Ezra Klein has a question:
"If you look at the campaign last year, presidential, you can’t find a mention of public option,” Joe Lieberman said. “It was added after the election as a part of what we normally consider health insurance reform." That's not true, of course. Much like Lieberman's belief that the public option will increase the deficit, which has been rejected by the CBO, and has never been explained by Lieberman (requests to his office for comment or clarification were not returned).
But why go to all this trouble? Lieberman doesn't have to support the public option. He can oppose it on philosophical grounds, or on personal principles. Instead, he keeps raising verifiably untrue objections. It's baffling.
The strand in Republican and rightist politics that is most disturbing I have termed "political Pentecostalism": essentially that belief is more important than the facts on which belief is based--that knowledge is based on belief and conviction, not belief and justification. So, is it that Lieberman is making statements that are simply and explicitly false? Because all that matters is that he show his devotion--that grants him salvation. Works--and things like "facts"--simply don't matter.
(Incidentally, it seems that I wasn't the first to think of political Pentecostalism, some blogger uses it as an epithet, too--this one, though, manages to completely misrepresent atheism and lob it it Obama.)
If you want further evidence of the utter strangeness of today's rightist movement, here's this from PPP (via digby at Hullabaloo:
Losing NY-23 candidate Doug Hoffman became the latest in an increasingly long line of conservative politicians to blame his problems on ACORN yesterday despite the complete lack of evidence the organization played any role in his defeat.
The Republican base is with him though. PPP's newest national survey finds that a 52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately. Clearly the ACORN card really is an effective one to play with the voters who will decide whether Hoffman gets to be the Republican nominee in a possible repeat bid in 2010.
Belief in the ACORN conspiracy theory is even higher among GOP partisans than the birther one, which only 42% of Republicans expressed agreement with on our national survey in September.
Overall 62% of Americans think Obama legitimately won the election to only 26% who think ACORN stole it for him, as few Democrats or independents buy into that line of thinking.
I really hope that's wrong, and not that many people are utterly disconnected with reality.
On a somewhat lighter note, though, here's a textbook definition of a bad inference to the best explanation. Indeed, you might call it an inference to a really poor explanation.
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