[Excerpt] ... That last is the tagline Brownback delivers in one of his TV commercials that you can watch yourself on YouTube. It is something to behold. I have never been in a cult indoctrination session, but I have started to think that this ad depicts the procedure. Here is this weirdly smirking man, Governor Brownback, telling you something he obviously doesn’t believe—and then he’s telling a different group—and then another. Each of these audiences is nodding constantly; each of them is made up of clean, neatly dressed people—some of them in a well-appointed suburban kitchen, some of them sitting on a pleasant veranda, some of them in a corporate boardroom. And the subject the governor is advising them on is how you get out of poverty! You know: hard work, family structure. “That’sthe way out of poverty!,” he exults, with that odd smile of his. To judge by the clothes and the settings, however, these people have never even had cause to doubt the timely arrival of their next meal, let alone fear a lifetime of ill-paid toil. For practical purposes, Brownback might as well be giving them tips on how to land a spaceship on the surface of the moon.
It makes no sense. But the unspoken object of the session is obvious: Don’t worry about what is happening. All these reports about economic disaster in Kansas—about the “poverty” that conservatism is supposedly inflicting on people—forget about them. It has nothing to do with the way you govern a state. ... [End of Excerpt]
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