As Dahlia Lithwick points out in her Slate article, conservatives believe that government can't do anything right. Not health care, not social safety nets, not protecting the environment. She also points out that despite all that, they believe that government can administer the death penalty just fine. Governor Perry of Texas claims to have never lost any sleep over the executions of 234 people. Whether or not any of them have been wrongly put to death is one thing, the more and immediately obvious problem is the total lack of doubt. How can the government be so inevitably bureaucratic and inefficient, yet make no mistakes on death penalty cases?
The other exception that she didn't write about is Defense. Somehow there isn't even a penny that should be cut from the over six hundred billion dollars spent on Defense. How can it be that the Pentagon runs with perfect efficiency, while no other department can run with even just an acceptable level of inefficiency?
If you think that's bad, their blind faith in tax cuts goes all the way into lunacy. The actual cost of the Bush tax cuts is not easy to calculate accurately, but suffice to say we're talking trillion. The tax cuts took effect in 2001, and completely failed to prevent the economic meltdown in 2009. The US$787-billion stimulus that conservatives called a failure? About a third of that was in tax cuts, so if the stimulus was a total failure, clearly tax cuts are a big part of that failure. More than a trillion in tax cuts failed to prevent the meltdown, and another US$218B in tax cuts "failed" to revive the economy. The latest round of tax cuts from the inane debt limit deal? Well, the first thing it failed to prevent was the downgrade of the US credit rating. When exactly are these tax cuts supposed to do anything?
You think corporations need cash? Apple Inc. alone is sitting on over US$76 billion in cash (or cash equivalents). If it's not spending that money, why would giving Apple another few more billion dollars change anything? If you understand anything at all about how banks work, you'll understand that the reason your savings account pays about 1% right now is because they have plenty of deposits compared to loans. There's plenty of money ready to be invested, if only there was something worthwhile to invest in.
The same Governor Perry also said that the verdict is still out on human causes of climate change. Ignoring the broad consensus among scientists for a moment, Perry's stance is foolish. Government leaders must act on incomplete information all the time. If he had some information the day before that terrorists were planning to hijack planes on 9/11, is he going to take no action until he gets complete and irrefutable intelligence on which buildings they plan to crash into? Of course not, he should do what he can with the best available information. Remember this is also a person who wants to dramatically cut social security now, even though it can probably still pay out 75% of benefits until 2085. Why is that verdict somehow "in"?
But Michele Bachmann takes this to her own level. She actually retold the story of a girl apparently suffered mental retardation after receiving a vaccine. Even the most cursory understanding of science should tell you that an anecdote has no meaning, because just because one happened after another does not mean there's any relationship between the two events. (In fact, it's quite hard to conclusively prove that one thing caused another.) Yet this woman - who has some non-zero chance of becoming president - believes this anecdote told by some random person she doesn't even know. She is completely unqualified for any position requiring judgement, because she has no way of telling what is reliable information and what isn't.
So, no, while I'm not at all pleased with many of his policies, President Obama doesn't really have to worry about losing my vote.
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