The DVR and Daniel Webster

And now we come to the portion of our entertainment when I give advice that I have a very hard time following myself.   Specifically, blowing a gasket at Republican base voters for loudly espousing one firmly held position or standard one week and then loudly espousing the exact opposite position or standard a week later is a waste of time.

Yes, they're despicable.  Yes, they're incredibly destructive. But this is not hypocrisy in the usual sense of the word:

the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense.

Instead, it's like getting mad at your DVR because you played Blazing Saddles on it last night, but your kid used it to play a  Transformers atrocity the night before.  Because thanks to +25 years of conditioning, the Republican base voter is now merely a mindless, programmable device.  A piece of political hardware that does not notice or care that it routinely jettisons what it swore on the lives of its children it believed just yesterday and replaces it with today's Fox News/Hate Radio-approved message, which they also swear on  the lives of their children that they sincerely believe.

You cannot productively debate with an opponent like this because an opponent like this does not believe that words mean anything.  They are just expedient strings of phonemes that get them from here to there.  

You cannot reason with an opponent like this because an opponent like this sees no connection between what they said yesterday, what they say today and what they will say tomorrow.   

You cannot negotiate with an opponent like this, because agreements made today will simply vanish down the memory hole once they become inconvenient tomorrow.

Short of open warfare, the only way to stop them from being used to destroy our country is by relentlessly going after their operators and enablers.