Does Any of This Surprise You?

Pretty interesting piece in the Times by Thomas Edsall about Tea Party Republicans. It's good the whole thing, but I want to highlight just a couple of graphics from it that say everything about the nut cases who have shut down the government, and apparently would not have any qualms about refusing to raise the country's debt limit, which almost everybody else in the universe says would be catastrophic. Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg is working on a study of the Republican party. The graphics below are the results of polls of six focus groups.

One of the key factors pushing Republicans to extremes, according to Greenberg’s report, is the intensity of animosity toward Obama. This animosity among participants in all six focus groups is [below] which represents a “word cloud” of focus group references to the president, with the size of each word in the cloud proportional to the frequency with which it was used.

Republicans on Obama

Now, does any of this surprise you? Of course not . . . but look closely and you will not see anything about Obama's race. That doesn't surprise me either, but don't kid yourself, if people in these groups really said what was on their mind, "nigger" would be in big, big letters up there.

Here's another. This one depicts the words that came up most frequently in the six focus groups.

Words occurring most in the GOP focus groups

Hmmm. I'll bet the words wouldn't be all that different in a poll about what the Republicans are doing to the country right now.