Thanks much to Arianna Huffington for inviting me to respond to her posts this week.

First, let me say that Right is Wrong is an important and enlightening read. Many of us are already there in terms of the book's main message (see title), but what I'm finding indispensable is its collection of pointed examples of just how out of touch the right has been for lo these many years. My latest favorite--somehow I missed this one in real time--was Bush's erstwhile Treasury Sec'y, John Snow, saying that the best remedy for the damage from Katrina was to make the Bush tax cuts permanent (see pg. 253).

That's some real chutzpah. It's also mindless, callous, and infuriating.

Now, on to Arianna's first post re the role of the fear card in 2008.

I'll give my answer the question she's posed, but I'd like to then move the discussion to my turf--economic policy--and not just because I'm more comfortable there than in neuropsychology, but because I think the same dynamics are in play in that debate, though they've not been framed that way (Lakoff can tell me if I'm using the term correctly).

Yes, the right will play the fear card, but no, barring a big, terrible, new event between now and then, it won't work. I base this view--and it is, of course, merely my opinion and my hope--on the fact that it didn't work in 2006, though, as Right Is Wrong documents, they played that card on every hand.

As a resident of Virginia, I learned something important about why the card was less effective. Jim Webb ran a tough campaign that focused largely on economic issues in a state where many residents were already facing hard times before the recent downturn and gas-price spike. But he also opposed the right on the war, and he spoke to the issue with great authority, credibility, and strength.

Yesterday, I read my six-year-old kid a bedtime story about roadrunners, those birds that live in the desert. Their favorite food is lizard, and while the lizards are tough and mean, the birds catch them with speed, perseverance, and superior intelligence.

Fear in the lizard brain is gripping, but it is not unconquerable. You really can't fool all the people all the time, and the depth of Bush fatigue is really quite...well...deep. What's amazing is that McCain wants to double down on Iraq, and that puts him in the same bubble as Bush/Cheney and the rest of the dwindling band of neocon losers.

So, I don't fear the fear card. I don't mean to sound cocky because I'm really not, but as I see it, its days are numbered. Played the right way, the fear card can be trumped by the strength card, the reality card, and the "your way has been a disaster" card. We've tried it their way. It hasn't worked. It's our turn.

Finally, we must recognize that the right also plays the fear card on the economy. In this version, it works like this: "you can't possibly pursue [insert progressive economic policy] because that would bring our economy to its knees."

I hear this fear mongering all the time. If we reset tax policy back to the Clinton years, investors will stop investing, workers will stop working, and the economy will cease to function! Never mind the fact that the economy performed much better in the Clinton years, whether you look at macroeconomic growth or microeconomic living standards (one e.g.: poverty fell steeply in those years, it's up in the 2000s).

If we regulate financial markets, they'll take their business elsewhere. If we don't immediately sign every unilateral trade treaty that comes our way, we'll be left for road kill on the global highway. If we boost the minimum wage, employers will fire everybody. To take a topical example, if we extend unemployment benefits, even in a labor market downturn, everyone will drop out of work and the economy will grind to a halt.

To my ears, it's the same fear card Arianna is writing about, just mapped onto the economic sphere, and with lots of matrix algebra to support it. But it's total BS. Our economy is not nearly so fragile as these arguments imply, there's no evidence to support them, and lots of evidence to support the opposite view.

We no more need to accept the dominant, hands off, YOYO (you're on your own), approach to economic policy than we need to remain mired in endless war.