The Financial Times reports that the number of Americans giving up their citizenship to protect their families from America’s onerous worldwide tax system has jumped rapidly. Even relatively high-tax nations such as the United Kingdom are attractive compared to the class-warfare system that Obama is creating in the United States. I run into people like this quite often as part of my travels. They are intensely patriotic to America as a nation, but they have lots of scorn for the federal government. Statists are perfectly willing to forgive terrorists like William Ayres, but they heap scorn on these “Benedict Arnold” taxpayers. But the tax exiles get the last laugh since the bureaucrats and politicians now get zero percent of their foreign-source income. You would think that, sooner or later, the left would realize they can get more tax revenue with reasonable tax rates. But that assumes that collectivists are motivated by revenue maximization rather than spite and envy.

As usual, imaginary friends and tinny cold war epithets form the duct tape that purportedly hold this flimsy argument together, but could it possibly have been made slightly less offensive and a bit more plausible by leaving out calling tax evasion “patriotic” and misspelling its manufactured villain’s name?  (It’s Ayers, you righty halfwit…)  The best part is that he treats “revenue maximization” as something good and holy, while “spite and envy” are sordid and evil, as a supposed justification for such greed-driven voluntary statelessness.  Anyone who has watched how the Republicans talk about the unemployed and all manner of their other chosen “lesser people”  (thanks, Alan Simpson for putting it so refreshingly bluntly…), and it’s pretty obvious where the spite, if not the envy, lies in this debate.

The number of wealthy Americans living in the UK who are renouncing their US citizenship is rising rapidly as more expatriates seek to escape paying tax to the US on their worldwide income and gains and shed their “non-dom” status, accountants say. As many as 743 American expatriates made the irreversible decision to discard their passports last year, according to the US government – three times as many as in 2008. …There is a waiting list at the embassy in London for people looking to give up citizenship, with the earliest appointments in February, lawyers and accountants say. …“The big disadvantage with American citizens is they catch you on tax wherever you are in the world. If you are taxed only in the UK, you have the opportunity of keeping your money offshore tax free.”

Since, as we all know, but only Leona Helmsley came out and said, “Only the little people pay taxes.”  Tony Hayward calls them, perhaps in a nod to the Queen’s English, “small people,” but you get the idea.

To grasp the extent of this problem, here are blurbs from two other recent stories. Time magazine discusses the unfriendly rules that make life a hassle for overseas Americans.

See, even the “liberal media” is deeply worried about the rich…  you should be, too.  The point of the whole thing is that Time reported that wealthy people (500 or so of them), have such snazzy tax lawyers that, like Dick Cheney, they came up with a way to not pay taxes pretty much at all by buying a fake address someplace awful, then profiting off of American taxpayer money, bailouts, legal immunity, and (!) citizenship, while living wherever they damn well please.  The main complaint is that they have to report every little cash transaction over $10,000, which we all know can be so onerous.  I bet tipping will suffer from that.  Then they find the following hogwash in the New York Times, but leave out whether the author is Ben Stein, Tom Friedman, William Kristol, or Ross Douthat:

…. American expats have long complained that the United States is the only industrialized country to tax citizens on income earned abroad, even when they are taxed in their country of residence, though they are allowed to exclude their first $91,400 in foreign-earned income.

Oh, I see; they found a tax that wasn’t devised to tilt to the rich.  It’s like a bunch of Che Guevaras in mink.

One Swiss-based business executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of sensitive family issues, (That’s one way to put it…)  said she weighed the decision for 10 years. She had lived abroad for years but had pleasant memories of service in the U.S. Marine Corps. Yet the notion of double taxation — and of future tax obligations for her children, who will receive few U.S. services — finally pushed her to renounce, she said. …Stringent new banking regulations — aimed both at curbing tax evasion and, under the Patriot Act, preventing money from flowing to terrorist groups — have inadvertently made it harder for some expats to keep bank accounts in the United States and in some cases abroad. Some U.S.-based banks have closed expats’ accounts because of difficulty in certifying that the holders still maintain U.S. addresses, as required by a Patriot Act provision.

Ah, what suffering, to have one’s multiple six-figure income, floating through the ether in banks all over the world, bothered with by one’s freeloading fellow citizens trying to get their dirty paws on it.  (Under a law dreamed up by the socialist (?) Bush Administration,  but niggling details like that don’t faze Cato…)  At least these beleaguered expats have a better chance of seeing their tax dollars at work than those of us at home do; if they’re lucky a bomb or drone might kill somebody or flatten a town in their area.  More likely, a hefty dividend check from the latest no-bid contract, a court decision relieving you of all liability for your latest crime, or a no-strings government bailout will land in your Swiss or Cayman Islands mail box with nary a thud, courtesy of the American taxpayer.  That’s what I call patriotic.

WASHINGTON — Nine days after a four-star general was relieved of command for comments made to Rolling Stone magazine, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates issued orders on Friday tightening the reins on officials dealing with the news media.

The memorandum requires top-level Pentagon and military leaders to notify the office of the Defense Department’s assistant secretary for public affairs “prior to interviews or any other means of media and public engagement with possible national or international implications.”

Uh, you’re the Pentagon, not a burrito cart.  Everything you do, by definition, has national and international implications, most of which are grave indeed.  All the more reason not to talk about them…  Too depressing.  As though this weren’t bad enough, Gates tosses in the word “possible,” which basically means burrito carts are to be included in the clampdown as well.

Just as the removal of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal from command in Afghanistan was viewed as President Obama’s reassertion of civilian control of the military, so Mr. Gates’s memo on “Interaction With the Media” was viewed as a reassertion by civilian public affairs specialists of control over the military’s contacts with the news media.

Yay!  We get our own Baghdad Bob!

Senior officials involved in preparing the three-page memo said work on it had begun well before the uproar that followed Rolling Stone’s profile of General McChrystal. But they acknowledged that the controversy, and the firing of one of the military’s most influential commanders, served to emphasize Mr. Gates’s determination to add more discipline to the Defense Department’s interactions with the media.

“I have said many times that we must strive to be as open, accessible and transparent as possible,” Mr. Gates wrote in the memo, which was sent to senior Pentagon civilian officials, the nation’s top military officer, each of the armed-services secretaries and the commanders of the regional war-fighting headquarters. “At the same time, I am concerned that the department has grown lax in how we engage with the media, often in contravention of established rules and procedures.”

Of course, “open as possible” doesn’t in this case mean what you think it means, clearly.  Rough translation:  We will henceforth speak with Fox News-like unanimity, on Fox News.  It’s that hopey-changey thing again.

The memo by Mr. Gates, a former C.I.A. director, also demanded greater adherence to secrecy standards, issuing a stern warning against the release of classified information: “Leaking of classified information is against the law, cannot be tolerated and will, when proven, lead to the prosecution of those found to be engaged in such activity.”

No wonder David Ellsberg is so exercised at the moment.  Sounds like Nixon to me.

A copy of the unclassified memo by Mr. Gates was provided to The New York Times by an official who was not authorized to release it. Douglas B. Wilson, the new assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, and Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, verified its content.

Nyeah, nyeah, you fascist douchebag…  A real American just gave you the biggest finger.

Mr. Gates’s memo “is based primarily on his view that we owe the media and we owe ourselves engagement by those who have full knowledge of the situations at hand,” Mr. Wilson said.

That is, only those that read the memo may speak, and repeating tired, counterfactual Bill Kristol talking points to a rightly disgusted public is somehow doing people a favor.

Mr. Gates was particularly concerned that civilian and military officials speaking to reporters sometimes had only a parochial view of a national security issue under discussion. The new orders, Mr. Wilson said, were devised to “make sure that anybody and everybody who does engage has as full a picture as possible and the most complete information possible.”

“Parochial” in this case means actual combatants.  The Big Picture guys are found in green rooms and think tanks.

The repercussions of the Rolling Stone profile have included heightened concerns that military officers will become warier of the press — and it is expected that many officers will read the new memo as an official warning to restrict access to reporters.

Is this article written for the retarded?

Mr. Wilson and Mr. Morrell rejected those assumptions, saying Mr. Gates would remain committed to having the Pentagon work closely with reporters.

That’s worked out so well so far, why not continue?  After all, now that war is a permanent thing, and the only media outlet able to expose its futility and the cynical arrogance of its promoters has ads for bongs in it, who cares?  Evidently not the NYT, as evidenced by the bland tone of this astonishing article.

“From the moment he came into the building, this secretary has said that to treat the press as an enemy is self-defeating,” Mr. Morrell said. “That attitude has been reflected in his tenure: he has been incredibly accommodating, incredibly forthright and incredibly cooperative with the news media. That said, he thinks we as a giant institution have become too undisciplined in how we approach our communications with the press corps.”

Never have I hear such errant nonsense, coming from the outfit that gave us Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch, Judith Miller, Mission Accomplished, and on and on.  Stupid, yes.  Undisciplined?  Hardly.

But correspondents who cover national security issues, a realm that routinely requires delving into the classified world, have come to rely on unofficial access to senior leaders for guidance and context — and for information when policies or missions may be going awry.

Officials involved in drafting Mr. Gates’s memo cited several recent developments as central to his thinking. They included disclosure of the internal debate during the administration’s effort to develop a new policy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, similar public exposure of internal deliberations over the Pentagon budget and weapons procurement, and, among others, an article in The Times describing a memorandum on Iran policy written by Mr. Gates and sent to a small circle of national security aides.

Ah, just niggling things that are none of our business like the current and next few wars, the earth-shattering amounts of money to be flushed down the toilet on ridiculous toys of war, and the way in which the booty is handed out to self-interested cronies.  Nothing in that could possibly be interesting to anybody.

On behalf of the military, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was consulted during the drafting of the memo on media relations and “fully supports the secretary’s intent,” said Capt. John Kirby, the chairman’s spokesman.

He cited Admiral Mullen’s visit to Kabul, Afghanistan, last weekend, in which the admiral told American military officers and embassy personnel that “we must continue to tell our story — we just need to do it smartly, and in a coordinated fashion.”

Hello, earth to New York Times.  Haven’t you shamed yourself, your country and your craft enough, slavishly telling the Pentagon’s “stories?”  Printing an article like this, basically describing the spoken intent of the giant, unaccountable US military to just, well, drop out of this whole, “quaint” free press thing, without rebutting its falsehoods and contradictions is bad enough.  But not at least getting a little balance, however false, from someone, anyone, who agrees with the majority of Americans who think that both the wars and the Pentagon are crazy, is pretty danged pathetic.  They even do that on Fox.

Thom Shanker, please make a note of it.

The memo is expected to reanimate the professional public-affairs cadre among the Pentagon’s civilian and military staffs, who have made no secret that they have felt challenged by the growing numbers of contractors hired for “strategic communications” issues. It was one such contractor who brokered Rolling Stone’s profile of General McChrystal.

From Halliburton, perhaps?

Nice sunrise today on the Hag veranda

UPDATED BELOW:

When I was a kid in the 70′s, everybody listened to KGON, the local FM rock station, and it was avowedly liberal: pro-pot, anti-Nixon, anti-war, with a great cast of hippie-ish DJ’s that became like family.  As Archie and Edith wistfully sang, “Those Were the Days.”  They had a feature in the morning, “Nukes in the News,” which poked fun at the near-daily shutdowns, cost overruns, and other problems that always plagued that particular branch of corporate welfare, and this was before Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome.”  Somehow, back then people understood, and it was uncontroversial to say on the airwaves, that Nixon was a crook, drug laws were stupid, wars were pointless disasters, and nuclear power was about the dumbest idea anybody ever thought of.   All these things are of course still true today, but few in our media understand this, and fewer recognize that the fact that such plain truths are still contested, much less denied, is a searing indictment of the way these bozos have screwed up doing their jobs over the last few decades.

President Obama announced recently that part of our efforts to combat global warming would be to “invest” in “new” nuclear power.  This cuckoo idea has been a favorite of such “liberal” rags as the NYT and WaPoo, and of course involves large corporations scooping up copious amounts of taxpayer dough, so it’s the sort of idea any politician might find attractive.  But honestly, just because the media was born yesterday doesn’t mean actual Americans were, and will never support nuclear power in their communities, and all it will take is the first plant going up amid protests and doubling and trebling of its budget that this idea will slither into the swamps from which it emerged, along with the reputations of the feckless politicians who supported it.

Forty years of nuclear power fiascoes has taught us a number of things, President Obama, so please take note:

1) The private market will never risk its money on nuclear power, owing to the 50% default rate and ruinous risks.

2) There is still no permanent place to store waste that will remain toxic for 100,000 years.

3) There will be accidents, given the appalling safety record of the industry, and

4) There is ZERO public support for this demented waste of money.

Those who would forget history are doomed to repeat it, and too bad Obama didn’t listen to KGON.  Whenever government takes a big leap into nuclear power , it always turns out the same, just ask the bonkers former Republican governor of Washington, Dixy Lee Ray (KGON called her Risky Delay).  This outspoken anti-environmentalist plunged her state into a decade-long financial and public relations disaster with her wanton embrace of the aptly named WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply System), which set out to build seven nuclear plants based on wildly overstated demand projections; only one ever went briefly online, and the rest were mothballed, abandoned, or aborted after Bechtel and the like made off with billions in state funds.

This time, the giveaway is even more flagrant, since the federal government is proposing to take on all the risk without even participating in any of the potential upside like Dixy did; whatever fake “profits” the corporate welfare queen, in this case Southern Companies, makes by overcharging its customers for “new” nuclear power it will get to keep to buy lead-lined private planes, US Senators, and such.  Ain’t bipartisanship grand?

Had KGON not long ago been bought out by Clear Channel and vanished into prerecorded obscurity, they would undoubtedly be dusting off “Nukes in the News.”

UPDATE: Alert Hag reader Jebbie reports that one of the WPPSS plants is still operating, # 2.  What an interesting name.  A later google search also revealed that there were only 5 WPPSS plants, not seven.  CHNN regrets the error, and will fire whoever was responsible when the hangover wears off.

Leonhardt’s drivel actually transcends the usual rote stenography of treating something flat-out bonkers a Republican said as though it weren’t entirely false and unfit to print, as it were, and ups the ante a bit.   Like Tom Friedman embracing the American Imperium before him, Leonhardt boldly steps above the partisan fray to personally declare that the least popular and most demonstrably misguided political party in American history is absolutely right, once again, although the opposite was of course true then as now.   As we’ve seen all too often of late, arithmetic isn’t the Grey Lady’s strong suit.  The recent 39% rate hike that WellPoint sneeringly slapped on its California customers was to boost its profits from 5% to 7%, a figure which is of course after the expense of corporate jets, executive salaries, advertising, lobbying, and lawyering et al, bringing this lovely organization to a overhead rate well in the thirties.  Medicare’s overhead is under 5%.  Isn’t anyone at the NYT aware of this?    ”Markets” are what currently produces the costliest and least effective medical care in the developed world; “government takeovers” are the only proven way to provide health care at an affordable cost to all citizens, but if you wasted two bucks on a New York Times you might not know that.

What is touted, and what we actually get, from the “free market” is the elephant in the room that simply cannot be mentioned in the mainstream media, of which the Times is unfortunately one of the least embarrassing members.  We get higher prices for poorer products, less innovation, colossal waste, corrupt politicians, environmental destruction, fewer jobs, and gross extremes of wealth and poverty.  Period.  This has been amply proven throughout human history, but especially in 20th century America.  After aggressive government intervention created a national transportation network and a robust financial system in the latter half of the 1800′s, the economy rapidly turned into the sort of monopolized and corrupt mess we see today, with the same results.  Aggressive moves in the other direction like progressive taxation, antitrust laws, and heavy investment in infrastructure and education briefly corrected the imbalance and produced a more broadly prosperous society, just the one that has relentlessly been swept away over the last thirty years as we’ve been blindly but eagerly led  back to the “market,” despite the fact that every time we went there before we got robbed.

Right down the line, we see every day the disgusting excesses and outright theft that Corporate America commits, whether they be our cable providers, agribusiness, retailers, utilities, banks, or military contractors…   None of them would survive five minutes in a “free market.”  But unlike the constantly reviled government, they get to keep their records secret, they seem increasingly unbounded by any laws, and they are worshipped not just on FOX Business Channel but even on the front page of the commie New York Times.  Worse, they run to the government at every turn for protection from real competition and absolution from even the flimsiest of penalties for misconduct, and they win almost every time, too, and that was before the Supreme Court gave them a new and improved version of humanity.

It’s time to stop saying that the “free market” is so successful, and come up with an example.  Just one.

After the massive bust of 2008-2009, would you imagine that this bunch is back to the idea of handing retirement security for millions of FOX watchers over to the stock market, still?  Of course not.  But almost unbelievably, a shabby and discredited fraud crafted a dozen years ago when the stock market and financial system were conveniently booming is being dragged out of the righty attic today as though the last two years never happened.   They think people are so stupid that they won’t notice Wall Street’s recent unpleasantness, and would prefer “free market” discipline to a regular check in the mail in their old age.  What’s the average age of the typical FOX viewer, again?

But the best example of bad timing is how the controlling minority of Republicans have dredged up ten year old whines about nasty (and not incidentally, Democrat-supporting) “trial lawyers,” historically ordinary Americans’ only club to battle overbearing corporations that maim, poison, fleece, and kill them just when corporations have been doing so so regularly and ostentatiously.  A power plant in Connecticut just exploded, killing several and maiming many more, a major international automobile company just recalled the vast majority of its vehicles for gross safety flaws that have killed motorists, and a longtime US House representative was sent to the grave by sloppy surgeons who severed his intestine while working on his gall bladder, and the Republicans want to REDUCE the damages these murderous scofflaws pay.  Do these guy read even less newspapers than Sarah Palin?  You have to wonder.

Further, Republicans are openly basking in the glory of their carefully crafted Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Citizens (!) United, that  helped cement in law the crony capitalism that has left so many people unemployed and disenfranchised, as a good thing, even as the health care companies they so unfailingly support proudly and publicly raise rates almost 40% in California.  Couldn’t they have gotten them to wait?  The pure delusion and squandering of political opportunity almost rivals something the Democrats might try, and that’s the Republicans’ eternal ace in the hole.

Today President Obama went on TV and defended Chase Bank CEO Jamie Dimond’s 17 million bonus, which was apparently set as a percentage of what he was able to finagle out of the taxpayers to save his (no longer) dying company.    Talent, and all that.  Rich Lowry proclaimed that the teabaggers had set aside their populistic communism in favor of good old Republican “ideas” of 2002, read so beautifully off Sarah Palin’s hand, and naturally the WaPoo and the NYT ran around “debunking” global warming and Republican (loser) intransigence as unfortunate but temporary products of liberal excess.  Maybe Republican’s timing isn’t so off after all.   For them, losing is the next best thing to winning.

The reason for this curious obsession with the past in a culture that can’t remember what happened yesterday is that “The War on Terror” was never anything more than a business plan, and its investors set it up to be a long-term thing.  The much feared “Peace Dividend”  after the collapse of our only conceivably threatening “enemy,” the Soviet Union, simply had to be eliminated, if the prerogatives of the Imperial Presidency were to remain….  secrecy, ever-expanding government power, black budgets, and a lot  taxpayer money to spend as one wished.  In peacetime, people do expect that they taxes they pay to the government will return as benefits, they are uncomfortable with the secrecy and violent tendencies of an overbearing government, and worse, they also might even respect the patriotism of dissent and stand for constitutional principles on occasion.  What righty could put up with that?  The Soviet Evil Empire had to be replaced with something grossly inflated to become “Islamofascism,” and in their more lurid fantasies, a “Caliphate’” in which Ay-rabs would screw all of our dames and then make ‘em wear head scarves.  Really.  A lot of Fox News watchers believe this to this day.  Turbans are much scarier than those fur things those Russkies wore, too, so what the hell?

The absurd thinness of the arguments that support treating September 11 as though it were the Holocaust (except in this holocaust, the Jews won afterward and spent their lives putting a can of whoop-ass on anybody who looked like a Nazi…) ought to discredit them so thoroughly that they would have no place in public discourse, but there they are, nine long and miserable years later.   The same people that led us into our current losing occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan now have their greedy eyes on Iran, and the gasbags on television just sit there, listen, and pretend that these people aren’t crazy.  Of course, since almost all of the gasbags cheered for the wars themselves, this is easier to do for them than it is for you, the viewer, who thought they were all nuts the whole time.

FOX has found its niche in all of this; Nixon once calculated that he had 30% of America no matter what he did…  the “don’t confuse me with the facts” crowd was his “base,”  and now his former campaigner, Roger Ailes, sells them dentures, gold, and golf estates as the ratings skyrocket.  The rest of the MSM, not so much.  You see, some, not all, news watchers might want to watch something that isn’t utter horseshit, for which they would obviously choose FOX anyway, but no media outlet wanted to be the only one so doing, so all of the TV Networks and newspapers except Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) seem to have tossed up their hands, donned their flak jackets and said, “Let’s go with the horseshit.”

History, unlike television careers, is important, and it moves along.  If Roger Ailes’ repulsive mug belching tinny Bushisms and shopworn fearmongering doesn’t shame the rest of the MSM to start calling such vermin out on their lies, nothing else will.  His comments were worse than mere lies, they were old, tired lies that got voted off the island in 2005, as even the stupidest bobblehead ought to have seen that.  Lies are like ties; you shouldn’t be caught in an old one.  But caught they were, and although they’d looked smashing in “everybody else was fooled, too,” and even “that’s old news ” looked good in the right lighting, “Gee, look at this crazy person we’ve been believing all this time; let’s go to commercial” wasn’t very flattering at all.

The crisis of the News Media, and the resulting crisis of our democracy, is that there is no competing with FOX, and because the rest of our media missed this fact at a pretty crucial moment, Osama can worry about glaciers melting now, which is a good thing, because we can’t be bothered.  Too many other problems.

Nagourney lamely brings up financial reform, climate legislation, and any number of things that clearly won’t amount to a hill of beans as “threatened” by Republicans’ still unlikely sweeps in 2010, as though he weren’t aware that those pipe dreams have already been sold down the river like everything else “hope and change” was supposed to bring.  We already know that any climate legislation will be so hopelessly watered down that the planet’s fate is as good as sealed, that even when the despicable and crooked Tim Geithner is tossed out for his now-revealed corrupt involvement with AIG, the clone that will replace him will be just as bad or worse, and that Sonia Sotomayor is as “liberal” as any Supreme Court nominee Obama would ever consider nominating.  In short, Nagourney is breathlessly reporting on a game that has already long since been thrown.  Can you believe they charge two bucks for that paper?

To washed-up beltway manipulators like Nagourney, a large majority in the house and 60 seats in the Senate must continue to be trumpeted to the NYT’s long-suffering readers as a thing worth losing, when the last several months have shown anyone with a pulse that it’s not.  Despite Nagourney’s tired ramblings, we are a now irredeemably just another failed state ruled by thieves, warmongers, and religious freaks, and if anything, Obama’s election has cemented this reality to a point where it’s no longer necessary for anyone who wishes otherwise to vote at all.  Newspapers may blame lots of things for their own decline, but the simple fact is that reading one to become an informed citizen is a dispiriting and pointless waste of time; vote and organize until you’re blue in the face, but unless you’re content to live in a corporatist dictatorship your time would better be spent filling out emigration papers.

From the time Obama utterly and flagrantly capitulated to the telecoms in allowing the government to spy on its citizens for corporate profit, we could see this coming, but more so in retrospect….  Democratic “victories,” costly and arduous as they were to achieve, have had no effect but to energize the fascist “base” of the Republican party while turning myriad Bush atrocities into bipartisan “consensus” along the way, which in the end is much more damaging.  If you don’t like a repressive government taking your money to spend on wars, repression, and empowering further the powers that be, move to Sweden.  At least you won’t have to read the New York Times there.

As we’ve seen, the answer to a health care “system” that gobbles up twice the money for half of the results is to throw more struggling people’s money at it.  The answer to  cripplingly expensive wars all over the globe is to start a few more of them.  The answer to the rapacious greed of the banksters is to give them more money, just as the answer to global warming is to build more nuclear power plants.  In short, the answer to every problem is to make it worse, and Adam Nagourney calls that an “agenda” that might be “threatened” by something so paltry and meaningless as an midterm election, following  two that were supposed to begin to cast aside such insanity.  Spare me.

Back in the days before Nagourney’s “reporting” helped to clobber John Kerry’s bid to oust Bush in 2004, there were still a lot of people who might have believed such nonsense.  And in those days, his cruel joke of a newspaper only cost a buck.  Today, Nagourney can type all he wants, but the fate of America, and the New York Times, is already sealed.

As only the Teabaggers seem to recognize, Democracy is as dead as Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith, and even in the unlikely event of the Republican sweep Nagourney now cheerleads, the “agenda” will remain the same.

Until recently, running a corporation, country, or media outlet was considered to be, if nothing else, a lot of work.  Perhaps Ken Lay’s universally acclaimed business genius, Clinton’s formidable multitasking skills, and Fox News’ “success” led too many people to believe otherwise, because none of these worthies were known so much for doing anything as they were for basking in the warm spotlight of fame, yet all were treated with equal reverence among their followers.  This delusion turned out to have rather unpleasant consequences in the end, but at the time seemed plausible enough.  They all look the same on TV, so why not go ahead and elect a not-too-bright President who’s never had a job he didn’t fail at?  The Fourth Estate went along, naturally, because as soon as Ken Starr sat down, they did too, and inertia is a powerful thing.

Tentatively at first, but like a tsunami after Bush’s “triumphant” 9/11 “performance,” bigwigs everywhere, from Enron to AIG, from the New York Times to the US Senate, understandably decided they’d been wasting their time at the office, and they might as well go home and clear brush (or its Hamptons equivalent).  If someone can fuck up that big and not just keep their job but become a National Hero for it with no more than a good PR department, why exactly, go to work at all?    It was time for the elite to spend some quality time with their vacation homes, not least so they could keep track of them all, unlike that foolish grinder coot McCain.  As Ronald Reagan once said, “They say hard work never killed anyone, but why take a chance?”

Of course, bad things did begin happening as the Masters of The Universe hit the links en masse;  wars lost, a city drowned, surpluses turned to staggering deficits, and paper profits in industry after deregulated industry turned to dust, but through it all the neat thing was that none of the major characters ever suffered unduly. Watching television news or reading the newspaper was like watching a familiar sitcom; horrible things might happen to the walk-ons, but the stars remained unharmed and ready for the next episode, to be re-run in any sequence.

Because of the growing and now seemingly unbridgeable chasm between appearance and reality that opened during those post “Mission Accomplished” years, a lot of “important” people got to take a lot of time off with pay, and I’d venture that that’s where some of the money we suddenly noticed missing went.  These people may not be worth their many millions, but they are worth something, and they oughtn’t be at the spa 24/7, you’d think, if they’re pulling a paycheck.  The trouble is, the only place the money didn’t go was to the media companies that breathlessly promoted all the flim-flam that now passed for success, thereby gaining essentially nothing while losing any remaining credibility in the process.  Knight-Ridder labored during the run-up to Iraq to get the story right, while the New York Times just set into type Dick Cheney’s daily missive, and they both ended up in hock.  Credibility doesn’t pay the bills, after all, particularly if your news product shows that you wouldn’t know credibility if it dropped on your head.

All this leaves us at an uncomfortable juncture, one that may make poor Ken Lay think that he died too early.  Unlike Kenny Boy, Goldman Sachs and AIG, among others, are threatening again to go Galt, this time loaded down with billions more in taxpayer funds than Ken would have even tried to secure from his pal W on his most shameless day.  Go Galt from what, exactly?  Is that a threat or a promise?

Oh, that’s right, failure is the new success, at least on TV.  (see Palin, Sarah.)

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.