Republicans are evil, and not just garden-variety evil at that. [View all]

[Jackpine Radical]

First, the leaders:

It's often said among psychologists that the main difference between a Ken Lay/Bernie Madoff-style psychopath and the ordinary high PCL-R street criminal lies in their ability to delay gratification and not act on their immediate impulses.

But among .001%ers like Romney & the Koch Brothers, it's clear that the urge to grab everything is pretty overwhelming & they never read their Macchiavelli, who advised the Prince to leave the peasants enough so they wouldn't be driven to desperate acts like Jacqueries. The peasants were recognized as the goose, as it were, and the Prince was advised not to kill it in a quest for all the golden eggs at once.

These people we're dealing with are less enlightened than the evil men for whom ol' Niccolo was writing. They are smash & grab types, willing to bring the species to an end and ruin the biosphere if doing so somehow helps them pile up a little more lucre.

And as for the followers:

The typical troglodytic Tea Partier has several themes running through their head, all of them evil. First, there is the psychopath-wannabee schema, wherein they identify with the .01% and desperately want to keep taxes down so that they won't have to pay them when they get rich, as will inevitably happen when Jesus gets around to recognizing their true worth.

Then there is the rage schema, wherein they hate everyone unlike them, and maybe even secretly know they are intellectually inferior to, say, Obama and ramp up their racism to assure themelves that the "Halfrican" must be "inferior" because of his skin color. They see themselves as Not Getting Theirs because some poor people somewhere are getting a bare subsistence out of one or another government program.

The Teabag mentality doen't function like a rational mind. Ideas have value only insofar as they drive the rage, which in itself is a reinforcing state. Rage for the sake of rage. Rage generally arises from unacknowledged fears ("fight or flight&quot . It's a lot more comfortable in the long run to be permanently enraged than permanently in a panic state, so after a while they learn to seek out rage triggers as a way of escaping their anxieties and blocking their awareness of their own inadequacies.

The rage state functions like a psychologically addicting drug. This is why it makes no sense to try to argue with them. It's not about seeking truth or finding the most reasonable course of action. It's about maintaining their rage fix. If you challenge them on any given point, their anxiety will start to rise and they will quickly jump to another rage trigger. Anybody who has argued with one of these people knows what I mean. They come on about the deficit, you counter with real numbers, and suddenly they've jumped to railing about Obama's birth certificate or "welfare queens" or whatever Rush fed them this morning.

Rush, Hannity, O'Reilly and all the rest are their drug pushers. It doesn't matter if Fox lies to them. They don't care. They need their fix. Truth and rationality have nothing to do with it.