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In case you hadn’t heard, most all of Ragin’ Ricky’s momentum has collapsed. He’s now mired in the muck of fundamentalist/right-wingery wackoism that envelopes his persona. People are not amused.

Rick seems rather blithely unaware of what all the fuss is about. He’s never changed. It’s just that never before have many people listened. Now they are, and folks are puzzled, dumbfounded, and scratchin’ their noggins. What in the world is this man talking about?

Now I’d be the first to admit that I haven’t looked at Rick’s  background that carefully, and frankly I don’t intend to, since he is but another flash in the pan, and I don’t expect him to garner the nomination, though it would be a hoot and three-quarters if he did.

But I know what he is and what he means, as well as I know how the GOP elites operate–and believe me, ALL of these fools are GOP elites, who are quite aware of who they are speaking to and what in reality they are saying, coded up as it is.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m reading Robert Altemeyer’s book The Authoritarians. This is largely about those who follow the demagogic types such as Santorum and Gingrich, and the ever irrelevant Ms. Sarah. Two things that go hand in glove is fundamentalism and being a high Right-Wing Authoritarian. (Remember to be a High RWA means you like authority and place being a good little soldier very high on your list. You tend to identify with your group, stick to your own kind, have a strong identification with authority, feel aggression towards “others” , have poor reasoning abilities, be self-righteous, and a strong tendency to be dogmatic, meaning you don’t care about facts, you are just right.)

Ricky is clearly a RWA. He has publicly stated that President Kennedy’s “faith speech” to Protestant church leaders “made him sick.” He does not believe in a separation of church and state. He claims that this means that only secularists can participate in government. This is clearly not the case, but this is what he would wish his followers to believe. What Kennedy and others meant and mean is that one doesn’t refer to the tenets of their faith in order to decide matters of public interest.

In other words, as a Catholic, I would not ban birth control because my church claims that it is sinful to use it.

Ricky claims he would not either, but here is where it gets sneaky. Ricky wants to do that, but figures he pretty much can’t, but he sure as heck can fund any number of faux studies which set out to prove that contraceptives present some medical and psychological dangers to women. He would do everything he could behind the scenes to drum up the “evidence”  that would allow him eventually to support appropriate legislation that would limit certain types of contraception and certain methods of dissemination. Getting rid of Planned Parenthood is a good example of that beginning.

One thing that is clear from studies done on those who score high on Authoritarian testing: they have difficulty in rational thinking. Let me explain. Let’s use the syllogism:

  • All fish live in water
  • Sharks live in water
  • Sharks are fish

Now, the RWA will tell you, to a much higher degree, that this syllogism is correct. It is not of course, and most people could quite quickly see that. But high RWA’s see that the result is correct, i.e., sharks are fish, and the means of getting there is irrelevant to them.

Knowing this fact makes the life of elite GOP folks ever so much easier. They simply connect what the believe the Tea Mob believes is true: (gas prices are too high) to any referent they wish (Obama is repressing oil production in this country (an utter falsehood, but this doesn’t matter). The TeaMOB® will faithfully repeat it ad nauseam and become increasingly belligerent while doing so.

Now Rick knows that fundamentalists (of which he is one ardently) tend to lose their fervor when they attend college. This is true, and is well documented. Their RWA scores drop a good 10% on average as well. Rick hates this, as do most of the Righty-tighties. And they BLAME the left. And so they BLAME the universities which they claim are chock full of left/radical/socialist/commies who are indoctrinating their children in secularist awfulness.

Thus Rick says that the President is a snob for wanting all kids to have the opportunity to go to college. Fact: kids who go to college aren’t as fundamentalist as when they went in. Referent: Radical leftist university indoctrination. The truth? The kids lose their fundamentalism not so much based on what professors teach them, or books offered them, but more from the bull sessions they engage in at night in the dorm with kids from other countries, other cultures, and other lifestyles. These are the new things they have never been subjected to. They were taught to avoid them, distrust them, and that they were bad. And they find, heck, they’re just regular folks!

Of course there is more than just pure desire on Rick’s part to “save the children”. Saving them means keeping them non-logical thinkers who follow the authority, and accept the false syllogisms. This is the base that the GOP now counts on.

Of course, the problem with this all, is that in order to placate the base, one has to feed them the red meat they desire, and in doing so, the vast middle goes, “wha? THE F**K” is he talking about?

And they sigh, drop their heads, turn, and walk away.

And another PO-10-shall savior of our Republic, bites the dust.

And the winner is:

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