Which comes first?

Krugman, as usual, whacks the arationality of the Republican mole:

Health reform, says the budget office, will increase Social Security revenues and reduce Medicare costs. But the G.O.P. analysis says that these sums don’t count, because some people have said that these savings would also extend the life of these programs’ trust funds, so counting these savings as deficit reduction would be “double-counting,” because — well, actually it doesn’t make any sense, but it sounds impressive.

...

[T]he modern G.O.P. has been taken over by an ideology in which the suffering of the unfortunate isn’t a proper concern of government, and alleviating that suffering at taxpayer expense is immoral, never mind how little it costs.

Given that their minds were made up from the beginning, top Republicans weren’t interested in and didn’t need any real policy analysis — in fact, they’re basically contemptuous of such analysis, something that shines through in their health care report. All they ever needed or wanted were some numbers and charts to wave at the press, fooling some people into believing that we’re having some kind of rational discussion. We aren’t.

Conservatives in America prefer myth.  It's not that reality is too harsh.  Reality would require them to alter their beliefs, and they are constitutionally unable to do that.

I believe you can't know what's right without knowing what's true.  Much of the Teapublican base believes you must first know what's right before you can then determine what's true.  I take the scientific revolution as correctly victorious.  They want to revert to scholasticism that protects ignorance and poverty in a static world where learning outside their one true faith is a crime.

Oh, but they'll take the new gadgets that science and engineering produce, just not the empiricism required to produce the next set of ideas.