skulls filled with bumper stickers and fear

* Drifty:

"I don't believe for a second that if someone still backs Dubya at this late date, they can be "gotten", so I have no interest in wooing a single one of the reprehensible, died-in-the-sheep’s-clothing “red vote”.

I have no interest in debating them or swapping scripture with them or thumb wresting them for forensic points because it simply doesn’t work. This is the tribe of the “Always In Error But Never In Doubt”. This clan of Simple, Declarative Dumbfucks, have been proven bloodily, monstrously, horrifically, incontrovertibly, overwhelmingly and tragically wrong year after year after year and it hasn’t made so much as a dent in their certitude, or nary a new cortical fold or crease
[]
They are lost and doomed; have filled their skulls with bumper stickers and fear, welded it shut, and melted the keys down for tinfoil to line their beanies."

* driftglass inadvertently makes my case for compulsory voting:

"Consider the numbers (John) Dean is citing: That 23% of the American population are “pure, rightwing Authoritarian followers”. That a tiny fraction – perhaps 1% -- are Liberal, but the rest, the overwhelming majority, identify as Conservatives.

So right there you can kiss any precious pet theory of “balance” goodbye.

Then consider the shameful fact that only about half of the eligible public actually votes during Presidential elections anyway, and quite a bit less at the midterms. And given that it’s a pretty good bet that the 23% who are aggressive, dogmatic followers of a Dear Leader will be much more likely to find their way to the polls, they will be far more represented in the voting half of Americans than in the non-voting half.

So, being conservative (pun intended), lets say 40% of the actually voting public are those “pure, rightwing Authoritarian followers”

And then consider that the numerical split between Dems and Republicans is about 50/50, and the “pure, rightwing Authoritarian followers” tend to overwhelmingly be Conservatives, you end up with damned near 70-80% of Republican voters fitting this profile.

Then, just for good measure, figure out from your own experience how many voters of any Party are actually agenda-driving “activists” -- the ones who pound the pavement, evangelize and make and enforce policy and discipline -- and what kind of Leaders, Policy Makers and Disciplinarians you are likely to grow in this Brownshirt Hothouse, and you begin to see what Liberals have seen and tried to warn this nation about for decades.

That the Grand Old Party has been taken over by monsters."