Quote for the day

In critiquing Bobby Jindall's State of the Union response, Paul Krugman nails it:

Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny.

The only thing I'd add to this is that the GOP has been doing this for ages. All you need do is remember the way in which United Nations critic Jesse Helms savored speaking the name of then UN Secretary-General "Boutros Boutros-Ghali" back on the 1990s. One had a sense that Helms and his allies reasoned taht any organization run by a guy with such a funny name must, perforce, be a ridiculous proposition. And the GOP's penchant for ridiculing scientific studies that they don't understand is long standing and can be seen as recently as John McCain's criticism of DNA sampling studies of endangered Grizzly bear populations, undertaken for the purpose of ascertaining genetic diversity and determining just how endangered the species really was. McCain caricatured these necessary studies as "paternity tests."