FOR BAGGERS, IS IGNORANCE A SIGN OF FREEDOM?

A few years ago I remarked on how BushBots seemed impervious to evidence and Steve Benen reminds me that the Tea Party folks aren't much different:

And perhaps no group of people is fueled more intensely by misperceptions of reality than the Tea Party crowd.

Of people who support the grassroots, "Tea Party" movement, only 2 percent think taxes have been decreased, 46 percent say taxes are the same, and a whopping 44 percent say they believe taxes have gone up.

If one uses tobacco, there was an increase in the excise tax to pay for an expansion of the SCHIP program, so there's a narrow sense in which the Baggers are partly correct that taxes increased. On the other hand, the reduction in payroll taxes withheld affected tens of millions more people than the excise tax, so on balance the Baggers should be happy with Pres. Obama and the Democrats if they were rational.

But they aren't. As John Cole points out, the Baggers are

"a group of people who are completely uninterested in the truth, unwilling to believe anything that comes from someone other than Rush or Glenn Beck or an “acceptable” source of information, and who have a vested interest in believing what they want to believe, reality be damned."

It's almost as if they think they are asserting their existential freedom by denying simple facts, perhaps like Dostoevsky's Underground Man:

Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.