Who Said it Best Today: Paul Krugman on Republican Anti-Intellectualism
Today in Paul Krugman’s Op-Ed in the NYT (Republicans Against Science) he took up a subject I have worried about (Eschewing Science), electing people who reject science and inconvenient facts that don’t line up with their ideology. As Paul put it:
“So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.
And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.
Lately, for example, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has gone beyond its long-term preference for the economic ideas of “charlatans and cranks” — as one of former President George W. Bush’s chief economic advisers famously put it — to a general denigration of hard thinking about matters economic. Pay no attention to “fancy theories” that conflict with “common sense,” the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyze things like financial crises and recessions?
Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.”
In the meantime, FEMA, has stopped funding for any projects not yet approved for tornado and flood damage due to past extreme weather events to pay for ongoing Irene response. And you can guess who are squealing like pigs. All those good Republicans who don’t want to pay for anything, because as we all know, the private sector will take care of us. Anti-intellectualism at its zenith.