He’s Out There, He’s Outraged, and He’s Outrageous

Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony
Stuck a feather in his hat
And called it macaroni.Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy.

Richard Schaklburg 1775

When I say that he’s outrageous I mean that in the most complimentary way. Dennis Kucinich may not be a serious contender for the Oval Office at in the polls at this point but he’s campaigning as if he were, daring to address issues that are not the official Democratic Party centrist position. Hitting at the top contenders weakest points. Calling the Bush administration on every indecent move they make.

From Digg.com comes this article published in the RAW Story

Kucinich: ‘Belligerent’ Bush Admin. trying to ‘deceive’ US into ‘yet another war’

“The belligerent Bush Administration is using this pending designation to convince the American public into accepting that a war with Iran is inevitable,” Kucinich said. “This designation will set the stage for more chaos in the region because it undercuts all of our diplomatic efforts.” (read more here)

Kucinich is the darkhorse in this race but he certainly hits the emotional buttons Weston talks about in his book The Political Brain. He is the only contender who can claim that he voted against the war in Iraq and has consistently criticized it all these years. He is the one Democrat in this race who has been the big thorn in the Republicans toe because he has constantly called them out on their bad policies and their devious tactics.

With the recent endorsements by Michael Moore which probably means a great deal of money flowing his way via Moor’s rich and powerful friends and The AFL-CIO, Kucinich is beginning to make his move from a distant fourth in the pack o He will appeal to voters across a wide range of the spectrum because he has one of those pulled himself up by his bootstrap life stories that are so appealing to the emotions of voters and he knows how to deliver a well written speech. With the right advisers and enough money, Kucinich could come up from behind the pack at the last minute and steal this nomination right out from under Hillary Rodham Clinton’s pert little nose.

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This is Your Brain. This is your Brain on Politics:

Well I got a hammer,
And I got a bell,
And I got a song to sing, all over this land.Its the hammer of justice,
Its the bell of freedom,
Its the song about love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land.Its the hammer of justice,
Its the bell of freedom,
Its the song about love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land.

Pete Seeger and Lee Hays performed by Peter, Paul, and Mary

My Delphi Forum friend MerlinsDad (who I met at the Political Circus and now hang out with at the Poll Vault over at Delphi Forums) was feeding me large chunks of Drew Weston’s book, “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotions in Deciding the Fate of the Nation” and got me so darn interested in it that I just had to have a copy which arrived in the mail yesterday. Drew Weston is decidedly liberal and he has set out to change the way Democrats run their campaigns.

This promises to be a better than average good read. MerlinsDad says it is. He’s going to be reading along with me the second time through and we’ll discuss. I’m going to try to get him to start his own Blog so it will be a permanent record of rational discourse between two friends. Actually I’m going to try to bully him into it because I’ve tried convincing him he has plenty to say in a Blog that is worth saying and he keeps giving me this “Aw shucks, attitude.” I’m a fierce bully when I want to be. ;^)

I tried to start reading this last night around 10:30 pm and promptly fell asleep three pages in. I guess I was a little tired. The heat has been getting to me and we’ve had a respite. It’s 8:54 am and the temperature is 69* with 86% humidity. It was raining earlier but the sky is partly cloudy and we’re looking fo a high of 86*. I hope the humidity clears up as the day goes by…

Well, let us begin the discussion. I’ve read the forward and 12 pages into the first chapter. Weston is a neuroscientist who has been studying how the brain processes political and legal information as well as a clinician who trains psychologists and psychiatrists in understanding the “nuances of of meaning in what people say, do and feel.” The central thesis of the book is that the assumptions of the past from the time of Plato and Socrates and the Enlightenment have been that human beings think rationally and when presented with contradictory information the will examine all of the data and come to a reasonable conclusion.

Weston contends that this is not the case. He asserts that the politically partisan brain of the die hard Democrat or Republican will reject contradictory information about their candidates based on what he calls “gut feelings” and he set out to prove it by watching the brain at work in real time with the advanced technology we have at hand today. He and his colleagues set forth 4 hypotheses about what they expected they might find during their studies.

1) Threatening information about candidates would produce negative emotions that would activate neural circuits associated with negative emotional states

2) They expected to see activation of the part of the brain that is associated with regulating emotions .

3) They expect to see a “brain in conflict” as indicated by activations in a region that monitors and resolves conflict

4) Since they suspect that people “reason with their gut” or emotions they didn’t expect to see activation in the brain that is normally associated with reason or rational thinking.

Generally scientists don’t get everything on their wish list when they set out to do a study like this but in this case, Weston studied 15 Democrats and 15 Republicans and in every case all 4 hypotheses were verified. Humans are not the rational, reasoning creatures we have been taught they were all these years when it comes to politics. We operate on a very emotional level and this has some serious consequences on the campaign trail.

This may explain why I just can’t get into Hillary Clinton. She doesn’t turn me on emotionally. I don’t really dislike her all that much perse. I’m sort of neutral. She’s blah. There’s nothing exciting about her. Nothing that grabs me and makes me say, “YEAH, shes my candidate!”

I really want to feel much more strongly about the first viable woman candidate for President. I want to be excited that there is a woman running for President who actually might win. I mean when that Republican woman ran some years back I was excited. But Hillary is just not cutting it for me.

In truth, I’m far more excited by the prospect of Bill Clinton being the ‘First Gentleman’ in the Whitehouse than I am in Hillary sitting in the Oval office. I get a huge giggle at the thought of the ire of the Republicans imagining Bill lurking in the halls of the Whitehouse giving advice. Truth is, I want Bill back far more than I want Hillary back and that will probably be why I vote for her in the primary. More’s the pity.

If I had my druthers, I’d want Dennis Kucinich in the front runner position. Now there’s the Democrat who moves me emotionally! Listening to him give a political speech about his policies and the Democratic Party in general is like listening to an old time Evangelical Revival stump Preacher. HE MOVES ME! To tears.

B

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