"Whatever It Is, I'm Against It"

What do you call it when a person or a party refuses to believe facts because they dislike the person who presents them? Bloodymindedness is one word. Damnfoolish will also work.

In two states now, Florida and now Wisconsin, Republican governors have forbidden state employees to acknowledge climate change in any way. They are required to ignore science––in other words they're told to lie. (Bloomberg reports this story)

The Republican Party has a policy of putting polluters of the environment in the job of protecting the environment. Polluters are not good at cutting or regulating pollution….and that is the whole point. Walker is doing this in Wisconsin, or trying to. (Associated Press)

The Republican Party prefers to advance peace by dropping bombs. Does this have anything to do with the massive support they get from the armaments industry? Not only is this corrupt, it’s also deranged and dangerous. The latest cheerleader for war is Tom Cotton of Arkansas. The same guy who wrote the Iranians and told them not to sign a treaty on nuclear disarmament. "Give War a Chance" (NPR reporting)

Where does this insanity come from? What causes this dangerously disordered way of thinking. If it were a person you'd look at the home. What's wrong there. Here it's about the party culture. The Republican Party is the party of ugly bullying and deep corruption. Why is the GOP this way? Because it wins for them. (Here is a sad example from Missouri politics. Again, reported by NPR)

There are a lot of deep old hatreds in the Republican culture. Hatred of other races and religions and of women. Hatred comes from fear and suspicion. It dates back as far as Nixon, a singularly hateful and suspicious man. Was it all about his manhood? (Here's an interesting story from VOX.)

Hatred of “the Other” means all terrorism is Muslim or Communist and foreign born. Homegrown Christian terrorists are not terrorists. (Salon has a short list of the Christian terrorist groups we're supposed to ignore.)

The Republican Party is a machine to serve the 1%, but they get votes from a lot of working people too. Mostly white. Having a black president has confused them. It has at least supplied a worry the 1% can exploit. Working class Republicans find it easier to follow the instructions of the 1%, the gilded rich, who tell them who to hate and who to oppose, rather than make an alliance with other working people who have shared interests and grievances. It’s the old divide-and-conquer strategy of Confederate generals like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The values are deeply Confederate too: keep the other races down and hate the federal government. (Politico reports on the South's devotion to Confederate principles. Which we never got around to calling treason.)

This is a recipe for dysfunction. But the small group of wealthy people who own the Republican Party aren’t concerned. They would rather the United States were more like Mexico or some banana republic where the elite ruled the impoverished majority. (Salon has a story from a former Republican who got sick of it.)

Despite presiding over a rebellious kindergarten of a Republican Congress, Obama has succeeded pretty well. (FactCheck has the numbers on Obama. They're good to great, but you'd hardly know it from how much half of America hates him.)

So they hate him even more. It’s like the Groucho Marx song:

Your proposition may be good,
But let's have one thing understood,
Whatever it is, I'm against it.
And even when you've changed it or condensed it,
I'm against it.

(Here again is that Washington Post article about how the Republican Party is organized around the idea of making sure we fail as badly under Obama as we did under their guy.)

What do you call it when a person or a party wants the United States to fail?