It is instructive to take a look at Roy Blunt’s and Cynthia Davis’ respondes to H1N1 preparedness. Both Blunt and Davis pay allegiance to a similar conservative credo; yet Davis tells the government no thank you, keep your vaccine, while Blunt  puts on a big show, pointing his little finger at the big, bad government that didn’t get him his vaccine right away.

As we pointed out earlier, Blunt has, predictably, remained faithful to the tried-and-true Republican playbook: do nothing, obstruct, defame the opposition, and use the rhetoric of movement conservatism to do so – all suitably fact free, designed to give Blunt the requisite populist sheen.

Davis, however,  responds to the need to head off a potential public health crisis in a way that is true to her belief that government is not entitled to intervene  in health questions (except, of course, when they involve women’s reproductive rights):

It is not the job of the government or the schools to provide vaccines.  Schools are educational institutions, not health institutions. … ultimately this decision should be worked out between you and your doctor.

In Davis’ delusional reality, the recommendations of epidemiologists for disease control can be safely disregarded simply because they might interfere with her narrow definition of the role of government. She conceives of public health policy as a function of doctors interacting with comfortable, middle-class individuals who can afford their services – and if that is not really an effective way to deal with potential epidemics, then let the devil take the hindmost.

With such liars and simpletons for leaders, is it any wonder that the Republican cadres are going into a Tea Party tailspin? The bred-in-the-bone conservative masses are  tasked with understanding why things went south after George Bush led the way to the promised land, gave them their tax cuts, thrilled them with feckless displays of military might, gutted  corporate and financial regulation, and unleashed the free market dogs on a hapless nation. And what tools do they have to help them make sense of what happened? A choice between the mendacity of Republican power politics or the delusional dogma that fed its inevitable failure

*Graffito Angst photograph from Wikipedia Commons.