TO A CONSREVATIVE, “IGNORANCE IS BLISS!”

 

…The 1/2 Alaska Governor, Sarah Palin, in a rare but telling picture

 

Conservatives that appear on Fox are many times downright proud of being an ignoramus. 

 

Today’s thinking by conservatives says that ignorance is a virtue.

Someone recently put that thinking into a clear statement recently when they wrote:  “Making Ignorance into a virtue for the general conservative public started with the original adoption of Sarah Palin on the Fox channel as a right-wing hero.”  Subsequently, today, any utterance from Palin’s mouth is far more likely to be a blatant lie than anything resembling fact.

Palin represents this new conservative era of treating the truth like it’s a death-threat that is attacking conservative America.  Never mind that the final effect of this approach is that the truth be damned, forever.

One good example of this occurred when the Republican state legislator John Becker (R-OH) introduced a bill that would ban all insurance plans from covering abortion.  Becker didn’t just stop at trying to outlaw abortion coverage. He also insisted that IUDs, the most effective contraception available, be outlawed from any and all insurance coverage.

Now Becker’s bizarre reasoning was that he believed IUD’s work by killing fertilized human eggs.

This is of course totally incorrect, as an “abortion” is a procedure that stops a pregnancy.  If a fertilized egg fails to implant, then you were never pregnant in the first place, and therefore you cannot get an abortion. Like most forms of contraception, IUDs work by preventing the sperm from meeting the egg.

When Rep. Becker was confronted with the facts, he just blew them off.  His comment was, “That is just a personal view,” and “I’m not a medical doctor.”

Well, that fact is obvious, but Rep. Becker walked away with a big smile on his face looking as if he was mighty proud of his offering of a “Palin-esk” approach with his overall level of basic ignorance.

So, today, the Republicans and the conservatives are continuing to outdo themselves by proudly spouting off about stuff they know nothing about.

Apparently, this attitude toward the truth, or perhaps the “untruth” began during the George W. Bush administration. 

When Ron Suskind of the New York Times interviewed an unnamed Bush official in 2004, the official stated to Mr. Suskind what he believed to be the shortcomings of today’s journalists.  You know, “those who insist that the truth matters more than fantasy”. 

What?

The aide actually said that guys like Suskind were, ''In what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who, ''Believe that solutions emerge from their judicious study of discernible reality.'' Then the official added, ''But that's not the way the world really works anymore.  We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."  Yep, the unnamed official really said that.

Obviously, all this got even worse after Dubya Bush left office. 

All you have to do is go back to what started coming out of the mouths of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Karl Rove, and Bill O’Reilly on the Fox channel, after McCain / Palin lost in 2008.  Apparently the Murdoch / Ailes team that was running Fox decided that those watching their channel would believe anything they were fed, regardless of its validity.  So, “Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead,” with all those Fox-Falsehoods.
 

So, Fox & Co. plus the GOP, and all of the right-wing think tanks, then set off to convince their followers that they were the, “all knowing conservatives”, regardless of the facts.
 

The sense that you could stick it to the liberals by being utterly indifferent to reality actually then grew even worse with that adoption of Sarah Palin as their right-wing hero. Shameless lying and ignorance work outstandingly as debate tactics, as it’s hard to argue with someone who has signaled that he or she doesn’t care about the truth.  These people are downright proud of how little they actually know. Such a person is not open to being educated. Apparently, once the pretense of caring about what is right has been abandoned, all avenues of discourse are immediately shut down.

As an example, there was Rep. Jeff Miller’s (R-FL) recent appearance on MSNBC.  It was a performance that has become standard for the right-wing when talking about climate change.

First, wave away the scientific consensus and spout total ignorance in the most condescending tone possible.  Act as if nothing could be sillier than those scientists with their interests in facts and research. 

Miller went above and beyond the call of duty, showing off how proud he was to know so very little. “Why did the dinosaurs go extinct? Were there men that were causing it?  Were there cars running around at that point, that were causing global warming?“  “No!” he said, totally full of contempt for people who weren’t nearly as stupid as himself.

If Miller wasn’t such a major idiot, he would know that, most real scientists agree that the death of the dinosaurs was caused by an outside force that disrupted the Earth’s atmosphere.  Scientist have confirmed that there was something that caused a massive cooling of the earth (probably a collision with a giant meteor) and then a major global warming effect that wiped out 70% of the species on the planet. This is one of the major reasons we know that outside forces, whether meteors, autos or power plants, that have major impact on the planet’s atmosphere can create temperature changes that permanently affect life on this planet.

What is so wrong is that here is someone who is not only catastrophically wrong, but downright proud of being ignorant. 

But having such a wall of ignorance is a powerful rhetorical tool. When you have nothing but contempt for the facts, attempts to educate these idiots will only make the pride in their own ignorance grow stronger. The more you try to educate those that are proudly ignorant, the dumber they become.

The end result of this situation is obviously a major catastrophe.

Remember, the conservative identity is one of being totally opposed to everything liberal.  As liberalism has increasingly been aligned with the values of real facts and reason, the incentive for conservatives to reject these is then multiplied.

To be a “conservative” today increasingly means taking a contemptuous view of reality. Therefore, the proudly ignorant grow more belligerent, day after day.  This is now being called the “Circle of Ignorance.”

And of course, those that are the most ignorant, will eventually get their own show on Fox News.

Copyright G.Ater 2014