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From the highly recommended reading in Paul Krugman's "You’re So Vain."

Chait professes himself puzzled by the right’s intellectual insecurity. Me, not so much. Here’s how I see it: in our current political culture, the background noise is overwhelmingly one of conservative platitudes. People who have strong feelings about politics but are intellectually incurious tend to pick up those platitudes, and repeat them in the belief that this makes them sound smart. (Ezra Klein once described Dick Armey thus: “He’s like a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.”)

Inevitably, then, such people react with rage when they’re shown up on their facts or basic logic — it’s an attack on their sense of self-worth.

Krugman is really on to something there.

It's easy to dismiss those we liberals disagree with as dumb or "factually challenged", but dismissal ignores the fact that there tends to be reasons for every phenomenon you see, even the political ones. There's gains to be made for my side through understanding the recent conflagration of conservative mythology, which didn't seem to be as prominent 30 years ago as it is today.

On the other hand finding the right approach won't be so simple. I recently got into an argument with a person who repeated the platitude that "the government does nothing right, name me one government program that works" in my presence. I choose the U.S. Postal Service (when I could have gone with Social Security, the VA, or Medicare.) The story ends with that person who is now reticent to talk to me at all, mostly because he ended up not being able to defend one of his central, comforting political platforms.

I see Rachel Maddow, Ta-Nehisi and Yglesias covering the controversy over Arizona Rep. Trent Franks's comments. Here's the clip from The Rachel Maddow Show:

In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say "How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can't believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible." And we're right, we're right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America's soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by the policies of slavery. And I think, What does it take to get us to wake up?

I'm not getting the same thing from his comments that everyone else is. He seems to be saying that slavery was bad, and these days, so is abortion, for the black community, in terms of destructiveness. I think he's being hyperbolic in the comparison, but I'm not sure if he's into nut case territory.

He is overstating his case, as 40%, not half, of pregnancies among black women end in abortion. But he's still right in that there is something terribly wrong with any people suffering a 40% abortion rate. Is there even a historical precedent for that?

The blowback I see Franks getting for his statement so far seems to centered around his foolish slavery comparison, while ignoring the fact that a 40% abortion rate is truly epidemic. Why we as a society aren't doing something about this is beyond me.

I include Franks in that condemnation. Franks attempts to ban abortion were unsuccessful, but even if they had been, it would have done nothing to "solve" the problem of desperate women seeking desperate solutions.

To wit: I see a problem in 40% of black women wanting to have an abortion, rather than even 100% of all women being able to have an abortion.