TO SAY that most American political discourse takes place at the
intellectual level of baboons would be an insult to baboons.
Baboons are capable of handling two-factor reasoning problems:
if I eat all the bananas now, I'll have none left for later;
better eat enough to quell my hunger now, but leave some for
later. In contrast, political discourse generally takes place at
the one-factor level that could be handled by, say, flatworms:
Banana yummy! Hunger bad! Or, as today's headline on Politico
has it: "Republicans to slash food stamps"! (Exclamation point
added.) Nothing against Politico; such is the nature of
headlines, which is the level at which politics generally is
conducted. To get to the higher-reasoning version of the
argument, the one that might be interesting to any baboons who
may be reading this, you have to continue down into the body of
the article. There, you find that those Republicans have a
rational explanation for wanting to cut food stamps: otherwise,
they'd have to cut the defence budge