since we breathe it. Presumably, the only acceptable “proof” of global warming will come if and when New York and Los Angeles are completely under water—at which point conservatives will finally be willing to tackle the problem.

The creationists and the global-warming-denialists of the conservative camp would do well to remember the case of Galileo in particular. Clinging blindly to conventional thought for its own sake may seem noble and high-minded at the time, but—more often than not—it makes one look monumentally stupid in retrospect. And in the case of global warming, it’s suicidal.

{pic by matthewfilipowicz}

In what is proving to be a very surreal case of showing one’s true colors, right-wing pundits are rushing to the defense of right-wing terrorist groups. The cause of this conservative outrage is a recent report from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which notes that white-supremacist militias and assorted other “rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues”—namely, the presence of a black man in the White House, the current economic recession, and the political possibility of gun-control and immigration-reform legislation at some point in the relatively near future. Right-wing Jaw Flappers are irate over this simple statement of fact because their ratings and livelihoods depend on stoking public fears over the very same issues that right-wing extremist groups use to recruit new members. Thus, perennial blow-hards like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michelle Malkin are claiming that the DHS report is really an attack on run-of-the mill conservatives who simply hate foreigners, horde weapons, and anxiously await the End Times.

The reaction of these Paleolithic pundits illustrates the obvious fact that their ideologies, like those of the terrorist groups they are defending, are based on little more than hate. The pundits have been issuing shrill warnings for months that the Obama administration is on the verge of rounding up all the guns, forcing U.S. citizens into FEMA prison camps, and turning the United States into some sort of Communist-Socialist-Fascist state. It is this sort of delusional rhetoric that is fueling the proliferation of hate groups in the United States—not to mention the psychotic fantasies of “lone gunmen” like Pittsburgh cop-shooter Richard Poplawski (who, apparently, took the warnings of Glenn Beck a little too seriously). This doesn’t mean that the pundits are directly responsible for the violence of their faithful followers, of course…just that they are all in bed together.

{pic by silas216}

The news that right-wing mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh has signed an eight-year syndication contract worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million is over-priced proof of the adage that it pays to be stupid. Or, more precisely, that it pays to be a demagogue in a nation teeming with under-educated conservatives. According to public opinion surveys conducted by the The Pew Research Center after the 2004 election, so-called “social conservatives”—who are grist for the Rush Limbaugh Enterprise—tend to be a poorly educated lot. Only 19 percent completed college, and a mere 9 percent had any education beyond college. By way of comparison, 23 percent of “liberals” finished college, while another 26 percent had some post-graduate education. In other words, conservatism breeds where ignorance flourishes.

Perhaps this explains why arch-conservatives like Limbaugh so despise the very concept of “public” schools. If too many people become too educated, Limbaugh & Company might run out of fellow conservatives to exploit for power and profit.