GOP: Remembrances of things that never happened

The latest Smithsonian magazine tells us of the ongoing research into the implanting in your brain  memories of things that never happened.  At MIT,  a pair of neuroscientists prompted a fearful reaction by a terrorized mouse to a false memory of electrical shock. The key to this was the manipulation of the brain to cause the poor rodent to wrongly remember the pain of a similar event that never happened.

Hmmmm...

With all due respect to  MIT and another laboratories working on these experiments,  the past election proved that it's possible to manipulate the voters in the same way. The Republicans made you believe that President Obama was the villain who prevented unemployment from dropping to zero.  Keen practitioners of Plato's noble lie, they made up a lot of traumatic things that  led the voters to blame the president for inspiring President Bush to cause a serious recession.

Candidate Mitt Romney said it very well when he contended that the economy was improving but Obama made it worse. Even if it weren't true, never happened, it sank into the  voter's memory lanes so that a worker  at a plant gate could fume that he would have had a job today  if Obama hadn't single-handedly bailed out the auto industry.

And when Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor, an out-of-the-starting-gate critic of the Affordable Care Act predicted that it would soon bloat health care costs by 41 pct.,   it had a worse than chilling  effect on many voters.

There is even existing today  a False Memory Syndrome Foundation in Philadelphia that tries to be helpful in these matters, telling its online readers that "the professional organizations agree: the only ways to distinguish between true and false memories is by external corroboration."

We think a remedy lies well beyond that.  As  John Hay,  Teddy Roosevelt's secretary of state. once glumly advised his boss:  "Dealing with people to whom mendacity is a science is no easy thing."

Rubio: Obamacare led to IRS scandal

Sen. Marco Rubio  has his grandiose ambition wrapped so tightly around his yearning to be president that maybe we should forgive him for sounding as dumb as Sarah Palin at times.  The Florida Republican wannabe wunderkind's latest non-sequitur exposed the sort of logic that could leap the Grand Canyon.

 In an email to a constituent, Rubio blamed Obamacare for the IRS controversy.  As you may have heard, Rubio hates Obamacare and hopes to ride it to the Republican nomination for president in 2016.  So, the only answer to things like the IRS keyhole, he says, is to repeal Obamacare". He may yet throw in the Oklahoma tornado as manufactured in the Oval Office,   but you  get my point about Obama-hating.

The May issue of Smithsonian magazine quotes an angry response by a specialist in microbe research to a scientific team's report that changes in gut bacteria could  protect us from strokes.   Jonathan Eisen of the University of California scowled that the team's ideas were "completely absurd, dangerous , and self-serving claims that confuse  the issue of correlation versus causation."

Back to Rubio:  Wish I'd said that.

GOP's Ted Cruz, a Joe McCarthy rising star

Tea Party Sen. Ted Cruz's  odyssey toward an even more debased  GOP  dropped him off on a stage in Independence, Oh., this week  for the Cuyahoga County Republican Party's annual  in-name-only dinner toast to  Abe Lincoln.  For the evening Cruz received a share of partisan  huzzahs for his cockeyed  mythology and the published reports didn't hesitate to refer to him as a "rising star" in national politics.  That destined-to-be ephemeral title seems to be catching on at least with his bug-eyed gang, which tells you how easy it is today to be an acclaimed  star if you traffic in saying a lot of crazy things.

In Cruz's  case, the freshman Texas senator has slandered  Chuck Hagel by questioning whether the decorated war veteran and nominee for Secretary of Defense was on the payroll (maybe $200,000!) of  America's worst  enemies, say, Iran and North Korea.  He couldn't prove it, but that's part of Cruz's mystical  M.O.  It would have made more sense if he had accused Hagel of spilling spaghetti sauce on his new necktie or not lowering  the toilet seat.

Cruz also tossed in his world-view that Iran praised the Hagel nomination - which it didn't.

The rising star - `Whoops, now I'm saying it -   is drawing a lot of attention for being a reincarnation of Red-baiter Joe McCarthy for his questioning of his targets' patriotism.  Writing  on the New Yorker's blog, Jane Mayer recalled that Cruz,  a Harvard law school man as was Obama,   once  declared in a speech that Obama would have made a "perfect president of  Harvard Law School"  because there were  a dozen Marxists on the faculty.

Well, the GOP has had a series of rising stars that immediately come to mind. Sarah Palin.  Tim Pawlenty. Bobby Jindal.  And the party ended up with the likes of John McCain and Mitt Romney at the top of the tickets.

So I'll stick with the big Thermador kitchen appliance ad in Smithsonian magazine that says:  "Some stars burn brighter than others". It's also true that, conversely,  some stars are not very bright at all.

Smithsonian Magazine:The myth of split infinitives

There was some good news in the February Smithsonian magazine for those us who have labored over typewriters and then computers for so many years.  According to the experts, you won't go to Hell  if you split an infinitive.   And you won't suffer in purgatory if you, as I just did, begin a sentence sentence with a conjunction.  What's more, there's no shameful abuse of grammar if you end a sentence with a preposition.

A periodical of Smithsonian's worthy standards has now reassured us that all of the above transgressions are myths  That's right, myths that should in no way intrude on clearly written texts..  Indeed, it goes still farther by telling  us:

"But perhaps the biggest grammar myth of all is the infamous taboo against splitting  an infinitive,  as in "to boldly go'".  The truth is that you can't split an infinitive,  since 'to'  isn't part of the  infinitive, there's nothing to split."  If that gets a little technical for you, don't bother.   Go back to the part that says infinitives aren't divisible and move on with a clear conscience.

Smithsonian also quotes some notable sources to free us from our guilty conscience.  There were the comforting words of Katharine Hepburn, who once observed:

"If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun."

Then it closes with the outburst of an angry Raymond Chandler when a copy editor at the Atlantic Monthly messed around with the author's  prose:

"When I split an in infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split."

That works for me.

NOTE:  My column on Kasich's budget and the pizza twirlers in the Ohio General Assembly is posted on Plunderbund.

Legal Neanderthals are rising again

WEEKEND WASH:

I seldom watch the Sunday morning TV news shows, but happened to catch a few minutes of ABC's"This Week" that produced one of the better putdowns of the week. In a panel merry-go-round on the incendiary Arizona immigrant law, George Will criticized Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, one of the current conservative floor models, for opposing the Arizona law. Will argued that nobody gets into the Virginia Statehouse without an ID - so there! But Al Sharpton promptly felt it necessary to advise the pundit that, unlike Arizona, in Virginia, everybody must show an ID, including white folks. Cool.

While we're in Virginia, we might as well mention the State's Republican Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, who ordered new lapel pins for his staff that shielded a Greek goddess' exposed breast that appears on the original state seal - a new version of John Ashcroft's Boobgate cover-up. Remember the drapery Ashcroft added to the Spirit of Justice statue in the Justice Department's Great Hall? My guess is that breast-beating Cuccinelli changed the seal to avoid any embarrassment if the old seal, which has been around since 1776, visibly excited him.

Is there no end to the number of empty heads that want to offer their spins on illegal immigrants? Among the latest is Congressman Duncan Hunter Jr., California Republican, who wants to deport all American-born children of illegal immigrants. Can you imagine how that would have played with the millions of Italian, Irish and eastern European immigrants who arrived on our shores - one way or another - a century ago? The huddled masses, I believe. Unfortunately, in today's world, the immigrants aren't all baseball players.

A recent issue of Smithsonian magazine has a piece on Neanderthals that quotes Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins Program at the Natural History Museum, which would be worthy of mailing to your favorite outer-conservative: Says Potts: "The Neanderthals were smart. They had brains the same size as Cro-Magnon and were very clever at using local resources. They lacked the ability to expand their thinking and adapt to changing conditions."

You can take it from there...