Cocktailhag, the blog » town hells

Joe Wilson, Repugs and emotional intelligence (or lack thereof)

rmp — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:49:55 +0000

Joe Wilson’s political opponent Rob Miller in the 2008 election and facing him again in 2010 has so far raised $700,000 to defeat Wilson thanks to the “You lie!” outburst. Wilson has raised $200,000 as of Friday morning from those who support what he claims was an emotional outburst. The outburst may have been strictly a political calculation. This time I chose to believe Joe that his emotions did get the better of him. If so why? The answer is anger and a lack of emotional intelligence, something that is a common factor in all Repugs’ thinking and actions. When their thinking is challenged, they will make personal attacks or cower away by ignoring a human plea.

On anger the Greek scholar and philosopher Aristotle, said, “To get angry is easy. The hard part is getting angry at the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way.”

That wise use of anger takes emotional intelligence the subject of an excellent book by Daniel Goleman in 1999. Goleman found the IQ score of a child does not predict success in life. In fact only 10-20% of high school valedictorians became highly successful in the business world. Emotional intelligence is a far better predictor of success than academic intelligence. C students with strong emotional intelligence had far greater success becoming CEOs and chair of boards.

Interestingly, a Boston Globe article Thursday by staffer Erica Noonan titled “Emotional intelligence’ a new hiring criterion,” underscored Goleman’s thesis. She said, “In this job market, it’s not just who you know, or even what skills you’ve mastered. It’s how well you understand other people that will get you ahead. This is the age of emotional intelligence, often called EQ, and today’s hiring managers want proof you’ve got it.”

Goleman examined what happens emotionally in the human brain that prevents emotional intelligence: The amygdala, or emotional part of the brain developed much earlier than the frontal lobe, the thinking part of the brain. Early humans had more need for the emotions involved in the fight or flight response, “Do I eat him before he eats me, or do I run?” than they were with thinking about a situation before deciding what to do. Our ancient ancestors had to have quick answers if they were to pass their genes on to us. After the thinking part became more developed, the amygdala could still hijack (overpower) the frontal lobe when danger came. This is now called an amygdala hijack and continues to this day.

Goleman has a five-step cure for how to prevent the hijack: 1) Watch yourself and learn to understand your emotions; 2) Find a role model who has a lot of emotional intelligence and study and learn from that person; 3) Notice the signals that tell you a hijack is beginning to take place; 4) Short circuit the hijack as soon as it starts. Learn to say such things as “I’ll think about it;” 5) Forgive yourself if you have a relapse and can’t prevent a hijack.

The Repugs like Wilson are not aware of these steps so they are incapable of using them. It’s mostly not their fault. It is how they were raised and their role models. They were taught to only have empathy for their kind because they were superior to outsiders. The least successful Repugs can feel better about themselves and their inner emotions if they can find someone else their lessers. And a black, young president. That’s soul food for White elders.

Joe Conason in a Friday Salon.com article had an insight, quite uncommon for Joe, on Republican politicians in his article, “Republican politicians have no empathy,” when he said, “ They only want government to intervene when they suffer personally…” As proof, Joe cited two examples Nancy Reagan and Pete Domenici:

“A constricted compassion that arises solely from personal experience has somehow come to seem peculiarly Republican. The most famous examples include former first lady Nancy Reagan’s crusade for stem-cell research and former Sen. Pete Domenici’s campaign for mental-health insurance parity. While both were admirable and courageous efforts that resulted in important legislation, they were cast as narrow exceptions to conservative ideology — exceptions grounded strictly in personal misfortune.”

Both lacked compassion and emotional intelligence until they had direct experience with these illnesses. We’ve seen countless examples on YouTube of this same lack of compassion during Town Hells and throughout debates in congress. The worst War Hawks have never experience war to have accurate inisight and compassion like Chuck Hagel has. He left the Senate because he couldn’t take the lack of compassion and resulting disastrous decisions causing immense suffering and death.

For the twelve years that I taught in Chicago inner-city elementary schools an anti violence, anti-bias, life skills curriculum I developed, I emphasized emotional intelligence and the great power of empathy and forgiveness. I used various activities to show students that empathy, caring and compassion are crucial for a person to be able to get along well with others. A child or animal who has been neglected and devoid of nurturing and human touch will develop a brain that is emotionally crippled and 30% smaller in size than an animal or child that has been nurtured. A three-year-old nurtured child will try to find a way to comfort another crying child. An un-nurtured three-year-old will order the child to stop and may even yell and hit the child. There is zero relationship between IQ and empathy. Children should be taught empathy by example and through discussions about emotions when the child is feeling the emotion. Teaching a child the old Native American belief that a person should not judge another person until they have walked a long time in the other person’s moccasins (shoes), can provide a very important emotional intelligence tool.

Unfortunately, to rid the world of the Joe Wilsons means we have to start with parenting and early childhood education. Chicago public schools don’t do that. Until they do, the violence and shootings will continue unabated no matter how much money is thrown at the problem by Arne Duncan or how many cops are assigned to the schools. Until we do that across America, we will continue to elect Repug thugs, hold Town Hells and stand little chance of reducing polarization and enacting compassionate laws.

MTP Disgraces Itself Once Again this Morning Just for Ratings

rmp — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:51:21 +0000

Since David Gregory took over MTP his ratings have gone down to the point that two weeks ago the unheard of happened and ABC’s This Week won the ratings battle. So MTP is searching for ways to win the week to week battle which they won last week. In their promo for this morning’s show they put on their website:

A Special Edition: As anger reaches a boiling point at town halls across the country, health care reform takes center stage. We’ll take an in-depth look at the debate with some leading voices: Fmr. House Majority Leader Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX), now the head of FreedomWorks, an organizer of protesters at town hall meetings; Sen. Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK), Member of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions; Fmr. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), an informal adviser to the White House and author of “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health Care Crisis”; & Rachel Maddow, Host of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. Plus we’ll get perspectives from around the country with Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY); Bruce Josten, Executive Vice President of the Chamber of Commerce; and Gov. Bill Ritter

Because of Maddow’s excellent research and reporting, Armey was forced to resign from his association with the the global law firm of DLA Piper. An Open Salon writer Michael Rodgers provided excellent background on the Maddow-Armey appearance if you are not familiar with it. He wrote, “Apparently DLA Piper didn’t like being associated with Armey’s FreedomWorks astroturfing campaign designed to misinform and encourage people to disrupt town hall meetings being held across the Country for the purpose of clarifying issues about health care reform.” The post also has a video clip from when Armey made an ass out of himself in a debate on Hardball between Salon’s Joan Walsh and Dick Armey where Armey tells Joan he’s glad she could never be his wife,

Armey tried to soften his firing by DLA Piper explaining to Politico’s David Mark, “The firm is busy with its business, and shouldn’t be asked to take time out from their work, to defend themselves of spurious allegations,” Armey said. “No client of this firm is going to be free to mind its own business without harassment as long as I’m associated with it.”

If MTP really wanted to inform the public as CBS Morning Show did one hour earlier, they would not have let Dick Armey obfuscate, confuse and waste valuable time just to have a shootout with Rachel. The absence of facts and truth is what is missing most from the debates and M$M coverage. Armey’s successful fight to kill Hillary health reform and his kill efforts now are disgusting in the extreme because of the suffering and huge economic problems created. Half of all personal bankruptcies and mortgage foreclosures are due to lost or inadequate health insurance coverage.

So NBC in its infinite wisdom, gives this scumbag and completely failed former congress critter their platform to continue to wreak damage just so their ratings will compete with ABC. They finally allow their best journalist to appear on MTP so Rachel can participate in a fight that was already over when Armey was fired. Where was NBC News when Rachel did her research behind the Town Hells and Armey’s Army marched and yelled so that the insurance and health industry can continue to screw this dupe Army and millions of senior citizens?

The M$M blames Obama for losing his message on a program he didn’t create because even though he has thoroughly debunked all the myths and lies during his Town Halls they claim he hasn’t because of those Town Hells and the insurance paid ads and thugs that they give maximum coverage instead of ensuring they provide the truth and debate on issues that are justifiably contentious.

Even when ads opposing reform are prepared, deceit is the prime method. The Right Wing Health Care Group who created the anti-socialist medicine ads tricked British women into appearing in the ads.

The number one distortion that continues unabated is the simple fact that there is no such thing as Obamacare. The president chose, wisely or not, to let congress develop the reform plan. There are five bills, three in the House and two in the Senate that are a long ways from being completed into a final bill. Yet, the Repugs blame everything on Obama as if their part, which should be a major part, plays no role in the objections Americans have on all sides of the political spectrum.

During the MTP show this morning both Coburn and Armey claimed eureka the solution is to let anyone use any plan in any state. So in good ole capitalistic fashion, the states with the best insurance will cause all the others to improve. They totally ignore the fact as has been pointed out by Obama in his recent Town Halls, that those state programs who would have outsiders from around the country descend on them, would be overwhelmed and that mayhem and state economic disaster would result. This is typical Repug thinking that there is always a simple answer for the most complex problems and since it sells well, why care about the true consequences.

Those of us who want single payer want it done at the federal level so that each state can’t have a totally different version and moving to another state creates great difficulties. Obama said from the start of his presidential campaign that single payer is out. Some states have decided to go single payer on their own. Obama has pledged that any public option will not eventually lead to nationwide single payer. We are left with the public option as our only hope to rein in the insurance/health monopolies that rake in trillions that could be spent on actual health care. Now even that option is fading away.

The president said many times in his Town Halls that any public option would be self-sustaining and would not be able to use public funds if it got into financial trouble. It would have no government competitive advantage. The Repugs refuse to recognize that fact including the head of the American Chamber of Commerce on MTP this morning and make the false claim that a public option will ruin the insurance industry because of an unfair competitive advantage. The Repugs love the fact that Fedex and UPS have more than successfully competed with the US Postal Service, yet when Obama makes that point when defending his version of a public option, it is totally ignored.

This morning HuffPo reported that the Public Option is not the essential element according to Obama’s health secretary Sebelius who indicated to get Repug support that Sen. Conrad’s Co-Op idea may be necessary to get health reform passed. Many on the left shout that the Dems should get some balls and just use reconciliation and stop trying to woo the PON Repugs and the need for 60 votes in the Senate. Conrad has pointed out correctly that there are requirements to make reconciliation work such as paying for everything in the bill in six years that make this approach an unrealistic option.

I’m glad that all this grandstanding nonsense and distortion are happening now so these tactics will be old when more honest discussion can take place in the fall. I doubt that they have forced Obama to retreat because I suspect he already had that in his process thinking knowing that it would be very hard to get a true public option into a final bill. This distraction from the real debate has obscured many reforms that will get into the final bill and create a much better system than now exists.

That doesn’t mean I am at all happy for just getting any kind of bill passed or that I am backing down from the fact that by far the best solution is single payer. However, what Obama has pointed out and can’t be ignored, to crash our insurance based system too quickly would create economic crisis that would make the bank bailout puny in comparison. Any serious system changes will take considerable time and agony to implement.

For reform opponents to ignore Obama’s plea that to do nothing would be disastrous, is the utmost in hypocrisy and lunacy. It takes a lot to top Repug hypocrisy, but somehow they keep doing it. As their OWE, I suspect their tactics will backfire by the fall and many more Americans will see them for the hypocrites they are as happened in the last presidential election.

PS. As of this posting, I can’t find a link that would provide the video of this mornings’ MTP. When one is available, I will provide it.

Segments from this show were released at 1PM.

Danger Alert: The Right, White Christian Apocalypse No Longer Hereafter

rmp — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 20:25:55 +0000

Rachel Maddow has done a superior job of connecting the dots behind the town hells. Last night she had a seven minute scary discussion (at the 8-minute point) with an insider, Frank Shaeffer, who deeply regrets helping his father create a dangerous monster that is running amuck to kill for the health industry real health care reform. Bitter irony for the ignorant pawns that are harming themselves and our nation.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.

I haven’t read his book but I did find an article written by him that provides his answer as to why these pawns let themselves boil over with rage and hate and become the Repugs and America’s worst enemy. He says about both the leaders and the pawns, “They can’t compute that their white man-led conservative revolution is dead. They can’t reconcile their idea of themselves with the fact that white men like them don’t run the country any more — and never will again. To them the black president is leading a column of the “other” into their promised land. Gays, immigrants, blacks, progressives, even a female Hispanic appointed to the Supreme Court… for them this is the Apocalypse.”

The women pawns, there aren’t many women leaders, feel even more abandoned because many of them depend on their men. Men who are frightened and very angry are not very comforting to these females.

Schaeffer sums up the current mindset of all these town hell fanatics, “The last presidential election (to paraphrase Bart Simpson) “broke their brains.” What else could explain their embrace of intimidation — rather than discourse — over the health care debate and such unsavory moments of madness as the Republicans accusing Obama and Judge Sonia Sotomayor of racism, knowing full well that they’d just destroyed their chances with the Hispanic community forever?”

Schaeffer in an attempt to try and explain the craziness to left nurturing brains wrote, “The Republican Old Guard are in the fix an atheist would be in if Jesus showed up and raised his mother from the dead.” I can’t imagine there is a cocktailhag anywhere that wouldn’t beam at that brilliant visualization. Still I find it difficult with my left brain to understand how any brain could see fascism in either Obama or Sotomayor. The goons that Frank and his father Frances left us with must be looking in the witch’s mirror and seeing the wall rushing toward them, look for anyone not in their tribe to blame. Hitler was the last evil demon to seriously threaten America so those left heathens must be aligned with Adolph’s Nazi troops to put wonderful, can do no wrong America again in such dire straights.

Facist definitions and actions are flying left and right. Sara Robinson a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and one of the few trained social futurists in North America, says in an August 7 post that, “…our fascist American future now looms very large in the front windshield — and those of us who value American democracy need to understand how we got here, what’s changing now, and what’s at stake in the very near future if these people are allowed to win — or even hold their ground.”

Will the crazies need to draw blood or even assassinate Obama before they are held to account? Our M$M is unlikely to do much because covering crazies is easy and captivates many readers and viewers. It’s left to the blogging world. If a defector like Frank who knows these sickos well is that concerned, we should be too. Rachel’s doing her part and so should we. What that part should be is open to discussion. Unfortunately, I don’t have any definitive answers.