DHS funding and the Toddler Party

Not since Ronald Reagan circulated an ignorant tale of an extravagant "welfare queen" has a Republican pol so perfectly demonstrated the immature smallness of the modern conservative mind. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank gives us Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona, who, speaking yesterday of a Department of Homeland Security shutdown, said he had chatted with two TSA agents about it, "and they both said: 'Stay strong. We’ll be all right.'"

That's all Rep. Franks needs to propel him on a policy decision of major ramifications: the idle bravado of two TSA agents.

The effects of a DHS shutdown on 30,000 unpaid, furloughed employees are of no concern. Nor are the demoralizing effects on 50,000 TSA screening agents who'd be required to work, but without pay, as would 40,000 Customs and Border Protection employees, 40,000 active-duty Coast Guard members, 13,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and 4,000 Secret Service employees. For Rep. Frank, it's not to worry — because two of them will be "all right." He had talked with them. He knows.

Altogether foreign to Frank's narrowest of epistemological capacity is the straightforward concept of absurdity. And in this case, the absurdity is as immense as it is straightforward. Said an anguished DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson yesterday: It's "absurd to be having this conversation" within the sprawling throes of domestic terrorist threats. "It is even absurd that I have to spend a very, very large part of my work week simply defending paying our people to work."

I guess Johnson was unaware of Frank's consultation with the two TSA agents. What's to worry? "We'll be all right."

I don't often quote the Bible, yet one of its wisest and better-known passages neatly defines the fundamental difference between this country's Trent Frankses and its Jeh Johnsons, and the passage deserves citation: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

Who would have thought that the world's greatest power would someday be at the seemingly endless mercy of mere toddlers?

 

Comments

[dricey]

Conservatives argue differently than rational beings do. Rational beings argue based on datasets. So: 50,000 TSA screening agents, 40,000 Customs and Border Protection employees, etc. Rational beings would poll these datasets and report what the results were.

Conservatives, on the other hand, argue using anecdotes. They cherry-pick a couple of people they met; they find (or invent) the account of one or two people who had bad experiences with Obamacare, and so forth. Oftentimes, they also narrate the emotionally-charged details of their anecdotal examples. It works brilliantly because voters (who lie somewhere in between rational beings and conservatives) are far more emotional than they are intellectual, and these anecdotal accounts have warmth and appeal to them that rational beings' data sets don't. It works. It wins. Damn shame, too.

BTW: Conservatives do exactly the same thing when they dress up as Christians and quote the Bible, cherry-picking prooftexts regardless of what the rest of the Bible says.