When Boehner told Sen Reid to "go F&%# yourself" at least he wasn't pretending to be

[Bill USA]

.. more human than he is (eg. his histrionic lugubriousness). He was just being the Repugnant that he is. ..Oh, and he was drawing inspiration from the Great Malevolence, Dick Cheney, who said the same to Sen. Patrick Leahy (a member of the Senate actually elected in a legitimate election) in 2004.

The GOP are making D.C. the Toxic Waste Super Cite of the country. the Repugnants seem to fall into two camps. One, abject con-men who will do anything for the right price (and obviously, corporations and the super wealthy are calling the shots by that measure), or the utter idiot ideologues, who really couldn't qualify to run a hot dog stand but think they know something about public policy and how to run a government. They think being zealots qualifies them as 'sincere' when they are really just fooling themselves and believeing that they think being 'sincere' (as they believe they are) over-rules everything else including knowledge, competence and full consciousness.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/06/the-words-hurt-model-of-polarization/

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But Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood and Yphtach Lelkes suggest in a new article that “affective polarization” may better describe the divide between party identifiers. Instead of focusing on ideology and policy positions, Iyengar and his colleagues draw on a psychological concept called social identity theory.

They argue that simply identifying with a political party, as most Americans do, is enough to generate unfavorable attitudes toward the other side, or the “out-party.” (This idea should feel pretty familiar to Red Sox and Yankees fans.) And a variety of survey evidence shows that in recent decades Democratic identifiers have come to view Republicans increasingly negatively, and vice versa.

First, Iyengar and his colleagues examined partisans’ ratings of the other party on a “feeling thermometer” – a measure that allows a survey respondent to say how “warm” or “cool” they feel toward another person or group.

In surveys in the 1980s, about 40 percent of Americans gave the out-party a rating lower than a neutral score of 50. But that figure climbed to 53 percent by the 1990s, 56 percent in 2004, and 63 percent in 2008. In 2008, the average rating of the out-party on a 0 to 100 scale was around a decidedly chilly 30. By way of comparison, the average score that Catholics and Protestants gave each other was about 66.
(more)

[freshwest]

1. Interesting, thanks, Bill USA. K & R.