“America is facing a fiscal crisis of the first order. Our national debt is spiraling to unprecedented and unsustainable levels…. The 2012 budget proposed by the White House is a totally unserious and insulting continuation of the reckless big spending policies of Obama’s first two years in office.” — Newt Gingrich campaign website, January 25 2012
“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon.” — Newt Gingrich, January 25 2012
If we can spend a trillion dollars to find and kill Bin Ladin, I don’t care how much it costs, as long as Newt is the first person with a one way ticket to the moon.
I want to know HOW Newt Gingrich thinks it is possible to
1. Eliminate the Department of Education
2. Defund scientific research
3. Promote pseudoscience like Creationism and Cold Eartherism
4. Muster the technical innovation and scientific know-how to create and maintain a permanent colony on the Moon in just eight years from now.
The man is completely irrational.
Fruktata: (to your conclusion) so are his “followers” and a large part of the American electorate. Obama’s SOTU speech showed that he doesn’t get it either.
http://questioneverything.typepad.com/
Am I Living in a Nightmare?
“My dreams contain more rationality and even my nightmares are not as frightful as what I observe when I am awake. The State of the Union Address and the Republican rejoinder afterward underscored this living nightmare reality. The talking-head commentaries afterward confirmed the madness.:
I had planned to deconstruct the President’s comments on energy as an example. As I went through the text of the speech, about energy, I realized how hopeless it would be to simply point out the inconsistencies and outright non-truths. There were too many, and the common person won’t care anyway. Governor Mitch Daniels’ responses regarding energy issues were just as insane, of course. And all the talking heads could do is analyze the whole thing in the framework of things like “energy independence” and “jobs creation”.
Now I understand why zombie movies are so popular. The vast majority of people appear to be zombies. And clearly the so-called leaders (political and thought) have had their brains eaten.
Here is the President enunciating what is essentially a drill-baby-drill (Republican) notion:
‘Nowhere is the promise of innovation greater than in American-made energy. Over the last three years, we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I’m directing my Administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources. Right now, American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years. That’s right — eight years. Not only that — last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past sixteen years.’
What can we possibly conclude from this statement? Does the President really believe that opening lands for drilling is going to substantially increase our oil production, or even if it did (marginally) at a cost that would make it economical? More still does he grasp the energy cost of retrieving energy? Does he get that drilling more holes and deeper for a marginal increase in flows is just plain dumb? And does he realize this is not likely to produce any real improvement, even in the short run? I won’t try to point out all of the illegitimate notions expressed here. For better analysis than I can do go to The Oil Drum or Our Finite World for high-quality analyses of the oil and natural gas situation in the US.”
(and George Mobus concludes further down)
“It doesn’t occur to either of these men that their statements are empty words, unsupported claims, and generally internally inconsistent (as well as usually inconsistent with reality). Moreover, it never occurs to the electorate that both sides have it so horribly wrong. Most people are choosing sides in meaningless debates. They go for ideological-based faux-reality. And it never occurs to any of them that most of what passes for assertions about how to best govern are just ludicrous gibberish. It’s the rhetoric not the substance of the messages.
And this attitude, or lack of awareness is everywhere. Is it any wonder that I would feel like I am living in a nightmare? George Orwell came pretty close to inventing a fictional dystopia in which double-speak was the norm, in which truth is lie and lie is truth. But in “1984” the powers that be actually had a rational plan in mind. They were forcing society to conform with constraints through their manipulations (we never learned exactly what those constraints were but assumed they were simply based on power struggles). Our leaders have no real plan. They are bumbling through and by helping the 1% get richer just hastening the day of demise for all. Orwell’s world might have been frightening, but it didn’t have the seemingly random logic of a dream/nightmare. Our world is completely out of control and chaotic, even as political and thought leaders try hard to produce the illusion of rationality and even progress (or promised progress).
The SOTU address, the rejoinders (even the Occupy response), and the analyses by political experts, all demonstrate just how far from reality our political and economic worlds are. It was somewhat amusing to watch the Republican candidates (read that clowns) perform in their debates and speech venues, as well as revelations of their complete hypocrisies with respect to their behaviors in life. But that race is just one small piece of the overall picture. What is happening in Congress, the Executive branch, the Supreme Court (where corporations were afforded the right of free speech – using money to talk) would have been considered totally unrealistic in former times. Completely, and totally, those governing the US have demonstrated that the United States way of life and means of government are without reason.
Yes those governing, and would-be governing, are without a shred of understanding of reality. But they are there largely because the electorate shares that same fate. Most people in this country are generally ignorant, undiscerning, selfish, unempathetic, and lazy. I think I know why (lack of sufficient sapience) but that is of no avail. This is just the way it is. So with a general population of people who are in this situation, what else should we expect from our leaders? People get elected when they make promises to people that those people want to hear. It doesn’t matter if the promises can be fulfilled because they correspond to reality. All that matters is that they get the power and the wealth that comes with modern elected offices. Damn everyone else.
And that is exactly what is happening. Just how bizarre will this nightmare get?”