Category: Psychology

Regrets………

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Mikhail Kalashnikov, after decades of denying any culpability for the deaths caused by the AK-47, felt profound remorse toward the end of his life:

The inventor of the Kalashnikov assault rifle apparently wrote to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church before he died expressing fears he was morally responsible for the people it killed.

Mikhail Kalashnikov, who died last month aged 94, wrote a long emotional letter to Patriarch Kirill in May 2012, church officials say.

He said he was suffering “spiritual pain” over the many deaths it caused.

Kalashnikov had previously refused to accept responsibility for those killed.

It does make me wonder how I’ll deal with the end of my life.

As a firmly middle-aged man, my most frequent regret is how few wild oats I sewed during my single days.

Hopefully, my regrets will become more profound as I age, but I’m just not that deep.

Tinfoil Hat Time

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Loretta Fuddy, the director of the Hawaii Department of Health, was killed in a plane crash.

Ms. Fuddy was the official who released Obama’s “Long Form” birth certificate.

Within minutes, “whacko, my parents are first cousins, X-Files wannabe, black helicopter, tinfoil hat wearing, stupid, dim-witted, thinks pro wrestling is real,”* lunatic teabaggers were already saying that she was murdered for knowing too much:

When President Obama marched into the White House briefing room with his Hawaiian birth certificate in April 2011, he said: “I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest.”

How right he was. The release of his long-form birth certificate did not eliminate the “birther” movement, which wrongly contends that Obama was born in Kenya and is therefore ineligible to be president. Although conspiracists had demanded its release, once he made public the document it merely shifted the debate. Some birthers accused Obama of forgery, while others turned their focus to his college transcripts in hopes of proving that he had applied for admission as a foreign student. (He had not.)

And this week, birthers seized on a plane crash off Hawaii that killed one person: state public health Director Loretta Fuddy, the woman who verified the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate.

Skeptics turned to social media Thursday to suggest that Obama had played some role in Fuddy’s death. Twitter posts included: “The WH tying up loose ends?” “What did she really know?” and “R.I.P. Loretta Fuddy — we’ll know the truth about Barack Hussein Obama, regardless.”

Donald Trump, a longtime doubter of Obama’s birthplace, also weighed in on Twitter: “How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.”

That reaction didn’t surprise those who study conspiracy theorists.

Wankers.

*Sorry, I think that I just channeled the comedian Denis Leary.

Your Moment of Kafka

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There was a crazy guy in New York City’s Times Square, one Glenn Broadnax, who was wandering into traffic.

Why is this news?  After all, crazy people interfering with traffic is not particularly newsworthy in Manhattan.

Well it becomes news because, police shot at him while trying to apprehend him, and missed, striking innocent bystanders.

Because of this the prosecutor charged Mr. Broadnax with assault ……… for getting shot at:

An unarmed, emotionally disturbed man shot at by the police as he was lurching around traffic near Times Square in September has been charged with assault, on the theory that he was responsible for bullet wounds suffered by two bystanders, according to an indictment unsealed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan on Wednesday.

The man, Glenn Broadnax, 35, of Brooklyn, created a disturbance on Sept. 14, wading into traffic at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue and throwing himself into the path of oncoming cars.

A curious crowd grew. Police officers arrived and tried to corral Mr. Broadnax, a 250-pound man. When he reached into his pants pocket, two officers, who, the police said, thought he was pulling a gun, opened fire, missing Mr. Broadnax, but hitting two nearby women. Finally, a police sergeant knocked Mr. Broadnax down with a Taser.

The shootings once again raised questions about the police use of firearms in crowded areas and drew comparisons to a shooting a year ago, when officers struck nine bystanders in front of the Empire State Building when they killed an armed murder suspect.

Initially Mr. Broadnax was arrested on misdemeanor charges of menacing, drug possession and resisting arrest. But the Manhattan district attorney’s office persuaded a grand jury to charge Mr. Broadnax with assault, a felony carrying a maximum sentence of 25 years. Specifically, the nine-count indictment unsealed on Wednesday said Mr. Broadnax “recklessly engaged in conduct which created a grave risk of death.”

“The defendant is the one that created the situation that injured innocent bystanders,” said an assistant district attorney, Shannon Lucey.

You are charging a clearly disturbed man with felony assault for somehow “forcing” to fire recklessly firing into a crowded area?

What the f%$#?

F%$# Ronald Reagan for Gutting Mental Health Care in the US

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Former Virginia gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds was stabbed by his mentally ill son, who then shot himself.

Yesterday, his son was released early from what would be a 48 hour psyche evaluation because there were no beds available:

Dennis Cropper, executive director of the Rockbridge County Community Services Board, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch that the emergency custody order, or ECO, allowed Gus Deeds to be held as long as four hours to determine whether he should be kept longer, up to 48 hours, under a temporary detention order.

 The son was evaluated Monday at Bath Community Hospital, Cropper said, but was released because no psychiatric bed could be located across a wide area of western Virginia.

(emphasis mine)

It’s kind of trite to blame Ronald Reagan, except for the fact that Reagan WAS to blame, having aggressively gutted the public psychiatric health system, first in California, and then, after he was elected, nation wide.

Rob Ford Just Stopped Being Funny

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Everyone’s (Or at least Jon Stewart and his writing team’s) favorite Chris Farley tribute band, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has put on quite a show over the past few months.

I’ve not written about him, because I had nothing to add that The Daily Show has already covered.

Well, we now have credible reports that he was beating his wife:

New details from a months-old police report revealed on Friday indicated that Mayor Rob Ford’s wife, Renata, displayed bruises indicative of domestic violence and was possibly inebriated, according to a Toronto Star story published by columnist Rosie DiManno.

“The mayor’s wife was slurring her words and belligerent with the driver. She either refused to pay the fare or did not have the money,” DiManno wrote. “Their argument became so heated that the cabbie called for police assistance.” The columnist said the incident occurred “nearly a year ago” and began with a dispute between Renata Ford and a cab driver outside her parents’ home.

When police arrived, DiManno wrote that they “observed that Mrs. Ford appeared to have bruising on her limbs.”

“When asked about it, she refused to say how the injuries had been suffered. She was, in fact, too incoherent to say much of anything — either inebriated or on drugs,” explained DiManno.

According to DiManno, no one was charged after the argument between Renata Ford and the driver. However, DiManno said police “tried following up” with Renata Ford afterward because they were concerned “domestic abuse may be involved.” DiManno described Renata Ford as having been “not cooperative” with the police.

This is not the first time there have been questions about domestic violence in the Ford household. In 2008, Ford, then a member of the City Council, was charged with assault and making a death threat against his wife. Those charges were dropped after prosecutors found inconsistencies in Renata Ford’s allegations that they said raised “credibility issues.”

The Toronto Star has pulled the story, saying that it wasn’t ready for release, but is serves to reinforce something we should all be aware of when we are tempted to make jokes: There are people who are collateral damage to this sort of bullsh%$, and I am not referring to the embarrassment suffered by the citizens of Toronto.

I’m no particularly surprised by this.  Ford is a product of the sort of nihilistic self-destructive hostile populism that was detailed in Mark Ames’ magnificent essay, Spite the Vote.

What he is, and what he does, is not motivated by a desire to fix things, but by a hatred by the other, which in his case are mass transit users and bicyclists. (?!?)

It is an illustration of the old Chinese adage, “If you are out for revenge, dig two graves.

Here is Jon Stewart is weighing in on the distinguished Mr. Ford:

Economists are Douchebags

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A business school professor at Wharton has found that not only are economists more selfish and more likely to cheat, but that even just the study of economics and business has a criminogenic effect.

The quick bullet points are:

  • Less charitable giving
  • More deception for personal gain
  • Greater acceptance of greed
  • Less concern for fairness

He wonders if there is a problem with how we teach economics.

Gee,  you think?

Go read the rest.

H/t Salon.

How Restaurant Management Explains the Republican Party

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The New York Times has a rather interesting article on restaurants moving away from tips in 2008.

I don’t mean a service charge with an option to tip, I mean a full service restaurant that has a service charge, but does not accept tips at all, the Linkery, which operated for 8 years* in the San Diego.

Its proprietor closed up shop and moved to the Bay Area this Summer, he’s starting a new restaurant shortly, and he penned took the free time to pen a fascinating series on his experiences with his experiment. (It’s a long read that I highly recommend but the nickel tour is that he sees it as an unalloyed success.)

What is interesting about all this is his observation that there are some (mostly unlamentedly former) customers who were in an absolute rage about the fact that they no longer can tip. (Part 5 of his series)

This is where it gets interesting to me:

“This isn’t about money,” the man would say.  [Almost always a man — MGS]

 He’d be the one person in a thousand, or in ten thousand, who’d get angry about our fixed service charge. Angry about his lack of control over the price, angry about not being the final arbiter of our service. You could count on him being male, at least when we’re talking about public scenes. (I’ve heard of a few women who got pretty mad about it in private.)

 And his go-to line was so predictable, we would wait for it, anticipate it. “I always tip way more than twenty percent!”

 If that was the case, why were these guys so mad about paying only 18%, far less than they otherwise would? What was it about not choosing the amount they tipped, that infuriated them, even when they were getting a discount?

 It had to be at least partially about lack of control. Or, more accurately, lack of imagined control. This guy thought that, in a tipped environment, his server would perform better in order to get more of his money. That idea is false, as shown both by repeated studies and common sense, but that was irrelevant. His anger could not be redeemed by mere facts.

 Then what was this rage so primal that no exposure to reality could relieve it?

It turns out, rather unsurprisingly, that there is a certain sort of person who demands control in the restaurant relationship.

In postscript 1†, we have a restaurant reviewer who got a wet behind the ears waiter, and decides to call the waiter out by name:

What blew my mind was that she called him out using his real name (which I’ve redacted here), even though she was writing from behind a shield of anonymity. It was, in my opinion, bad enough for the worker to have made a mistake at his job; even worse that he has to find out his mistake was to a reviewer; but now he’s been ridiculed by name in the paper, in an attempt to have his parents, siblings and friends all shame him, as well.

Of course, the server was a really great guy, a college student with minimal serving background, who we were trying to train on the job. He was doing his best, and whatever errors he made were my fault, for putting him a difficult position without giving him the tools for success. I knew that, and I expected that a professional reviewer would have, too.

I emailed the writer.

I wrote something along the lines of, hey, I get that you had a bad experience, but that was out of line to call the server out by his real name. You could have easily made the same point while using a different name for him.

She wrote back along the lines of, I write my experiences; just because you have good intentions I’m not going to hold back my criticism. It’s your fault for not having trained him properly.

I responded, I agree that the bad service is my fault. I’m saying you should have ripped on me and not him. I’ve apologized to him for putting him in that position, but it is still not right of you, writing under a pseudonym, to publicly embarrass him using his actual name.

And she came back with the clincher: Well, with your fixed service charge you didn’t give my any choice. I couldn’t give him a lower tip. How else could I punish him for his mistakes?

That made it all clear. She, like some other patrons, felt the burden of having to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. Obviously, some people like that role, and some people don’t, but at the very least our culture has trained diners that it is their job. When you go to restaurants, you are responsible for rewarding and punishing your server.

(emphasis original)

From a cultural perspective, it is fascinating, but it also says a lot more about our society and our politics, asaimai at No More Mister Nice Blog observes that this explains Republicans as well:

Why are Federal Workers a special case and a problem for Republicans?  In the case of Federal Workers I’d argue that its not merely that  they are workers (who are always despised) its because they are workers who for the most part don’t conform to Republican ideas of the right boundaries for workers. The right boundaries for workers are that they know their place, that they can be fired capriciously, and that they exist primarily to make the employer feel good about himself  and, further, that like waiters in a restaurant and prostitutes with their johns their job is also to make the employer believe that he is receiving an extra good form of treatment not accorded to others diners or johns.

Federal workers violate those central principles because they can’t be fired directly by “the employer” because the individual Republican tax payer isn’t the direct employer. They also can’t be humiliated and made to feel vulnerable because of civil service protections and unionization. And in the matter of interactions, one on one, the taxpayer can’t command good treatment by offering money (bribes) and thus often feels vulnerable and weak because there is no way to play the “do you know who I am” card which (like tipping) is an attempt to force a generic servant to give non generic attention and service to one class of people. So Federal Employees create an extra level of status anxiety for Republicans when they come in contact with these “employees” who can’t be fired or rewarded and therefore are not obligated to be extra nice to the individual Republican.

Of course there are lots of kinds of Federal Employees, some more obvious than others, and many of whom don’t come into contact with ordinary citizens very often (Scientists at the CDC vs. Park Rangers, for example). I’d argue that the antipathy I’ve described goes for both the kinds of Federal Employees that ordinary citizens encounter–and this is at the root of the really quite bizarre attacks by Republican Congressmen on individual Federal Employees like the now infamous attack on the the Park Ranger by the Texas Congressman. He explicitly challenges her and accuses her of failing to give special consideration to (some) clients (tourists/vets) when she is, of course, contractually obligated to treat all persons identically and has been ordered to shut down the monument. We’ve also seen this hostility directed by individual Republican Congressmen at high level Federal Employees during committee hearings. These attempts to create a hierarchical relationship which puts the “employee” below the “employer” even when the employee has specialized knowledge and skills that the employer does not are too numerous to mention.

I’d even argue that Reince Priebus’s absurd “offer” to pay for a few employees to keep the military site open for the honor flight vets was an example of a perfectly logical extension of the tipping principle: that people with money should get better treatment than ordinary customers. That the government’s attempt to treat everyone uniformly in both the Sequester and the Shut Down is, to the Republican way of thinking, a greater affront than almost anything else. It flies in the face of the “do you know who I am?” principle which underlies Republican thinking about the nature of the world.

So what can we do about this? Nothing, alas. Republicans will continue to see the Government, and experiences of Government work and workers, as a drama in which the employer must punish the employed in order to enjoy his superior status, and the rest of us will have to suffer as they choose to act out their petty desires by shutting down the government and refusing to “tip” our Federal Workers by, you know, actually paying them for work performed. ………

(emphasis original)

This explains a lot.

The only question is how corrosive this is to society as a whole, and how we minimize the impact of these attitudes on the rest of us.

*It’s like 80 years in restaurant years, as most restaurants do not make it 2 years.
†Like I said, not a short read, but well worth it.

Interesting Idea

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Green Eagle observes on the web, you can judge a book by its cover:

………

 As a motion picture art director, I work a lot with graphic artists constructing imitation documents of one kind and another. Perhaps because that is part of my job, I like to look for stylistic cues that give away the nature of a document, without reference to its content. This is an area (at least as it relates to politics) that has not received much attention, although institutions like the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore have fine collections of this material, much of it produced by people who are mentally ill.

 In particular, very little has been said about this phenomenon on the internet. This is probably understandable; websites are a relatively recent thing, and some of the relatively well known visual characteristics of the work of the mentally disturbed are eliminated by the template-driven layout of the vast majority of websites. For example, the chaotic writing of the Miz Thang example, or the handwritten political specimen shown below are not really possible on the internet. Well, enough preface, let me dive in with some examples:

He draws comparisons between whack job websites and works of art from the mentally ill.

I won’t post his examples. The picture that I am posting is the home page of the Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, which shows most of the characteristics he describes.

The tinfoil hat folks wear is reflected in their web designs.

Elvis (Impersonator) Has Left the Building

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It’s now official. Paul Kevin Curtis, the Elvis impersonator originally accused of being the Mississippi ricin mailer, has been exonerated, and Wayne Newton impersonator James Everett Dutschke has been indicted:

A federal grand jury has indicted a Mississippi man suspected of sending poison-laced letters to President Barack Obama and other officials, according to an indictment made public Monday.

The 5-count indictment charges 41-year-old James Everett Dutschke (pronounced DUHS’-kee) with developing, producing and stockpiling the poison ricin, threatening the president and others and attempting to impede the investigation.

………

George Lucas, an attorney for Dutschke, said he had not yet seen the indictment and had no immediate comment.

Dutschke is the second person to face charges in the case.

Paul Kevin Curtis, a 45-year-old Elvis impersonator, was arrested on April 17, but the charges were dropped six days later.

So yes, the Wayne Newton impersonator attempted to frame the Elvis impersonator, and he got caught, and now his lawyer, George F%$#ing Lucas is waiting for the details.

This is beyond the wildest dreams of the writers for The Daily Show or The Onion.

Background here.

Confusopolies are Obamacare’s Achilles Heel

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At the heart of healthcare reform, it is the insurance exchanges, and your average consumer lacks the sophistication necessary to see how the insurance companies will f%$# them until it is too late:

One of the big reasons I’m so pessimistic about the new health insurance exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act is the principle behind them. The idea is that everyone will be well- informed dedicated shoppers who will know how to select the best plan to fit their needs, which will reduce cost for everyone. Aflac’s 2013 WorkForces Report shows how deeply misguided this assumption is in reality.

Two numbers from the report really stick out. The survey found 54 percent of workers would prefer not to be more in control over their health insurance expenses and options because they will not have the time or knowledge to effectively manage it. This is completely understandable. Selecting the best insurance plan requires not only significant knowledge about every component of insurance, but also the ability to accurately predict the likelihood of future medical needs.

One thing that you can be sure of is that the insurance companies will do their level best to confuse customers so that they will make a decision that will increase their profits.

As John Maynard Keynes noted, “Capitalism is the theory that the worst people, acting from their worst motives, will somehow produce the most good.”

The health insurance industry is one of the best examples of this, and the health insurance reform plan requires us to rely on their good will.

Pleasant dreams.

Worst People in the World

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The modeling agents in Sweden tried to recruit models from an eating disorder clinic:

A well-known clinic in Sweden has managed to attract a following that stands outside the entrance, approaches patients, and … tries to recruit them to be models?

Indeed, while the United States struggles to keep women’s health clinic patients safe from vitriolic anti-abortion protesters, Sweden’s issue is based at the 1,700-bed Stockholm Center for Eating Disorders, the largest clinic of its kind in the country. Agents have been known to stand outside the clinic and approach teenage patients, offering the sometimes horrifically ill girls work as models because of their small size. These instances provide a shocking look into how shallow the modeling world is capable of being, caring only about young women’s physical attributes and not their health.

One of Sweden’s largest modeling agencies once approached a 14-year-old girl and handed her a business card, while another girl who was so sick she was in a wheelchair was interviewed by another agent right outside the clinic. These awful people care not for these girls’ poor health — you know, the reason they’re at the clinic — but instead for their proven ability to lose a lot of weight very quickly.

This is so deeply evil that it just buggers the mind.

Their mothers should have drowned these guys at birth.

This is Not the Onion

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You know that guy who is alleged to have mailed ricin laced letters to Obama and Congresscritters?

Wanna guess what his day job is?

He was an Elvis impersonator:

An Elvis impersonator named Paul Kevin Curtis who lives in Corinth Mississippi was charged Thursday for allegedly sending ricin-tainted letters to President Barack Obama, Sen. Roger Wiker (R-MS), and a judge in Lee County Mississippi. Court documents released by the Department of Justice show Curtis was charged with one count of sending a letter “containing threats to take the life of or to inflict bodily harm upon the president of the United States” and a count of sending a letter “containing a threat to injure the person of others.”

We are living in very strange times.

Normally, He’d be Wanker of the Day………

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But today, after Pamela Sampson, Niall Ferguson suggesting that Paul Krugman is the victim of an abusive childhood:

In my view Paul Krugman has done fundamental damage to the quality of public discourse on economics. He can be forgiven for being wrong, as he frequently is–though he never admits it. He can be forgiven for relentlessly and monotonously politicizing every issue. What is unforgivable is the total absence of civility that characterizes his writing. His inability to debate a question without insulting his opponent suggests some kind of deep insecurity perhaps the result of a childhood trauma. It is a pity that a once talented scholar should demean himself in this way.

Krugman’s response is to the point:

What a pathetic response. Notice that he is doing precisely what I never do, and making it about the person as opposed to his ideas. All I have ever done to him is point out that he seems to not know what he is talking about, and that he has been repeatedly wrong. I would never stoop to speculating about his childhood! If he can’t handle professional criticism — which is all that I have ever offered — he should go find another profession.

Krugman is right.

There is a qualitative difference between the two arguments.  Krugman is blunt.  He has no problems telling people that he disagrees with that they are full of sh%$.

He’s blunt, but he does not pull the kind of crap that Ferguson tried to pull.

H/t Atrios.

We Have A New Best Definition for Chutzpah

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For those of you who are not aware of the classic definition, “That quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan,”

Well, Mark “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” Sanford has come up with a new and improved definition:

But Mark wanted more than just his ex-wife’s disavowal of interest. When he first ran for Congress in 1994, he installed Jenny as his campaign manager. He did this for reasons of economy—“You’re free,” he told her at the time—but she proved a natural at the job. She blossomed into a shrewd political strategist, running Mark’s subsequent campaigns and becoming his top adviser. Will Folks, a former Sanford press secretary, says, “There’s absolutely no way he would have ever won the congressional seat or been governor without her.”

According to Jenny, she had already told Mark she would be taking a pass on the race the day before, at the funeral of a mutual friend. So when Mark came to visit her, he arrived with a proposal. “Since you’re not running, I want to know if you’ll run my campaign,” he said. “We could put the team back together.”

Jenny told him, in so many words, that wasn’t going to happen. Mark made one last appeal.

“I could pay you this time,” he said.

Un-dirtyword-believable.

You leave her, you publicly humiliate her, and you want her to run her campaign?

If I were Mark Sanford’s parents, I’d worry.

H/t Talking Points Memo.

I Saw This on Key and Peele

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Seriously, just watch!

Seriously, the Republicans are now arguing that they are intransigent assholes because Obama made them do it:

The first day of the House Republicans’ retreat was devoted, in large part, to persuading House Republicans to stop saying offensive things about rape and to stop thinking they can use the debt ceiling to hold the economy hostage after losing the 2012 election.

To state the obvious, these are not topics that should actually need to be covered at a retreat of House Republicans. We should be able to take it for granted that our legislators won’t petulantly crash the economy or offend rape survivors. That the House GOP leadership had to mount an organized campaign to convince GOP members of those things is evidence that something has gone wrong in the Republican Party.

No one knows that better than Republicans themselves. But it’s very difficult to be a Republican in a time of GOP dissolution. And so recent weeks have birthed the strangest strain of commentary I can remember: The Republican Party’s crazy opinions are President Obama’s fault.

The logic here is weirdly impeccable. The Republican Party’s dilemma is that House Republicans keeps taking all kinds of unreasonable and unpopular positions. If Obama weren’t president, the House Republicans wouldn’t be taking so many unreasonable and unpopular positions. But since Obama is president, and since he does need to work with House Republicans, he is highlighting their unreasonable and unpopular opinions in a bid to make them change their minds, which is making House Republicans look even worse. And so it’s ultimately Obama’s fault that House Republicans are, say, threatening to breach the debt ceiling if they don’t get their way on spending cuts. After all, if Mitt Romney had won the election, the debt ceiling wouldn’t even be a question!

If you are wondering why this sounds like a sketch from show on Comedy Central, it’s because it is a sketch from a show on Comedy Central. (See vid)

Of all the lame excuses that I’ve ever heard from anyone, “It’s not our fault, Barack Hussein Obama makes us batsh%$ insane!” is the lamest.

You guys might want to consider some very powerful anti-psychotic drugs.

Self Entitled, Self Deluded Assholes

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Robert Bork, at least later in his life, was a classic example of how the modern Republican Party has deliberately become a manufacturer of narcissistic fantasists:

Even before Robert Bork died last month, he had achieved something close to martyrdom. In the quarter-century since the Senate rejected his Supreme Court nomination, successive generations of conservative lawyers and activists have carried the torch, depicting his defeat as an injustice of historic proportion. Following his death at the age of 85, liberals mostly maintained a respectful silence while conservatives dusted off old complaints about the conduct of the confirmation hearing and the unfairness, in their view, of the “borking” the nominee received. Clearly, the Bork Battle survives Bork.

………

Some time after the Senate vote, I was invited to a conversation with Judge Bork at the offices of The New Republic magazine. He was hurting and angry. When my turn came to ask a question, I asked him whether, at any time during the hearing, he had felt that a member of the Judiciary Committee had met him on his own level in serious constitutional conversation.

“No,” he answered.

“Not even Arlen Specter?” I asked.

“Specter had his mind made up from the beginning,” he snapped.

I knew that wasn’t true, although Judge Bork clearly believed it. Senator Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, had in fact agonized over his vote, as I knew from having talked with him almost daily. A Yale Law School graduate and former prosecutor, the senator went head to head with the nominee through several rounds of questioning, hours of mesmerizing constitutional debate in which he probed for any sign of flexibility in Judge Bork’s view that the entire course of modern constitutional law was profoundly mistaken. Finding none, Senator Specter, who had assumed at the start of the hearing that he would vote for confirmation, decided to vote No, fully recognizing the price he would pay within his own party. Five other Republicans followed. (Judge Bork and Senator Specter, whose paths crossed at such a significant moment in their lives, died within months of each other; Arlen Specter, who eventually became a Democrat, died in October at 82.)

………

I should explain this column’s title, “Robert Bork’s Tragedy.” I see him as a tragic figure: not because he was dealt an unjust hand – he wasn’t – but because of his inability to understand what happened. He spent his final decades surrounded by acolytes who stoked his sense of victimhood, and there seemed to be no one around him to provide a reality check as his rants about the Supreme Court’s depredations and the collapse of Western civilization (he portrayed the two as inextricably linked) became ever more extravagant. (In a symbolic gesture aimed at the Republican base, Mitt Romney named him co-chair of his campaign advisory committee on law.)

What is interesting here is not Robert Bork, but rather how the production and support of this sort of (for lack of a better term) insanity has increasingly become the primary product of the right wing noise machine.

I’m not entirely sure how to fix this rather poisonous and self-reinforcing dynamic.

Truth be told, I’m not sure that would I want to fix this dynamic. 

Maybe I’m an optimist, but seems to me that this dynamic has gotten to the point they are choking on their own bile, and I see that as a good thing.

H/t Brad Delong.

Boehner told Reid to go Cheney Himself

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Republicans, such classy people:

House Speaker John Boehner couldn’t hold back when he spotted Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the White House lobby last Friday.

It was only a few days before the nation would go over the fiscal cliff, no bipartisan agreement was in sight, and Reid had just publicly accused Boehner of running a “dictatorship” in the House and caring more about holding onto his gavel than striking a deal.

“Go f— yourself,” Boehner sniped as he pointed his finger at Reid, according to multiple sources present.

Reid, a bit startled, replied: “What are you talking about?”

Boehner repeated: “Go f— yourself.”

The harsh exchange just a few steps from the Oval Office — which Boehner later bragged about to fellow Republicans — was only one episode in nearly two months of high-stakes negotiations laced with distrust, miscommunication, false starts and yelling matches as Washington struggled to ward off $500 billion in tax hikes and spending cuts.

Seriously, this sort of childish sh%$ is not the mark of someone who you can negotiate with in good faith.

Saying it in the middle of a contentious meeting is one thing, but this was a “drive by” f%$# you, and then he bragged about it to colleagues.

This is College Republican bullsh%$, and it is an indication of just how unserious the Republican leadership is about doing their jobs.

I experienced this when I was in the SGA Senate at UMass, and dealt with people who later figured in the Abramhoff, and they freuently behaved the same way, but they were in their early 20s, and it was the student senate.

That is why this deal is so bad.  Barack Obama just gave the keys to Eddie Haskell, and this does not bode well.

Just Read This

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I am Adam Lanza’s Mother.

She really isn’t.  Rather, Liza Long is describing the issues involved with raising her son, an extremely intelligent, and very troubled 13 year old., from the mom of a troubled adolescent, but there is a bigger issue that it obliquely address we look at the most prominent mass shootings in the past few years, they seem to be marked by the complete breakdown of the mental health infrastructure in this country.

Starting with Ronald Reagan, we have systematically dismantled our mental health infrastructure, so now we have the the emergency room, jails, and acute inpatient facilities.

For chronic, less severe mental health problems, there is nothing out there, except, “Take 3 pills daily,” or moving to some place with a less antediluvian public health system, like Canada, or Spain, or Portugal, or India(!), or Egypt(!!), or Greece (until a year ago, when Angela Merkel demanded that they adopt the US’s 3rd world health system because Greek pain equals German votes).