Drill, baby, drill

I was out running today and thinking about this chant from the assembled at the Republican National Convention. Digby, citing Atrios, observes that it's of a piece with the overall Republican strategy of activating and motivating their base by actively pissing off liberals. Which it definitely does. But I was also thinking about what it suggests about the deeper mindset of your basic right wing activist.

There's a scene in the documentary Jesus Camp in which Becky Fischer, the children's pastor, talks openly about what a "sick old world" we live in, and how eager she is to be done with it. Watching that movie, and watching monstrosities like the Republican National Convention, it's hard to escape the idea that a lot of these people are motivated primarily by absolute guttural hatred of everyone and everything outside of their tribe, including the natural world. I think it largely explains the sheer avarice of that chant - one gets the sense that the fact that offshore drilling and drilling in ANWR make no sense from any perspective except a malicious one is one of the reasons it's so wildly popular with them.