Even when Republican rhetoric is misleading, you can usually see how it's supposed to affect people. The War on Terror stuff scared people into thinking that only Bush could protect us from terrorists. The attacks on STD prevention exploited the inability of Americans to think clearly when sex is mentioned. Attacks on gay marriage play on the ickiness of gay sex to non-liberals. (Personally, I don't really have much of an 'ick!' reaction to gay sex anymore. I guess if they're doing something really gross, that's one thing, but then I'd probably be grossed out by straight people doing it too.)Anyway, I have absolutely no idea why the people who wrote Bobby Jindal's State of the Union speech thought attacking funds for volcano monitoring was a political winner. The idea that volcanoes can mess up your life by destroying everything with rivers of molten lava is a pretty intuitive one. It's one of the first things that comes to mind when you think about volcanoes. So it seems like monitoring volcanos would be an obvious good idea. But I guess Republican speechwriters don't see it that way.
1 comment:
I'm trying to be generous ... maybe he meant to say that volcano monitoring is not very good *stimulus* (i.e. has a low multiplier)?
I do give him credit for this line, though, because unlike most of the things the GOP has been complaining about, the volcano monitoring is a real program that actually is in the stimulus. Baby steps.
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