(From Media Matters)

Schiff: “One Of The Most Anti-Poor People Rules Is The Minimum Wage.” On the September 21 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade hosted author and businessman Peter Schiff, who claimed that minimum wage rules negatively affect employment for young and poor people. From Fox & Friends:

KILMEADE: All right, so let’s look at what you think we should do. How to encourage job growth, according to Peter Schiff: abolish the minimum wage. People think that’s anti-poor people.

SCHIFF: Well, one of the most anti-poor people rules is the minimum wage. It keeps people poor. What the minimum wage does is says that if a person that has very little skills, and generally they’re young or they’re poor, you can’t hire them unless they can produce –

KILMEADE: Right.

SCHIFF: — $7.25 worth of value, but it’s not just that. It also has to compensate you for all the mandatory benefits and taxes and risks associated with hiring people.

KILMEADE: Right.

SCHIFF: And people that have no skills, it’s not just worth it to hire them –

KILMEADE: Peter, I want to get through, too -

SCHIFF: -- maybe $3 or $4 an hour, if that’s what they’re worth – (emphasis mine!)

KILMEADE: — I understand what you’re saying. You also say – you say to repeal – hold on a second.

SCHIFF: — and you wouldn’t have all this red tape, maybe after a year or two, they would be earning $10 or $15 an hour -

KILMEADE: Right.

SCHIFF: The problem is they never get a chance. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 9/21/11, via Media Matters]

 

Now, nothing’s going to be better at making the poors mend their wicked, greedy ways than to pay them $24 a day.  That’s 121 bucks a week!  How much is a hot bunk in a trailer housing fourteen and some ramen, anyway? Clearly, the Republicans are going where the money is this time.  Taxing these fat cats some more, the great majority of whom we are told bask in the alarming luxury of flush toilets and home refrigeration, is currently the plan to balance the budget, so the first thing we have to do is cut their pay so they’ll get used to it, I guess. They’ve been riding that $7.25 gravy train long enough, the righties would have it, and it’s time for them to go all Bangladeshi on us or the rich might have to fly commercial, and America as we know it is all over.

The most insidious implication of this more than usually repellent exchange is the blandly accepted notion that, sadly, a lot of our fellow humans are only “worth” a wage, say, 1/200oth of what some other, undoubtedly better dressed but dubiously more productive fellow human is.  Nothing to be done about it; they ought to eat less.  You know how fat the poors are and all, wasting their money on rent and gas instead of personal trainers; they’d surely be less unsightly if only couldn’t afford to eat.

Not wanting to sound like a broken record, but when I hear exchanges like that, I do see why Obama is so overconfident about being reelected.  He could even go ahead and “compromise” with the Republicans, deciding that, say, five bucks and some change might be alright, and Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and the entire WaPoo op-ed page would sing Hosannas to the heavens. Better yet, the Servant Problem would be solved, once and for all.

Undaunted by his embarrassing “Let’s do Lunch” column, which was so offensively dumb that it drew a rare rebuke from his NYT colleague Paul Krugman, David Brooks wrote another unintentional howler today:

Very few people have the luxury of being freely obnoxious. Most people have to watch what they say for fear of offending their bosses and colleagues. Others resist saying anything that might make them unpopular.

Tellingly, he fails to mention that he gets paid to be obnoxious and offensive, and he doesn’t realize, cosseted as he is in the beltway bubble, that he’s as popular as crabs in a whorehouse.  Feel the luxury….

But, in every society, there are a few rare souls who rise above subservience, insecurity and concern. Each morning they take their own abrasive urges out for parade. They are so impressed by their achievements, so often reminded of their own obvious rightness, that every stray thought and synaptic ripple comes bursting out of their mouth fortified by impregnable certitude. When they have achieved this status they have entered the realm of Upper Blowhardia.

How’s the air up there, David?

These supremely accomplished blowhards offend some but also arouse intense loyalty in others. Their followers enjoy the brassiness of it all. They live vicariously through their hero’s assertiveness. They delight in hearing those obnoxious things that others are only permitted to think.

Thus, there has always been a fan base for the abrasive rich man. There has always been a market for books by people like George Steinbrenner, Ross Perot, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Bobby Knight, Howard Stern and George Soros. There has always been a large clump of voters who believe that America could reverse its decline if only a straight-talking, obnoxious blowhard would take control.

This is where Brooks’ snotty faux-omniscience always fails him; the facts don’t fit his little story, wherein Goerge Soros is JUST LIKE Bill O’Reilly, but he didn’t have time, nor inclination, to come up with better examples that could have possibly made a stronger argument.

And today, apparently, Donald Trump is that man. Trump, currently most famous for telling people that they are fired, has surged toward the top of the presidential primary polls. In one poll, he was in (remote) striking distance in a head-to-head against President Obama. Many people regard Trump as a joke and his popularity a disgrace. But he is actually riding a deep public fantasy: The hunger for the ultimate blowhard who can lead us through dark times.

Are people hungering for this?  Maybe Fox News watchers, but no normal people; check out the approval ratings for, say, Chris Christie or Paul LePage.

He is riding something else: The strongest and most subversive ideology in America today. Donald Trump is the living, walking personification of the Gospel of Success.

Bankrupt four times, functionally illiterate, multiple failed marriages, and the stupidest hairdo on the face of the earth.  I call that success.

It is obligatory these days in a polite society to have a complicated attitude toward success. If you attend a prestigious college or professional school, you are supposed to struggle tirelessly for success while denying that you have much interest in it. If you do achieve it, you are expected to shroud your wealth in locally grown produce, understated luxury cars and nubby fabrics.

Ah, the poor oppressed rich, who got their money the way Trump did, by inheriting it.  Cry me a river, David.

Trump, on the other hand, is utterly oblivious to such conventions. When it comes to success, as in so many other things, he is the perpetual boy. He is the enthusiastic adventurer thrilled to have acquired a gleaming new bike, and doubly thrilled to be showing it off.

He labors under the belief — unacceptable in polite society — that two is better than one and that four is better than two. If he can afford a car, a flashy one is better than a boring one. In private jets, lavish is better than dull. In skyscrapers, brass is better than brick, and gold is better than brass.

Tacky is better than tasteful, and a wife thirty years younger is better than one fifteen years younger.  Values to live by.

This boyish enthusiasm for glory has propelled him to enormous accomplishment. He has literally changed the landscape of New York City, Chicago, Las Vegas and many places in between. He has survived a ruinous crash and come back stronger than ever.

No mention of the bankruptcies, offensively crummy buildings, and ripped-off business associates, natch, which would kind of spoil Bobo’s Randian narrative. And those “many” places in between? Which? Can’t Pinch Sulzburger afford fact-checkers anymore?

Moreover, he shares this unambivalent attitude toward success with millions around the country. Though he cannot possibly need the money, he spends his days proselytizing the Gospel of Success through Trump University, his motivational speeches, his TV shows and relentlessly flowing books.

Take that, Andrew Carnegie, with your stupid libraries; to Brooks, I guess even Amway is a charitable outfit.

A child of wealth, he is more at home with the immigrants and the lower-middle-class strivers, who share his straightforward belief in the Gospel of Success, than he is among members of the haute bourgeoisie, who are above it. Like many swashbuckler capitalists, he is essentially anti-elitist.

Which is easy to be in your private jets; no doubt Trump HATES uber-elitists like David Brooks, despite the abject fawning.

Now, I don’t mean to say that Donald Trump is going to be president or get close. There is, for example, his hyper-hyperbolism and opportunism standing in the way.

That, and the fact that he’s so widely loathed.  Brooks doesn’t get out much, for good reason.

In 2009, Trump published a book with a very Trumpian title: “Think Like a Champion.” In that book, he praised Obama’s “amazing” and “phenomenal” accomplishments. “Barack Obama proved that determination combined with opportunity and intelligence can make things happen — and in an exceptional way,” Trump gushed.

Consistency, evidently, is the hobgoblin of elitists.  Here Brooks helpfully feigns unawareness that Trump doesn’t, well, “write” what’s in his “books.”  Or, more likely, he doesn’t think his audience does.

Now he spouts birther nonsense and calls Obama the worst president in American history. Now he leads rallies that make Michele Bachmann events look like the League of Women Voters. Even angry American voters want some level of seriousness, prudence and self-control.

Imaginary awareness of what voters “want” is the hallmark of every Brooks column, and it always happens to be exactly what Brooks himself wants. What a coincidence.

But I do insist that Trump is no joke. He emerges from deep currents in our culture, and he is tapping into powerful sections of the national fantasy life. I would never vote for him, but I would never want to live in a country without people like him.

I know how he feels. Whenever I’m feeling blue, all I do is imagine that Donald Trump exists to grace my humdrum life, and I feel better. Just like Bobo. The flip side of thinking ordinary voters want what you want is the risible delusion that voters care what you think.  They don’t.  The only thing better than a world without Trump would be a world without David Brooks.  And that’s no joke.

(The video above appeared just hours after Brooks got done typing, but nonetheless was online the same day. After seeing that, you’d think even a shameless toady like Brooks must be wishing he hadn’t thought that last paragraph was Fit To Print… Maybe there is a God)

In light of the Wikileaks fiasco, I’ve gotten to thinking a lot about good ol’ Ike, who chose to use his final speech as President, a mere two and a half minutes long, to warn America that we’d end up, well, how we have ended up if we didn’t watch out.  Clearly, we didn’t watch out.  We have given up both liberty and prosperity to fatten America’s War Industry, which is, globally, about the last place where our products still rule, and the threat to Democracy  Ike warned so darkly about is no longer some faint, distant possibility, but a plain fact we live with each day.  Both parties are War Parties now, and America only survives, albeit haltingly, on war.

Take our media….  Please.  Stung by the reality of their death-dealing credulity over the last decade, the pancaked know-nothings that pollute the airwaves are in angelic unison touching manicured hands to their fevered foreheads at the audacity, the noive, if you speak Bugs Bunny, of people they don’t even know, like that Assange person, running around behind their backs and committing actual journalism.  Everyone who’s anyone knows that sort of thing simply isn’t done anymore; it’s all about comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted these days, which is quite evidently a lot less work than that old way.  (see Gregory, David and Mitchell, Andrea, just for starters…)

I have to wonder what would happen on the Sunday talk shows today had, say, President Obama delivered something like Eisenhower’s 1961 speech.  Naturally, the panel would include Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and/or David Brooks, with maybe Joe Lieberman for balance.  Ike’s words, though demonstrably true, would have gone over like a fart in church in that crowd, whose very existence in such a public square not only owes itself to the military industrial complex, but to the complete capture of the purported Fourth Estate by it.

It was inevitable, really, that virtually all government spending would eventually end up in the hands of the military; no other government function is so immune to oversight and performance review, and like a bunch of Willie Suttons (selling guns instead of toting them), the sharp operators went where the money was.  You see, unlike the previous plutocrats the government lavishly sponsored from the railroad, oil, and infrastructure industries, the war industry doesn’t even have to do anything to scoop up deficit-financed dollars by the truckload; the tedious tasks of, say building a dam or a bridge that won’t fall down or getting an actual product to market have been completely eliminated.  They’ve already gone Galt, simply taking the money and running, leaving the corpses behind.  Ike, who unlike the chickenhawks of today abhorred war as one who experienced it must, saw the danger and tried to warn us, but was utterly drowned out by the  McNamaras, Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Powells, (and the medal-hungry generals who served them) in the ensuing decades.

Now, we’re faced with increasing economic hardship and dire  predictions of national doom without so-called austerity for everyone but the richest, but yet the half of our “discretionary” budget that goes to fighting failed and never-ending wars remains so sacrosanct that only Ron Paul and a few lefty Democrats in congress dare to question it, even as poll after poll shows that most Americans want the wars to stop, now.  The media religiously gloss over this inconvenient truth, in increasingly crazy and obvious ways, of which Wikileaks is only the most recent example.

Just as Eisenhower predicted way back in 1961, the military industrial complex would, if left unchecked, first destroy our Democracy, and then go on to destroy our prosperity.  While Ike may have spent more time on the golf course than President Obama (despite what you hear on Fox), he clearly did a little more thinking out there.

They know there are known unknowns that I don’t know about; and I know I don’t know about them.  Nolo contendre.

Anyway, when one does at least realize that nothing – not credit card wars, not torture, not tax policy, not social welfare policy, not massive fraud in the financial and mortgage markets, not massive (and up to now, largely unreported) deficits in state treasuries, not historic rot in the nation’s public infrastructure (no high speed rail in the US!), not a high school dropout rate at 30 or 40 percent (possibly higher), not a jobless rate at 10 percent (probably more than double that in real terms, and climbing) - nothing, not even a mild rebuke from one of their golden boys, David Brooks, will dissuade those representing the right from their catastrophically appointed rounds  – well what can a poor boy do?

Yet, there is perversity in this I think, real perversity in a moral sense, if one cares to look rather casually at the “tip of the spear,” where it seems the same ideology has appeared “in the heat of battle.”

DON’T HAVE TIME FOR TOO MANY QUESTIONS!!!

Here is a tiny snippet which might show, in moral terms, what such hubris means to people we don’t even know.  Out there.  Over the horizon.  Out of sight and out of mind, well beyond the picket fences guarding our little castles in the shining city on a hill.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2010/12/03/wikileaks-u-s-ignored-british-concerns-over-secret-spy-flights-115875-22757887/

Oh never mind, children.  Nothing can be done, nothing can be corrected, no lives can be saved – anywhere in the world – until American tax policy is settled, to the satisfaction of the anointed ones in our midst.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/ns/msnbc_tv-countdown_with_keith_olbermann#40500189

Bobby Kennedy

Robert Ellis Gordon gets half a page to hype two extreme-left positions: the first, that we, like him, should ignore our economists’ warnings and raise taxes during a depression (yes, it is); and second, the Kennedys, the worst thing that ever happened to American politics.

As a leftist theoretician, Gordon can afford to ignore economic science; as a pensioner, I can’t. As a leftist theoretician, Gordon must ignore the truth of history; as an observer of the historical record, I don’t ignore it.

The Kennedys were a corrupt bunch who believed that they were born to rule the USA, and the historical record amply shows that seamy side of “Camelot.

GEORGE SCHNEIDER

Gresham

As you’d expect, Gresham isn’t a very nice place, but you might be a bit surprised to find that the article in question was a bland recitation of the lifelong commitment of Bobby Kennedy and his brothers to helping those less fortunate, and worse, fighting inequality, that got poor old George’s Depends in a bunch.  The worst part about the letter, aside from its being a string of simpleminded Fox buzzwords, is that everything in it is false, irrelevant, or just plain crazy, and this is the sort of horseshit, and obnoxious horseshit at that, that the Oregonian runs every day.  And from yet another lying, dyspeptic old coot, collecting a pension (!) while he wastes reader’s time typing up Glenn Beck and Hate Radio.

Brooks on the Economy

David Brooks’ “The economy isn’t a machine” enumerates some of the economic arrangements proper to a free society, referring to them, rightly, as “the old wisdom of common sense” — “simple regulations, low debt, high savings, hard work, few distortions” — and concludes, “You don’t have to be a genius to come up with an economic policy like that.” But, in fact, it was a genius who came up with it, and his name was Adam Smith.

Koppel targeted Fox News and MSNBC, comparing them to bling-addled boxers in the big media ring, glaring at each other from their respective neutral corners, and then raining rhetorical spitballs, as they move, night after night, to the center of the big canvas:  American cable television.

Typically, there’s been a lot of reaction.

Sssssnnnnnnorrrrrrrre !!!

Koppel furrowed mightily about the underlying threat to the Republic if trends (in place and quite profitable for a helluva long time, thanks) continued, led by O’Reilly/Olbermann, Beck/Maher, Limbaugh/Stewart food fights.

BUT !!!!

It may be The Big Media Story is way ahead of Ted and all these other clowns, at least in terms of the dire state of cable itself.

From the Financial Times, 11/18/10:

“The number of people subscribing to US cable television services has suffered its biggest decline in 30 years as younger, tech-savvy viewers lead an exodus to web-based operations, such as Hulu and Netflix.” *

• Total number of subscribers to cable and satellite in the third quarter:  down by 119,000
• Compared to gain of 346,000 in the third quarter of 2009
• Net falloff in subscribers in the third quarter of 2010:  741,000

“The figures suggest that ‘cord-cutting’ – one of the pay-TV industry’s biggest fears – is becoming a reality as viewers drift to web-based platforms.”

• Online subscription services now priced at $7.99 per month (Hulu and Netlfix)
• Hulu’s revenue up over $130 million this year compared to last (Hulu owned jointly by News Corp., Disney, and NBC Universal)

“Research from The Diffusion Group, a technology research company, found that more than a third of iPad users were likely to cancel their pay-TV subscriptions in the next six months.”

* Source:  SNL Kagan

Ever since Reagan, but increasingly dramatically under Bush, Republicans have been allowed to say provably wrong and completely cuckoo things in public, repeatedly, every day, knowing that no one in the MSM would ever point this out, but they nonetheless used to use this privilege sparingly.  Before he got 9/11 and the bullhorn moment under his belt, Bush himself carefully emphasized his “compassion” and commitment to education and seniors, trying mightily to keep the authoritarian kleptocracy part of his agenda under the radar, but each time he proposed something crazy or got off yet another “nucular” without any correction, he became further emboldened by the obsequiousness and willing malleability  of the “liberal” media, and he was off to the races, with demonstrably disastrous results.

Rarely is it ever discussed that Bush’s narrow 2000 loss was magically turned into a “victory” solely by the media, which also helpfully made possible his illegally gerrymandered and shamelessly war-exploiting “sweep” in 2002 and his desperately smelly “landslide” in 2004; ever since the 1998 midterms the media has been conspicuously invested in Republicans, but in the process have driven Republicans into a cocoon of insanity so impenetrable that in the actual voting booth, the relentlessly touted mandates simply never happen, and thus must be sloppily manufactured out of hype and duct tape (sometimes literally).

Ironically, all the investment that the right has made in co-opting and intimidating the media into bending to its will may, in the end, be its undoing; it has gotten to the point that all but a quarter to a third of Americans know that if the Republicans and the media are simultaneously (as usual) predicting it will be sunny tomorrow, you’d better take your umbrella.   The Republicans may indeed climb a few seats out of their deservedly humiliating minority in 2010, but only if they can continue to convincingly lie about every single thing they plan to do once in power, and they might even gain the Presidency in 2012, provided they find candidates who haven’t been born yet.  Neither seems particularly likely, if you’re not David Gregory, Brooks, or Broder.

Nevertheless, “real Americans,” unlike the Davids and their many clueless imitators, are finally catching on to the game.  FOX sloppily tried to cover up the fact that Ron Paul won the absurdly overrated CPAC poll in the manner of a cat in the litter box, but the stench remained…  Huge numbers of Americans have rejected wanton deregulation of business and bloated and unaffordable military budgets the right bequeathed us and will rightfully punish any politician who attempts subsequently to abolish Social Security  and Medicare to pay for it all, but those are the only supposed “benefits” the media and its righty paymasters have left to offer a battered electorate, and have long since dropped their bashfulness about saying so.  If they think these genius ideas are the path to a 2010 landslide, I say “bring it on.”

For a long time I lamented the fact that our mouthpiece media functions as nothing more than the Pravda of the fruited plain, yet its long-suffering audience had never caught on to this the way those Russians did, with considerable negative consequences for what remains of our democracy.  I no longer am so sure.   After a half dozen times or so, even the media-exalted Leader George Bush admitted, albeit muddledly, that “you don’t get fooled again.”

The urgency and grave tone that he adopted when he recounted the latest nutty, boring, and utterly false rantings of despised former Vice President Dick Cheney to current VP Biden was either ham acting, or Gregory is the stupidest human being on the face of the earth, besides Sarah Palin.  I’m not sure which is more disturbing.  Gregory almost seemed surprised at how easily Biden swatted away such malevolent nonsense, but clearly realizing that he now looked like a bigger ass than Dick by this point, Gregory tried to turn the whole thing into a Mean Girls gossipfest about appropriate behavior for former VP’s.  Biden wasn’t having that, either, saying that being outspoken was fine, but lying wasn’t.  Good luck with that Joe; you’re talking to Karl Rove’s dance partner, after all.

But as though that interview weren’t both vacuous and cringe-inducing enough, along comes the panel:  David Brooks, whose head wobbles and arms swing independently of his body as he prattles, sort of like a bestacled Barney Rubble with Tourette’s, (his eyebrows don’t match his hair either, am I seeing a pattern here?), Harold Ford, Rachel Maddow, and this well-scrubbed 14 year old wingnut from Illinois named Aaron Schock.

Fireworks begin when Rachel points out the absurd hypocrisy of Shock’s attending an event celebrating stimulus dollars in his district, when he voted against the bill and repeatedly railed against such irresponsible “spending.”  The panel format gave Rachel a lot of opportunity to work her false eyelashes demurely in side shots as she repeatedly made her trademark “concerned” look.  (That’s how inherently bonkers TV News is…  the butch lesbian is the one in false eyelashes.)   Of course, the 14 year old didn’t appreciate such impertinence, and while he mentally read his hand, he said, “With all due respect,” and not much else.  He finally thought of something a little later, though, and opened with another sneering, “With all due respect,” which I think was intended to mean, “you nasty ol’ smartypants bull dyke with the false eyelashes,” and  explained that his constituents needed to be told that they were getting their “fair share” of this wasteful spending for which our grandchildren will surely turn on us later and become hookers and meth-heads.  Like all Republicans, the 14 year old has apparently not been told that his party is a tiny and disgraced minority, and has been deservedly told by the voters to give it a rest for a while.  Both he and Gregory openly high-fived the prospect of “another 1994,” which would put all this nonsense about Republicans not running everything to rest once and for all.  I can understand such stupidity about 1994 from someone who wasn’t born yet, but luckily Gregory is born again each day, so the fact that before 1994, Democrats had controlled congress for 50 years or so, often overwhelmingly, was never mentioned.  Both have so many imaginary friends that they think Republicans are much more popular and abundant than they actually are, and all the king’s horses could never convince them otherwise.

The least relevant guest, and that’s saying something, was former Rep. Harold Ford of Tennessee, who’s gotten so rich after leaving congress that he thinks he ought to be a senator from Wall Street, without being bothered by the messy politics of it all, kind of like Rudy.  Gregory’s gossipy questions about his taxes and position at Merrill Lynch didn’t  dent Ford’s vaulting overconfidence one iota, but did reveal Ford to be an excellent circumlocutor and fervent disciple of Reaganomics, despite being about 1/64th black and 1/99th Democrat.  I’m sure Gregory wanted to dance with him after that little performance; he’s way cuter than Karl Rove, too.

As usual, a whole hour of television was utterly wasted on trivia, speculation, and politics as theatre, the enormously important implications of the issues being discussed mattering not a whit to either the moderator or the guests, only how all of this will play in Peoria.  I have news.  Just as many Peorians as other Americans would sooner gouge out their eyeballs than watch “Meet the Press.”    People can accept high unemployment, but not when David Gregory still has a job.

In response to the well-deserved disrepute our media has so richly earned from the public for such unforgivable lameness, the solution has not been to improve quality and try not to misinform so, but rather to bring in new “talent” to serve up the same old swill.  Fortunately for, say, David Gregory, the media defines “talent” rather loosely.  Unfortunately for the long-suffering news consumer, the trajectory of “talent” is always downward; witness the NYT’s slide from Safire to Brooks to Kristol to Douthat…  who’s next, Drudge?  Britney Spears?  The LA Times dropped Robert Scheer to make room for Jonah Goldberg’s substantial bulk, and look how that turned out.  Desperate measures make for desperate times, but count on these lame rags to blame Y2K or el nino for their troubles.

Over at FOX, the dilemma was a little different, as you’d expect.  But media-savvy little Rovettes that they are there, they knew they needed something big to appeal to that ever elusive under-70 crowd; Bill O’Reilly was too sober, and as Murdoch himself said, maybe Hannity was a bit “academic.”  Enter Glenn Beck stage right, and then some.  Now, as Q-ratings go, you wouldn’t think Beck would have been the most obvious choice; he’s pasty and pudgy, beady eyed and dumb-looking, and his voice sounds like Richard Simmons without the “accent.”  Besides which, he’s utterly uneducated, bereft of any journalistic experience, and, well, to call him histrionic would be like calling Ann Coulter “outgoing.”  But therein lies the Beck magic; the “rodeo clown” FOX needed to reel in younger dumb people, and as a bonus, to make the network’s universally abysmal “journalism” look almost respectable by comparison.  Win, win.

In such an post-journalism environment , it was inevitable that Sarah Palin’s high heels would come clicking onto the stage.  Since nobody was asking any questions anyway, why wouldn’t a politician not bother to have any answers, even scribbled on a 3 x 5 card like Reagan used to?  That gal can just waltz onto any FOX show and say something like this:

“Scares me the road that he [President Obama] has us on, not seeming to understand what it is that built up America’s economic system, the free enterprise principles, the shrinkage of government, not the expansion to allow the private sector to grow and to thrive and to do what it does best and our families keep more of what they earned, so that they can reinvest and prioritize instead of government doing it for them, which is a step towards socialism. So some of the steps we’re taking economically right now scare the heck out of me.”

I’m scared too, mostly that that woman has a driver’s license, but to Bill O’Reilly, that speech was all but Churchillian.  He was no doubt too busy loofah-ing her in his mind to notice the tumbleweeds behind her eyes, but honestly.  He may think his audience is dumb, but surely they speak English?  Disturbingly, the answer is probably yes, since Palin finished up thusly:

“. . . what Reagan did . . . he boiled it all down to this. He looked at our enemies, enemies around the world, and he said, we win, you lose. That’s what I want to see and feel and hear from our new administration, from President Obama.”

Alrighty, then.  You can just imagine that over in the next studio, Glenn Beck’s Red Phone to the President is ringing off the hook, offering her the cabinet-level position of Queen of the Department of Law.  Or something.

Please….  If politics is going to henceforth be a talent show, would it be too much to ask that it contain some, uh, talent?

One of the funniest things about the right is that they never lose, even when they do, and they even have rather disturbing success convincing others, or at least the media, that this is so.  A lot of us, and certainly any trained psychiatrist, would look at their behavior each day, and think they were no more or less living in fantasy land than, say, Snoopy was when he battled the Red Baron on top of his doghouse; but continuing the Peanuts metaphor, the press reacts to these routine delusions like Charlie Brown does to Lucy holding the football.  The main difference is that Charlie Brown ends up on his back, humiliated, and our mainstream media keep their jobs, or even get better ones, so they can’t wait to kick again.  The New York Times never carried Charles M. Schulz’ iconic comic, preferring unfunny written versions on its op/ed page, although it’s considerably less entertaining, much less just, when their string of Charlie Browns always get awarded the field goal for the ball everyone can see Lucy is still holding over her shoulder.  The Republicans have noticed this phenomenon, and adapted to it predictably.

Usually, they can point to some to some fly in the ointment of the other side’s victory, no matter how microscopic, and failing that, they have a lot of ways to cheat, lie, and bloviate their way to some semblance of at least doubt that they did, in fact, lose again.  The fact that they lost the popular vote in four of the last five presidential elections, they ought to be by now a defeated and irrelevant minority in Congress, given their numbers, their leaders are all nincompoops, charlatans, and crazy people, none of whom can open their mouths without lying would, in a rational world, render them, well, not very interesting, at least as credible policy or political spokespeople.  But in our media landscape, lies are more interesting than truth, and crazy is much more interesting than sane, and they therefore continue to dominate public discourse, despite the fact that their policies, and even their people, are despised by a clear majority of Americans.  Ironically, that unpopularity plays to their psychological game; because they’re so vile, aggressive, and obvious about it, people do actually hate them, in addition to opposing them, in large numbers, so then these committed opponents of political correctness can cynically play the persecuted minority card and loudly cast themselves as oppressed and silenced victims.  Remember Bush Derangement Syndrome?  Anyone with a pulse or grasp of the English language couldn’t bear to watch the guy for a lot of very good reasons, but somehow they were cast as deranged meanies who just hated Our Leader, as Bush coasted blithely from disaster to disaster, quite predictably but free of any “mainstream” criticism for eight years.

You have to hand it to them, really.  Anyone who can cast themselves, often successfully, as deserving of the Affirmative Action on steroids they routinely demand and receive from the media and on the political stage, when all they ever fight for is the prerogative of the majority race, religion, and sexual orientation to oppress those who don’t conform, they’re at least standouts for their chutzpah. Then, treating the superrich, enormous and monopolistic corporations, and their many media mouthpieces as beleaguered Davids fighting the liberal Goliath, if nothing else, shows admirable creativity.  But most of all, it shows that we no longer have politics in this country; we have a rigged reality show, and the fact that this makes many people disengaged, uninterested, and no longer interested in voting, rigs the game in their favor, yet again.  Low turnout and disengaged voters tends to make them lose by less, or even occasionally win.

The worst thing about all this, of course, is that every pile of shit presented to Republicans sends everyone from Sarah Palin and Micheal Steele to David Gregory and David Broder excitedly digging for a pony, and of course they always find it, even if the pony does smell a little funny and can’t exactly pull a cart.  Bush’s dubiously legal “landslide” in 2004, and the shameful, Delay-tainted “victory” in 2002, have become so defensively sanctified in the small, pampered minds of our media stars that they continue to pretend to forget everything that, well, actually happened, either before or since.  And since nothing really happened at all unless it got on television, and the only thing our media outlets do even vaguely competently is bury their mistakes, too many Americans fervently believe a whole lot of things that are either just dubious or more often plain, unmitigated bullshit.  As the supposed guardians of our First Amendment, Walter Cronkite pointed out in 2004 that the media, particularly FOX, whose audiences were the most misled, ought to be ashamed of themselves for such malpractice and its horrendous results.  But, alas, he made a lot less money than David Gregory, you know, and Rush Limbaugh’s maids, especially the ones who get drugs for him, probably make more, too.  Money talks these days, and even when it’s lying, we all are forced to listen.*

*Fairness Doctrine, anyone?  Liberal Portland has ONE progressive radio station, which calls itself that, and FOUR right-wing ones, that call themselves “News Talk.”  Most are owned by Clear Channel.  Must be the magical “free market,” again at work.

UPDATE: You can’t make this stuff up.  Before a cheering FOX host, the startlingly nebbishy Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute explains that the real danger of Health Care Reform is that it might force insurance companies to sell a “50,000 dollar policy for (a mere) $10,000.”  France spends about half of what we do per capita on health insurance, but even here we don’t pay nearly that much for our inferior and selective care.  And, after he praised insurance companies for “saving more lives every day than Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi will in their entire lives,” he won the rhetorical point.  Talking, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, about $50,000 dollar medical insurance, would, you’d think, at least raise some eyebrows, and maybe want to at least be adjusted slightly for the talking points, at this politically sensitive time.  But not on FOX.  Lord, have mercy.

UPDATE II: Just when I thought these delusional righties couldn’t get any dumber, along comes this, and some of the chosen language sounds vaguely familiar..  Emphasis on the “liar.”

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide people into two kinds, and those who don’t. — Unknown

I‘m starting to think that one of the greatest dividing-lines of humanity is not the one between Republicans and Democrats, nor between rich and poor, labor and management — it’s the huge chasm separating those who live in reality, from those who don’t.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

There are two kinds of people in the political world. One side accepts as fact that human beings respond to incentives (seeking pleasure and avoiding pain); and the other side believes that good intentions will conquer history, psychology, economics and any amount of bad judgment. They will beat, or cheat, reality itself.

© Dan Popp

Have you ever heard such rubbish in all your life?  If you’re a regular Hag reader, I think you have.