Life After A Political Corpus Calloscotomy

From "Psychology Today":

Gazzaniga and Sperry's split-brain [corpus callosotomy] research is now legendary. One of their child participants, Paul S, had a fully functional language center in both hemispheres. This allowed the researchers to question each side of the brain. When they asked the right side what their patient wanted to be when he grew up, he replied "an automobile racer." When they posed the same question to the left, however, he responded "a draftsman." Another patient pulled down his pants with the left hand and back up with the right in a continuing struggle. On a different occasion, this same patient's left hand made an attempt to strike the unsuspecting wife as the right hand grabbed the villainous limp to stop it.

Note this phenomenon -- two halves of the same brain which have been cut off from each other causing each to giving completely different answers to the same question or conflicting responses to the same stimulus -- when reading how Mr. David Brooks' assays the problems which beset our political system.

First, when it comes to the failure of our political system to accomplish the basic functions of legislating, Mr. Brooks is appalled by the actions of a group called "Congress" who live in a place called "Washington":

DAVID BROOKS: First of all, it used to be you would pass — and this, I’m talking about the ACA ruling the Supreme Court has. You would pass a big piece of legislation, and there would be parts that would be unexpected. And so you would pass a follow-up piece of legislation to sort of fix it up.

We no longer work in a functional Washington that does that, and so now we rely on the Supreme Court, more or less, which is what they did in this decision, to go against the exact letter of the law, but to go with the interpretation of the law and to fix it up. And so it’s funny how the dysfunction in Congress has created the need for the Supreme Court to essentially step in and perform that role.

...

And here -- right here -- is where you can actually observe one, detached hemisphere of the Beltway Conservative brain handing control of the conversation off to the other, detached hemisphere of the Beltway Conservative brain.  Because right here is where Mr. Brooks stops talking about a dysfunctional entity called "Congress" which exists in a place called "Washington" and switches to the entirely unrelated subject of...

... a political party called "Republican" and how they are is comporting themselves during their presidential primary process (emphasis added):

We no longer work in a functional Washington that does that, and so now we rely on the Supreme Court, more or less, which is what they did in this decision, to go against the exact letter of the law, but to go with the interpretation of the law and to fix it up. And so it’s funny how the dysfunction in Congress has created the need for the Supreme Court to essentially step in and perform that role. 

As for the Republican Party, as Mark says, it’s interesting to see, on issue after issue, some people like Ted Cruz, who really — it’s really very much a base mobilization campaign, and almost in defiance of any Republican effort to reach out beyond the Republican base.

An affliction which makes you obsessively pull down your pants and them pull them up again, over and over, in public, would be considered a liability in most professions.

But for today's elite Beltway pundit, it is a skill worth millions.