Thursday, July 28, 2011
One spectacular flash of brilliant, life-changing, love-affirming light
Salam Allaikum.
Greetings my brothers and sisters. Peace be unto you, Peace be among you, and may Peace reign forever within your houses.
I have for too long been absent from the Mosque. But I hereby once again declare and proclaim:
“There is no God except Allah. And I declarer and proclaim: that Muhammed (PBUH) is his messenger.”
From those statements, I have never backed down, These declarations I shall never revoke. And thus, I am a true Muslim – albeit flowed, albeit ignorant of many things, but now aware, having been awakened in one spectacular flash of brilliant, life-changing, love-affirming light, I am ready to return, to fulfill my part of Allah's plan. To return to the mosque, to once again worship with you, oh wise ones, oh compassionate ones, oh kind ones, and to share in that great joy of the knowledge of the love that our Creator has for us.
My path in returning to you has been most crooked, with many twists and turns, many hills (yea, even mountains) to climb and oceans to cross. But in the climbing, and in the crossing, it has been affirmed to me this:
That after illness overtook me, and laid me so low, in the darkest of dark places, that in my darkest of moments and doubt, that Allah, in His wisdom, His benevolence, and His infinite love and mercy, did send two mighty angels to guard me, that I might not slip into and be forever lost to hell; that darkest of places, where Prophet Jesus (PBUH) descended and remained for three days until he was resurrected.
And what is hell? Hell, is the absence of love. Simply that. The absence of love. The absence of love of self, in the presence of a self-loathing that denies all attempts by your loved ones to enter, to soften your heart, and to give you love. Once we fathom what hell is, then we begin to fully love our neighbor as ourselves (from which we learn that we must love ourselves, so that we might better love our neighbor - some of this has been lost in translation - but the words of Jesus have always held kernels of virtually unfathomable eternal truths; truths that any child, of course, understands; yet truths of which we can but pray to see a glimmering.
This was revealed to me quite recently, on Sunday, October 31, 2010, in Centerville, Iowa, at a Presbyterian Church service of all Saints Sunday. I had attended neither mosque services, nor Protestant worship services since I was last in the mosque in 2007. The Pastor, and the Choir Director of my parents' church made it abundantly clear that I would be welcomed back with loving arms. But they did not understand this: That I am a Muslim, that I will always be a Muslim, and that while I may certainly attend their worship services, I believe in but one faith tradition: Islam, and I subscribe to but one Holy Scripture: the Koran. And these are beliefs and subscriptions that I came to, of my own free will, as my steps were directed by the unseen yet ever present hand of Allah. To return to my parents' church would have meant turning my back on my faith, on my family, on my friends, and this, I will never do. This is THE one thing, that I can never do.
In Centerville, Iowa, on that blessed Sunday morning, near the end of the worship, I suddenly found myself sobbing uncontrollably, for in the moment of grace, I realized what has most been missing from my life these past three years: Sharing in worship and praise of our Creator, Allah, with you, His saints and His apostles.
So, sobbing, I left the Church, to behold the brilliance of the Sun shining, revealing much of Allah's grace unto me. And this was a revelation. And then this: that of the 21 members of my family gathered that weekend to bury the ashes of my mother's older twin sisters at the family cemetery in Livingston, Iowa, there was but one to whom I could possibly explain all that had been there revealed to me; my youngest sister, Marianne. And that was a very lonely moment, that realization, that I could not share my joy. (And in these thoughts, perhaps I was giving too little credit to the rest of my family; but this is what I then believed).
And that was a lonely, but also a joyous moment. And as Allah smiled upon me, He then revealed the most astonishing truth; that truth from which I have run and hidden so successfully, but at no small cost to my spirit and soul. This truth: Brother Mark, of course I forgive, but, there is nothing to forgive. You were sick, and I sent unto you My angels, to protect you, and nourish you back to health. Brother Mark, you never even had to ask My forgiveness, much less beg for it, for what you have so mistakenly believed to be your sins. You are washed clean. You are made whole. It now is time to go and proclaim to the world, that Allah created you (all), that Allah loves you (all), that Allah protects and blesses you (all).
And that when the day of final judgment comes, you will come before Prophet Jesus (PBUH) who loves you (all). For did he not say, “Suffer the little children to come unto me?”
Come and give glory; come and give praise; come with joyful heart; come give thanksgiving; come to worship.
And as the founder of the faith into which you were first born, Martin Luther, wrote in this, his resoundingly affirming hymn, Built on a Rock:
My peace I leave with you. Amen.
In love, and with joy,
Br. Mark
I look forward to greeting you all again this afternoon.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Retired Lt Cmd Jeff Huber talks - listen up, y'all!
Monday, July 25, 2011
Iran Ate My Homework. Again.
26 July 2011
by Jeff Huber
“Uncle Leo” Panetta, our newly coroneted Secretary of Defense, wasted little time in leaping face-first onto the blame Iraq bandwagon. On 9 July he stated that weapons supplied by Iran had become a “tremendous concern” in Iraq in recent weeks. “We’re seeing more of those weapons going in from Iran, and they’ve really hurt us,” Panetta puled.
Panetta, Mullen and Jeffrey agree
on the threat from Iran.
Panetta wasn’t flying solo on this propaganda raid; he had two loyal echo chamberlains on his wing. As New York Times Pentagon camp follower Elisabeth Bumbler dutifully relayed from her uniformed handlers, “Mr. Panetta is the third top American official to raise an alarm about Iranian influence in Iraq in recent days.” The other two top officials were Joint Chiefs potentate Mike Mullen and ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey. Mutt and Jeff say they have “forensic evidence” to back their claims, though neither they nor Uncle Leo mentioned what that forensic evidence might be. Whatever they’re referring to, historical evidence indicates we’ll never see it.
The Pentarchy’s bull feather merchant marines have been shooting poisoned information arrows at Iran at regular intervals since around the time young Mr. Bush stiff armed that Iraq Study Group surrender stuff and went instead with the neocons’ surge strategy. Freddie Kagan, The American Enterprise Institute’s warlord Fauntleroy, published the surge manifesto Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq in January 2007.
Within a month Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times published “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says.” Gordon had made his bones with the Bush/Cheney regime when he and Judith Miller helped them execute the Nigergate hoax that duped the nation into nodding along with their pet invasion of Iraq. In their 8 Sept. 2002 article “Threats and Responses: The Iraqis; U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” Gordon and Miller supported their assertion that Hussein was seeking yellowcake from Niger by citing anonymous “officials” a jaw-dislocating 30 times. The documents that comprised the “smoking gun” were later proven to be poorly fabricated forgeries.
In making the case that Iran was producing the roadside bombs that were killing so many Americans in Iraq in his 2007 story, Gordon referenced “interviews” with “civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies” who “provided specific details to support” a claim that Iran was providing “’lethal support’ to Shiite militants in Iraq.” Gordon didn’t name any of these officials, or quote them directly or, for that matter, relay any of those specific details they provided other than to state that said details were likely to be revealed later.
Looks Iranian to me.
Then-ambassador to Iraq and charter New American Centurion Zalmay Khalilzad promised to pony up proof of the allegations outlined by Gordon. The military trotted out some of its very best PowerPoint palaver for a select audience of embedded media trustees, in which some sad sack major looking to become a sad sack light colonel said the shaped roadside bomb charges being discussed could only have come from Iran. After the brief the major allowed as how, well, yeah, um, actually, the stuff in the bombs could have been bought at any Radio Shack. (But Iran people still suck, okay?)
My colleague Gareth Porter correctly noted in Sept. 2007 that the Bush/Cheney administration “has not come forward with a single piece of concrete evidence to support the claim that the Iranian government has been involved in the training, arming or advising of Iraqi Shiite militias.” To this day, the only existing evidence of an outside party supplying weapons to Shiite militias points directly at “King David” Petraeus who, as commander in charge of training Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, handed out 190,000 (that’s right, one hundred and ninety thousand) AK-47s that vanished like cookies at an AA meeting.
Porter has also exposed allegations that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons as fatuous. In early 2010 he published a numbers of articles that revealed the files contained on the “smoking laptop” computer that described Iran’s work on a “nuclear trigger” were as blatantly bogus as the blue-dollar-bill forgeries that “proved” Hussein was buying yellowcake uranium powder from Niger. But thanks to neocon-backed brainwash breweries like United Against Nuclear Iran (aka UANI), lysergic visions of an Iranian made mushroom cloud over Jerusalem persist.
An article in last Thursday’s New York Times by Michael Gordon soul mate David E. Sanger badgered us with bull roar about how some development or other means Iran is getting closer to having bomb-grade material because the “United Nations Security Council” has “evidence” of something completely unrelated, and “international nuclear inspectors and American officials” say “evidence” points to something else entirely, and an “Iran expert” at a right-wing think tank says “The evidence is there that they are accelerating” but he doesn’t say what the evidence is or what exactly it says "they" are accelerating.
Trying to reverse engineer the thought process behind the latest manifestations of the warmongery is always perilous work. The main assumption involved—i.e., that there is a thought process of any kind behind anything those yahooligans do—is manifestly flawed. Strategies crafted by neocon tank thinkers resemble model airplanes assembled with sledgehammers. More than anything, war wonk schemes remind one of ice hockey’s bullyboy dump-and-chase tactic. Such methods are unsightly and uncreative and brutish, but if you simply keep pounding away at the opposition with them you’ll eventually prevail over things like art and science and reason and, most of all, humanity.
Why fling the puck into Iran’s end again now? Partly because that’s how dump-and-chase works; you keep doing it. Partly because the neocon men need somebody to blame for the recent uptick in U.S. casualties in Iraq, somebody for Americans to get mad at so they don’t stop and think things like Hey, didn’t we end combat operations there a while back? The war mongrels also need to keep Iran good and boog-ified to justify the coming atomization of our withdrawal timelines from Iraq and the Bananastans. (Gotta keep the Persian Peril isolated!)
Iranian Air Force C-22 carpet bomber.
The threat Iran poses to the Centurions’ agenda has little to do with that country’s military power or warlike intentions. Iran can’t project enough conventional force to pout about beyond its borders or the Persian Gulf, and for Iran to strike another country, especially Israel, with a nuclear weapon would be like the entire Persian race mumbling into the barrel of a .44 Magnum. Iran only becomes a problem when it develops a truly self-sustaining nuclear energy program and it, along with its big buddies Russian and China, wrestles control of the global energy strategy away from Dick Cheney’s pals. But even control of our most precious commodity is a mere chip, something to contend for that will sustain the great game that has been played by the powerful and corrupt since Winston Churchill molested Muslim geography after World War I.
In a kinder, gentler, saner America the body politic would have dismissed all this boo noise about Iran a long time ago. Lamentably, we live in an age when anything Bill O’Reilly says, no matter how asinine or bizarre it is, becomes incontrovertible fact if Sean Hannity says it too.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.
By Jeff Huber They sure could go for a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup from your local Walgreens right about now.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Hiding Behind the Troops
7/12/11
By Jeff Huber
They sure could go for a Reese's Peanut Butter
Cup from your local Walgreens right about now.
You’re at a convenience shack or a grocery barn or wherever Old Century-style place it is you go where you have wait in some kind of line to pay for stuff in person and talk to an actual check-out clerk who hasn’t yet been replaced by a machine that’s smarter than your kid in college. You look around while you’re waiting for the one or more of the latter-day luddites in front of you to write a check instead of swiping a credit card because a) they don’t believe in the 21st century or b) they never heard of it. (I can think of no contemporary scenario more Chaplin-esque—maddening, hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time—that the one that contains the bit of dialogue that goes: Darn it, I can never find that pen, it’s the one I always use, I know its in my purse somewhere, I always keep it there, it was an anniversary present, you know. Oh, I hope I didn’t leave it someplace.)
Mixed in among the displays of designer kid’s candies that are more addictive than crack cocaine and tabloid periodicals that are worse for your mind than sniffing glue, right next to the cash register, you see a presentation that proudly features one of those old-oak-tree ribbon thingies with a logo you can’t quite read yet. It’s not the pink one that wants you to save the ta-tas, no, and it’s not the one that wants you to adopt pound puppies and kitties or have them neutered or to clean up their poop or whatever—that one’s brown isn’t it? No, this is the yellow one, and you can read what it says now: SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!
If you tack a dollar onto the tab for groceries or your beer or your giant box of Jujubes, “a portion” of it will go help our troops overseas who are protecting us and keeping us safe and are making all the sacrifices in our War on Evil while we sit at home and don’t make hardly any sacrifices at all. This particular come-on promises to make sure every troop—that is, every troop who wants one, or asks for one, or fills out a ten page application form and writes a 500 word essay and then wins the drawing—will receive a gift, on the next Christian holiday, of a personalized Hershey bar that reads “Go, Troops, Go!” or simply “Yay Troops!”
At this point, you hopefully ask yourself why, if we the taxpayers have ponied up over a trillion dollars for our woebegone wars in Iraq and the Bananastans, should any of us pull another dollar out of our wallet to make sure our troops get a candy bar for Christmas? Gee, those tens or maybe hundreds of billions we poured into Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan that disappeared like an old lady’s favorite pen, wouldn’t they alone have bought a lifetime supply of personalized Christmas Hershey bars for just about every person in the world who celebrates Christmas?
And you hopefully want to scream when you fail to toss a buck into the pot when you check out and the cash register professional pouts and says, “Don’t you want to help the troops? The poor old lady who lost her pen did.”
If these yahooligans
don't end up in hell
there is no such place.
The preceding scenario portrays an artfully crafted scam with a witting or unwitting accomplice on the scene to guilt trip you into going along with it. It’s a parable that illustrates the principle behind the most cynical and perhaps the most effective pro-war propaganda campaign that has been operating since Dick Cheney first convened his White House Information Group to gull the American public and its legislature into rolling over for the invasion of Iraq, the crown jewel in the grand neoconservative strategy for invading and occupying the world.
Some of the support-our-troops organizations you’ll rub against are no doubt front groups, supposedly “grass roots” outfits similar to the repellant Vets for Freedom that bills itself as the f the "leading voice representing troops and veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan" but is actually a political beard run by Republican-affiliated public relations, media, legal, and political consultants who include former Bush White House spokesman Taylor Gross.
Many troop support groups and the people who run them are quite earnest and relatively free of Big War paw prints, but their effect is much the same as if they were simply a gaggle of propaganda goons. And I hate to say this, but even most of the love-the-troops-hate-the-war folks, however well intentioned they are, play into the pro-war propaganda scheme. In any case, it’s hard to tell which pro-trooper outfits are a scam and/or a front group and which ones, however misguided they may be, are on the up-and-up. The thing to remember is that there is no reason on earth why you should pluck a single penny out of your pocket to “support” the troops. You’ve already sacrificed enough; the malignant likes of Dick Cheney and John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol who brought you the Longest War Ever have hustled your country’s economy to hell in a hand truck, and unless you’re in pre-school right now, you’ll never see a return to the fiscal halcyon days of the President Pants (aka Clinton) era.
Lamentably, the grandchildren of kids in preschool might not see the end of the Long War either, now that the folks in charge of it have established a line of succession. Ex-CIA director Leon Panetta, who just replaced Ex-CIA director Bob Gates as defense secretary, is the same brand war perpetuating bureaucratic savant as his predecessor was. John Bolton was a kick up, kiss down kind of D.C. culture vulture; Panetta and Gates kissed up, down and sideways and sucked their way to the top of the dung heap. They were, long ago, wholly vested in the warfare-welfare system status quo; they knew where all the bodies were buried because they’re the ones who hired the hit men.
That they know little or nothing about actual war is of little consequence. The next guy in line for their cabinet job, newly implanted CIA chief David Petraeus, knows little or nothing about actual war either, yet to hear the hapless bullroar machine describe him, you’d think he’s the reincarnation of Ike, Patton and Robert E. Lee combined. Where Panetta and Gates are self-promoting bureaucrat buffoons, Petraeus is an out-and-out great white shark. He knows where all the bodies are buried because he’s the one who embalmed them. All Petraeus really knows about wars is how to keep from losing them by making sure they never end. As his hagiographer and camp wife Tom Ricks artlessly blurted in his most recent rewritten history of the Iraq War, Petraeus really did “betray us,” pretending to be looking for a way out of Iraq when he was actually buying time to make it impossible for us to ever leave.
That’s where the “support our troops” hook kicks into high gear. Whenever commenting for the embedded media about the prospects of bring troops home, the likes of King David, Mush Mullen, Desert Ox Odierno, Uncle Bob and now Panetta Head will fall back on the we don’t want to squander the tremendous gains our wonderful men and women in uniform sacrificed so bravely to achieve mantra. Those bravely sacrificed for “gains” amount to an Iraq and Afghanistan that, nearly a decade after 9/11, still look like the London Zoo ten minutes after a Nazi air raid, and a best ally—Pakistan—that we’re in a virtual open war with.
The Pentarchy exhorts us to honor our war dead and wounded by adding to their number in pursuit of self-defeating, self-perpetuating wars whose sole purpose is to create bases of operations from which we can launch more self-defeating, self-perpetuating wars in the name of American global leadership.
The way you can support our troops is to apply constant pressure on your elected federal officials to bring them home and to keep their tea bagger toadying mitts off the troops’ pay and benefits. Anything else is just helping the warmongery use our troops as a human shield.
Whatever you do, don't plunk down good money to have Walgreens send them a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Our troops are getting plenty to eat, trust me.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.
Hiding Behind the Troops
7/12/11
By Jeff Huber
They sure could go for a Reese's Peanut Butter
Cup from your local Walgreens right about now.
You’re at a convenience shack or a grocery barn or wherever Old Century-style place it is you go where you have wait in some kind of line to pay for stuff in person and talk to an actual check-out clerk who hasn’t yet been replaced by a machine that’s smarter than your kid in college. You look around while you’re waiting for the one or more of the latter-day luddites in front of you to write a check instead of swiping a credit card because a) they don’t believe in the 21st century or b) they never heard of it. (I can think of no contemporary scenario more Chaplin-esque—maddening, hilarious and heart-breaking at the same time—that the one that contains the bit of dialogue that goes: Darn it, I can never find that pen, it’s the one I always use, I know its in my purse somewhere, I always keep it there, it was an anniversary present, you know. Oh, I hope I didn’t leave it someplace.)
Mixed in among the displays of designer kid’s candies that are more addictive than crack cocaine and tabloid periodicals that are worse for your mind than sniffing glue, right next to the cash register, you see a presentation that proudly features one of those old-oak-tree ribbon thingies with a logo you can’t quite read yet. It’s not the pink one that wants you to save the ta-tas, no, and it’s not the one that wants you to adopt pound puppies and kitties or have them neutered or to clean up their poop or whatever—that one’s brown isn’t it? No, this is the yellow one, and you can read what it says now: SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!
If you tack a dollar onto the tab for groceries or your beer or your giant box of Jujubes, “a portion” of it will go help our troops overseas who are protecting us and keeping us safe and are making all the sacrifices in our War on Evil while we sit at home and don’t make hardly any sacrifices at all. This particular come-on promises to make sure every troop—that is, every troop who wants one, or asks for one, or fills out a ten page application form and writes a 500 word essay and then wins the drawing—will receive a gift, on the next Christian holiday, of a personalized Hershey bar that reads “Go, Troops, Go!” or simply “Yay Troops!”
At this point, you hopefully ask yourself why, if we the taxpayers have ponied up over a trillion dollars for our woebegone wars in Iraq and the Bananastans, should any of us pull another dollar out of our wallet to make sure our troops get a candy bar for Christmas? Gee, those tens or maybe hundreds of billions we poured into Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan that disappeared like an old lady’s favorite pen, wouldn’t they alone have bought a lifetime supply of personalized Christmas Hershey bars for just about every person in the world who celebrates Christmas?
And you hopefully want to scream when you fail to toss a buck into the pot when you check out and the cash register professional pouts and says, “Don’t you want to help the troops? The poor old lady who lost her pen did.”
If these yahooligans
don't end up in hell
there is no such place.
The preceding scenario portrays an artfully crafted scam with a witting or unwitting accomplice on the scene to guilt trip you into going along with it. It’s a parable that illustrates the principle behind the most cynical and perhaps the most effective pro-war propaganda campaign that has been operating since Dick Cheney first convened his White House Information Group to gull the American public and its legislature into rolling over for the invasion of Iraq, the crown jewel in the grand neoconservative strategy for invading and occupying the world.
Some of the support-our-troops organizations you’ll rub against are no doubt front groups, supposedly “grass roots” outfits similar to the repellant Vets for Freedom that bills itself as the f the "leading voice representing troops and veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan" but is actually a political beard run by Republican-affiliated public relations, media, legal, and political consultants who include former Bush White House spokesman Taylor Gross.
Many troop support groups and the people who run them are quite earnest and relatively free of Big War paw prints, but their effect is much the same as if they were simply a gaggle of propaganda goons. And I hate to say this, but even most of the love-the-troops-hate-the-war folks, however well intentioned they are, play into the pro-war propaganda scheme. In any case, it’s hard to tell which pro-trooper outfits are a scam and/or a front group and which ones, however misguided they may be, are on the up-and-up. The thing to remember is that there is no reason on earth why you should pluck a single penny out of your pocket to “support” the troops. You’ve already sacrificed enough; the malignant likes of Dick Cheney and John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol who brought you the Longest War Ever have hustled your country’s economy to hell in a hand truck, and unless you’re in pre-school right now, you’ll never see a return to the fiscal halcyon days of the President Pants (aka Clinton) era.
Lamentably, the grandchildren of kids in preschool might not see the end of the Long War either, now that the folks in charge of it have established a line of succession. Ex-CIA director Leon Panetta, who just replaced Ex-CIA director Bob Gates as defense secretary, is the same brand war perpetuating bureaucratic savant as his predecessor was. John Bolton was a kick up, kiss down kind of D.C. culture vulture; Panetta and Gates kissed up, down and sideways and sucked their way to the top of the dung heap. They were, long ago, wholly vested in the warfare-welfare system status quo; they knew where all the bodies were buried because they’re the ones who hired the hit men.
That they know little or nothing about actual war is of little consequence. The next guy in line for their cabinet job, newly implanted CIA chief David Petraeus, knows little or nothing about actual war either, yet to hear the hapless bullroar machine describe him, you’d think he’s the reincarnation of Ike, Patton and Robert E. Lee combined. Where Panetta and Gates are self-promoting bureaucrat buffoons, Petraeus is an out-and-out great white shark. He knows where all the bodies are buried because he’s the one who embalmed them. All Petraeus really knows about wars is how to keep from losing them by making sure they never end. As his hagiographer and camp wife Tom Ricks artlessly blurted in his most recent rewritten history of the Iraq War, Petraeus really did “betray us,” pretending to be looking for a way out of Iraq when he was actually buying time to make it impossible for us to ever leave.
That’s where the “support our troops” hook kicks into high gear. Whenever commenting for the embedded media about the prospects of bring troops home, the likes of King David, Mush Mullen, Desert Ox Odierno, Uncle Bob and now Panetta Head will fall back on the we don’t want to squander the tremendous gains our wonderful men and women in uniform sacrificed so bravely to achieve mantra. Those bravely sacrificed for “gains” amount to an Iraq and Afghanistan that, nearly a decade after 9/11, still look like the London Zoo ten minutes after a Nazi air raid, and a best ally—Pakistan—that we’re in a virtual open war with.
The Pentarchy exhorts us to honor our war dead and wounded by adding to their number in pursuit of self-defeating, self-perpetuating wars whose sole purpose is to create bases of operations from which we can launch more self-defeating, self-perpetuating wars in the name of American global leadership.
The way you can support our troops is to apply constant pressure on your elected federal officials to bring them home and to keep their tea bagger toadying mitts off the troops’ pay and benefits. Anything else is just helping the warmongery use our troops as a human shield.
Whatever you do, don't plunk down good money to have Walgreens send them a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Our troops are getting plenty to eat, trust me.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.
Jeff Huber to slice and dice with his pen-knife! Panetta's an Idiot, What the Frick Can He Tell You? Does not matter what he tells US! What matters is what he tells the P R E S S!!!!!
Monday, July 18, 2011
Panetta's an Idiot, What the Frick Can He Tell You?
19 July 2011
by Jeff Huber
Buddy Hackett impersonator Leon Panetta, who just stepped into Uncle Bob Gates’ vacated billet in America’s Pentarchy, has set a new benchmark in ethnic humor. He spent his first greet-and-grip trip abroad grinding his heel into his tinkle tool, saying more stupid things per minute of media exposure than George W. Bush ever did, and shrugged it all off in an MSNBC interview with “I’m Italian, what the frick can I tell you?”
"Beats the shipoopi out of me."
Tell me you’re not really the frickin’ Secretary of Defense, Uncle Leo. Moe, Larry and the Holy Ghost. Where do we find such bureaucratic twits?
Panetta began his government career as an Army intelligence officer during Lyndon Johnson’s surge in the Vietnam War. Military intelligence is to both the military and intelligence what McDonald’s is to food. Officers in combat branches have to be able to fly airplanes or drive ships or lead frightened young men in desperate attacks against machine gun nests. The only requirement for becoming an intelligence officer is to never know what the hell you’re talking about. Panetta was discharged after a two-year tour as a first lieutenant and awarded an Army Commendation Medal, a medal normally given to junior enlisted and officer personnel for not getting caught masturbating in the middle of the parade ground at high noon. (Fair disclosure: in the course of my career I received six Navy Commendation Medals, which shows you how good I was at not getting caught).
Uncle Leo didn’t claw his way to the top of the warmongery by the sheer inertia of his lack of competence in military and intelligence matters alone. He was a political prodigy. In high school Panetta joined JSA (aka Junior Statesmen of America aka Junior State of America). He was vice president of the student body as a junior and as a senior he was president. He graduated from Santa Clara University in 1960 magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. In 1963 he got his Juris Doctor from Santa Clara School of Law.
There’s no mention of Panetta having served in Vietnam, and you can bet a shiny new District of Columbia quarter that we would have heard about it if he had. It isn’t clear where exactly Panetta did serve, but I’d be willing to double down that he got himself stationed in Washington, just like a lot of wannabe politicos getting their military service block checked on their way to bigger and more malevolent things. It’s a tried and true career path that continues to be beaten by ambitious youth eager to acquire the creeping corruption that accompanies the incremental accumulation of power.
Why did law school graduate Panetta become an Army intelligence officer instead of an Army JAG? It’s hard to say for sure, but in Washington lawyers are as common as call girls. If you’re a Washington lawyer with an ultra top-secret security clearance from your days in military intelligence, on the other hand, you defecate 24-karat ingots.
In 1966, newly discharged First Lt. Panetta cashed in his credentials on a job as legislative aid to the Senate minority whip, and before he could say “Jimmy Hoffa poured into a pond of poached piranhas” three times, he knew where all the bodies were burid and he was a made guy. The higher and higher up the ladder the mob kicked him, they more they could trust him to keep their secrets because he had as much blood on his hands as anybody else.
After Panetta rode this gravy train through a series of appointed positions, he switched parties in 1971 and was elected to nine terms as a congressman. (He reportedly claimed to have left the Republican Party because it had moved away from political the center. Heh. The Republican Party hasn’t been in sliding distance of the political center since it was against slavery.)
Uncle Leo left the legislature to become Bill Clinton’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. Panetta had worked budget issues in Congress, though one can hardly imagine that he ever dirtied his hands on a spreadsheet. Possessing actual skills involved with areas one works in is for the servant classes, not for high rollers like Panetta. But his fluency in the Big Schmooze made him a natural to move up as Clinton’s White House chief of Staff, where no asset is more valuable than knowing how to deploy elbows and trim the sails to catch the prevailing winds.
Eyebrows collided with hairlines, however, when young Mr. Obama nominated Panetta to head the CIA, and his elevation to defense secretary popped optical organs out of their orbits. Talk about trading one empty hat for another. It was telling that at his defense post confirmation hearing, Uncle Leo predicted that the next Pearl Harbor could be a cyber attack. Clue in, Leon. We’ve already had cyber attacks, on the Pentagon itself no less.
So it’s little wonder that Uncle Leo devoured his feet during his first, uh, trip abroad. Oddly, though, his witless comments rang of a certain savant veracity. We may snicker that he told the troops they were in Iraq because of 9/11, but why else was he going to say they were there? Because their last commander in chief lied to the entire world to justify an invasion that had been on the neocon agenda since the late nineties, and because their present commander in chief is too much of a weakling to put an end to the “strategic mistake” like he pledged he would? And how else could Panetta justify telling the troops that they’ll have to continue to fight and die for a strategic mistake as soon as the Iraqis get off the dime and ask us to stay like he wants them to?
As to Panetta’s comment to the embedded war beat press that despite promises from the White House we’ll keep 70,000 troops in Afghanistan until 2004, I don’t see what the furor is all about. This White House hasn’t kept any of its frickin’ war promises yet. Why start now and set a bad precedent?
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.
Panetta's an Idiot, What the Frick Can He Tell You?
19 July 2011
by Jeff Huber
Buddy Hackett impersonator Leon Panetta, who just stepped into Uncle Bob Gates’ vacated billet in America’s Pentarchy, has set a new benchmark in ethnic humor. He spent his first greet-and-grip trip abroad grinding his heel into his tinkle tool, saying more stupid things per minute of media exposure than George W. Bush ever did, and shrugged it all off in an MSNBC interview with “I’m Italian, what the frick can I tell you?”
"Beats the shipoopi out of me."
Tell me you’re not really the frickin’ Secretary of Defense, Uncle Leo. Moe, Larry and the Holy Ghost. Where do we find such bureaucratic twits?
Panetta began his government career as an Army intelligence officer during Lyndon Johnson’s surge in the Vietnam War. Military intelligence is to both the military and intelligence what McDonald’s is to food. Officers in combat branches have to be able to fly airplanes or drive ships or lead frightened young men in desperate attacks against machine gun nests. The only requirement for becoming an intelligence officer is to never know what the hell you’re talking about. Panetta was discharged after a two-year tour as a first lieutenant and awarded an Army Commendation Medal, a medal normally given to junior enlisted and officer personnel for not getting caught masturbating in the middle of the parade ground at high noon. (Fair disclosure: in the course of my career I received six Navy Commendation Medals, which shows you how good I was at not getting caught).
Uncle Leo didn’t claw his way to the top of the warmongery by the sheer inertia of his lack of competence in military and intelligence matters alone. He was a political prodigy. In high school Panetta joined JSA (aka Junior Statesmen of America aka Junior State of America). He was vice president of the student body as a junior and as a senior he was president. He graduated from Santa Clara University in 1960 magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science. In 1963 he got his Juris Doctor from Santa Clara School of Law.
There’s no mention of Panetta having served in Vietnam, and you can bet a shiny new District of Columbia quarter that we would have heard about it if he had. It isn’t clear where exactly Panetta did serve, but I’d be willing to double down that he got himself stationed in Washington, just like a lot of wannabe politicos getting their military service block checked on their way to bigger and more malevolent things. It’s a tried and true career path that continues to be beaten by ambitious youth eager to acquire the creeping corruption that accompanies the incremental accumulation of power.
Why did law school graduate Panetta become an Army intelligence officer instead of an Army JAG? It’s hard to say for sure, but in Washington lawyers are as common as call girls. If you’re a Washington lawyer with an ultra top-secret security clearance from your days in military intelligence, on the other hand, you defecate 24-karat ingots.
In 1966, newly discharged First Lt. Panetta cashed in his credentials on a job as legislative aid to the Senate minority whip, and before he could say “Jimmy Hoffa poured into a pond of poached piranhas” three times, he knew where all the bodies were burid and he was a made guy. The higher and higher up the ladder the mob kicked him, they more they could trust him to keep their secrets because he had as much blood on his hands as anybody else.
After Panetta rode this gravy train through a series of appointed positions, he switched parties in 1971 and was elected to nine terms as a congressman. (He reportedly claimed to have left the Republican Party because it had moved away from political the center. Heh. The Republican Party hasn’t been in sliding distance of the political center since it was against slavery.)
Uncle Leo left the legislature to become Bill Clinton’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. Panetta had worked budget issues in Congress, though one can hardly imagine that he ever dirtied his hands on a spreadsheet. Possessing actual skills involved with areas one works in is for the servant classes, not for high rollers like Panetta. But his fluency in the Big Schmooze made him a natural to move up as Clinton’s White House chief of Staff, where no asset is more valuable than knowing how to deploy elbows and trim the sails to catch the prevailing winds.
Eyebrows collided with hairlines, however, when young Mr. Obama nominated Panetta to head the CIA, and his elevation to defense secretary popped optical organs out of their orbits. Talk about trading one empty hat for another. It was telling that at his defense post confirmation hearing, Uncle Leo predicted that the next Pearl Harbor could be a cyber attack. Clue in, Leon. We’ve already had cyber attacks, on the Pentagon itself no less.
So it’s little wonder that Uncle Leo devoured his feet during his first, uh, trip abroad. Oddly, though, his witless comments rang of a certain savant veracity. We may snicker that he told the troops they were in Iraq because of 9/11, but why else was he going to say they were there? Because their last commander in chief lied to the entire world to justify an invasion that had been on the neocon agenda since the late nineties, and because their present commander in chief is too much of a weakling to put an end to the “strategic mistake” like he pledged he would? And how else could Panetta justify telling the troops that they’ll have to continue to fight and die for a strategic mistake as soon as the Iraqis get off the dime and ask us to stay like he wants them to?
As to Panetta’s comment to the embedded war beat press that despite promises from the White House we’ll keep 70,000 troops in Afghanistan until 2004, I don’t see what the furor is all about. This White House hasn’t kept any of its frickin’ war promises yet. Why start now and set a bad precedent?
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.
And to the Banana Republic, for which is sits! PITY THE FOOL (permalink): We pity the voter who’s trying to follow the debt limit/budget debate.
Special report: Banana republic press corps!
PART 2—PITY THE FOOL (permalink): We pity the voter who’s trying to follow the debt limit/budget debate.
More precisely, we pity the voter who tries to get relevant facts from the Washington Post or the New York Times, two of our greatest newspapers.
How hard can it be to get basic facts from these, our most famous political papers? Consider what happened last Friday night, when “a visibly angry” Barack Obama held a press conference shortly after John Boehner walked away from the budget talks. (In news reports the next day, each paper used the term “visibly angry” to describe Obama’s demeanor.)
Back to Obama on Friday night: As he began his visibly angry press conference, he described the deal he had been offering Boehner. If you had been reading our biggest newspapers, you probably would have been puzzled by some of the things you saw Obama say—especially by the things he said about his proposal for additional revenues:
OBAMA (7/22/11): Good evening, everybody. I wanted to give you an update on the current situation around the debt ceiling. I just got a call about a half hour ago from Speaker Boehner, who indicated that he was going to be walking away from the negotiations that we've been engaged in here at the White House for a big deficit reduction and debt reduction package.
And I thought it would be useful for me to just give you some insight into where we were and I think that we should have moved forward with a big deal.
Essentially what we had offered Speaker Boehner was over a trillion dollars in cuts to discretionary spending, both domestic and defense. We then offered an additional $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs; Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. We believed that it was possible to shape those in a way that preserved the integrity of the system, made them available for the next generation and did not affect current beneficiaries in an adverse way.
In addition, what we sought was revenues that were actually less than what the Gang of Six signed off on. So you had a bipartisan group of senators, including Republicans who are in leadership in the Senate, calling for what effectively was about $2 trillion above the Republican baseline that they've been working off of.
What we said was, give us $1.2 trillion in additional revenues, which could be accomplished without hiking taxes—tax rates, but could simply be accomplished by eliminating loopholes, eliminating some deductions, and engaging in a tax reform process that could have lowered rates generally, while broadening the base.
So let me reiterate what we were offering. We were offering a deal that called for as much discretionary savings as the Gang of Six. We were calling for taxes that were less than what the Gang of Six had proposed and we had—we were calling for modifications to entitlement programs would have saved just as much over the 10 year window.
In other words, this was an extraordinarily fair deal. If it was unbalanced, it was unbalanced in the direction of not enough revenue.
According to Obama, he had offered Boehner a deal which involved $1.65 trillion in spending cuts and $1.2 trillion in additional revenues. That’s roughly a 4-3 ratio.
For starters, you might have been surprised by Obama’s claim that this was “an extraordinarily fair deal”—a deal that “was unbalanced in the direction of not enough revenue.” (You might have been surprised by that claim because previous reported deals had tended toward ratios of 3-1 or 5-1, spending cuts over new revenues.) But more specifically, you might have been surprised by Obama’s claim that his request for $1.2 trillion in new revenue was actually less than the amount of new revenue the Gang of Six had proposed.
At Friday evening’s conference, Obama said the Gang of Six had proposed $2 trillion in new revenue. But all week long, you had read in your nation’s most famous newspapers that the Gang of Six had proposed one trillion dollars, or roughly $1 trillion, in new revenues. For example, you had read these things in the New York Times just one day before the press conference:
HULSE (7/21/11): That plan is the one put forward Tuesday by the so-called Gang of Six, a bipartisan group of senators who worked for months to reach an agreement and whose work was lauded by Mr. Obama as a sign that a deal was possible. The plan included a net increase in government revenue of about $1 trillion over a decade.
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (7/21/11): The Gang of Six plan calls for at least $1 trillion in new tax revenues by eliminating and reducing tax breaks and deductions. For conservative senators like Saxby Chambliss, Lamar Alexander, Michael Crapo and Tom Coburn to accept this reality shows how willfully blind the House majority has really become.
Hulse’s piece was a front-page news report; his account was largely echoed by an editorial that same day. But then, if you double-checked your facts in the Washington Post, you still were told that the Gang of Six had proposed (roughly) $1 trillion in new revenue. Again, we’ll match a front-page news report with an editorial:
MONTGOMERY (7/20/11): The proposal, crafted by a bipartisan group of senators known as the "Gang of Six," calls for $500 billion in immediate savings and requires lawmakers in the coming months to cut agency spending, overhaul Social Security and Medicare, and rewrite the tax code to generate more than $1 trillion in fresh revenue.
[…]
[The Gang of Six plan] calls for raising more than $1 trillion over the next decade by reducing a variety of popular tax breaks and deductions, including breaks for home mortgage interest and employer-provided health care. While some of those savings would be dedicated to debt reduction, the rest would go toward lowering tax rates for everyone, with top individual and corporate rates dropping to at least 29 percent, down from 35 percent.
WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (7/21/11): Mr. Norquist's comments come at a moment of remarkable and welcome fluidity in what had seemed to be a solid wall of Republican opposition to raising any tax revenue at any time for any reason. The surprising reemergence and expansion of the Senate Gang of Six this week was accompanied by a flurry of statements from Republican senators endorsing a proposal that included $1 trillion in new tax revenue.
According to all accounts in these two famous papers, the Gang of Six plan would have involved $1 trillion, or roughly $1 trillion, in new revenue. Now, Obama was saying that the Gang of Six plan had involved two trillion dollars! On that basis, he was saying that his own proposal for $1.2 trillion in new revenues was smaller than the Gang’s proposal. According to Obama, he had been “calling for taxes that were less than what the Gang of Six had proposed.”
Pity the fool who tries to resolve a conflict like this by reading the Post or the Times! The next day, each newspaper simply changed its account of what the Gang of Six had proposed; the papers offered no explanation for why their number had suddenly changed. If you read the Washington Post or the New York Times, you aren’t supposed to notice such things. But by the next morning, each paper had simply changed its figure, bringing its account in line with what a visibly angry man said:
MONTGOMERY (7/23/11): White House officials said that there was no handshake agreement on taxes, and acknowledged that they upped their revenue request after the bipartisan Senate "Gang of Six" released a plan to raise $2 trillion in taxes over the next decade. But they said Obama offered Thursday to drop the extra $400 billion if Boehner would accept smaller cuts to entitlement programs.
In the end, Obama told reporters he had offered Boehner "an extra-fair deal" on "the biggest debt-reduction package that we've seen in a very long time." Obama said it would have raised taxes significantly less than the Gang of Six plan, which was endorsed by the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, Lamar Alexander (Tenn.).
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (7/23/11): Mr. Obama, in fact, had already gone much too far in trying to make his deal palatable to House Republicans, offering to cut spending even further than the deficit plan proposed this week by the bipartisan ''Gang of Six,'' which includes some of the Senate's most conservative members.
[…]
The ''bargain'' would require that alongside these cuts, tax revenues would go up by $1.2 trillion, largely through a rewrite of the tax code to eliminate many deductions and loopholes. That's substantially less in revenue than the $2 trillion in the ''Gang of Six'' plan.
Pity the fools! They aren’t supposed to notice such things when they read the Post and the Times. But in this Post news report and this Times editorial, readers were now told that the Gang of Six had proposed two trillion dollars in new revenues. As far as we can tell, neither paper offered any explanation for the overnight change in their facts.
For today, we’ll leave the story right here—while noting that this pseudo-journalistic conduct is nothing new at the Post and the Times. Before the week is done, we’ll return to the halcyon days of yore; more specifically, we’ll return to August 2000, when these Potemkin newspapers (and the Associated Press) pretended that they were explaining the size of Candidate Bush’s tax cut proposal. From one day to the next, the numbers would change at these famous newspapers, without anyone making the slightest attempt to explain the reason for the ever-changing, contradictory accounts. Indeed, contradictory accounts of this seminal matter would even appear, side-by-side, on the very same page of a given day’s newspaper! Editors at these famous newspapers didn’t notice—or just didn’t care.
As we deathlessly said at the time: If voters weren’t completely confused by that point, it could only mean one thing. It meant they weren’t reading the Post!
Let’s return to last weekend’s change in the numbers. In this case, some readers may feel that they understand the conflicting accounts of how much new revenue the Gang of Six did propose. We’ll guess that very few readers could really explain this in anything like a full-blooded way—we certainly know we couldn’t—although the conflict does seem to involve those “baselines” to which Obama briefly alluded.
That said, there was no way for the average reader of the Post or the Times to understand the sudden change in the numbers which occurred at both newspapers last Saturday. That reader is supposed to flip his newspaper’s pages each day, nodding assent as he sees basic numbers change without explanation.
When papers are willing to function this way, it isn’t clear why they bother including numbers in their news reports or editorials at all. But one thing is abundantly clear: Whatever such work is supposed to be, it plainly isn’t “journalism.” Rather, it’s the type of Potemkin “journalism” which signifies a banana republic.
It’s the type of which emerges from the pages of a banana republic press.
Tomorrow: Part 3 (so many choices!)
PART 2—PITY THE FOOL (permalink): We pity the voter who’s trying to follow the debt limit/budget debate.
More precisely, we pity the voter who tries to get relevant facts from the Washington Post or the New York Times, two of our greatest newspapers.
How hard can it be to get basic facts from these, our most famous political papers? Consider what happened last Friday night, when “a visibly angry” Barack Obama held a press conference shortly after John Boehner walked away from the budget talks. (In news reports the next day, each paper used the term “visibly angry” to describe Obama’s demeanor.)
Back to Obama on Friday night: As he began his visibly angry press conference, he described the deal he had been offering Boehner. If you had been reading our biggest newspapers, you probably would have been puzzled by some of the things you saw Obama say—especially by the things he said about his proposal for additional revenues:
OBAMA (7/22/11): Good evening, everybody. I wanted to give you an update on the current situation around the debt ceiling. I just got a call about a half hour ago from Speaker Boehner, who indicated that he was going to be walking away from the negotiations that we've been engaged in here at the White House for a big deficit reduction and debt reduction package.
And I thought it would be useful for me to just give you some insight into where we were and I think that we should have moved forward with a big deal.
Essentially what we had offered Speaker Boehner was over a trillion dollars in cuts to discretionary spending, both domestic and defense. We then offered an additional $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs; Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. We believed that it was possible to shape those in a way that preserved the integrity of the system, made them available for the next generation and did not affect current beneficiaries in an adverse way.
In addition, what we sought was revenues that were actually less than what the Gang of Six signed off on. So you had a bipartisan group of senators, including Republicans who are in leadership in the Senate, calling for what effectively was about $2 trillion above the Republican baseline that they've been working off of.
What we said was, give us $1.2 trillion in additional revenues, which could be accomplished without hiking taxes—tax rates, but could simply be accomplished by eliminating loopholes, eliminating some deductions, and engaging in a tax reform process that could have lowered rates generally, while broadening the base.
So let me reiterate what we were offering. We were offering a deal that called for as much discretionary savings as the Gang of Six. We were calling for taxes that were less than what the Gang of Six had proposed and we had—we were calling for modifications to entitlement programs would have saved just as much over the 10 year window.
In other words, this was an extraordinarily fair deal. If it was unbalanced, it was unbalanced in the direction of not enough revenue.
According to Obama, he had offered Boehner a deal which involved $1.65 trillion in spending cuts and $1.2 trillion in additional revenues. That’s roughly a 4-3 ratio.
For starters, you might have been surprised by Obama’s claim that this was “an extraordinarily fair deal”—a deal that “was unbalanced in the direction of not enough revenue.” (You might have been surprised by that claim because previous reported deals had tended toward ratios of 3-1 or 5-1, spending cuts over new revenues.) But more specifically, you might have been surprised by Obama’s claim that his request for $1.2 trillion in new revenue was actually less than the amount of new revenue the Gang of Six had proposed.
At Friday evening’s conference, Obama said the Gang of Six had proposed $2 trillion in new revenue. But all week long, you had read in your nation’s most famous newspapers that the Gang of Six had proposed one trillion dollars, or roughly $1 trillion, in new revenues. For example, you had read these things in the New York Times just one day before the press conference:
HULSE (7/21/11): That plan is the one put forward Tuesday by the so-called Gang of Six, a bipartisan group of senators who worked for months to reach an agreement and whose work was lauded by Mr. Obama as a sign that a deal was possible. The plan included a net increase in government revenue of about $1 trillion over a decade.
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (7/21/11): The Gang of Six plan calls for at least $1 trillion in new tax revenues by eliminating and reducing tax breaks and deductions. For conservative senators like Saxby Chambliss, Lamar Alexander, Michael Crapo and Tom Coburn to accept this reality shows how willfully blind the House majority has really become.
Hulse’s piece was a front-page news report; his account was largely echoed by an editorial that same day. But then, if you double-checked your facts in the Washington Post, you still were told that the Gang of Six had proposed (roughly) $1 trillion in new revenue. Again, we’ll match a front-page news report with an editorial:
MONTGOMERY (7/20/11): The proposal, crafted by a bipartisan group of senators known as the "Gang of Six," calls for $500 billion in immediate savings and requires lawmakers in the coming months to cut agency spending, overhaul Social Security and Medicare, and rewrite the tax code to generate more than $1 trillion in fresh revenue.
[…]
[The Gang of Six plan] calls for raising more than $1 trillion over the next decade by reducing a variety of popular tax breaks and deductions, including breaks for home mortgage interest and employer-provided health care. While some of those savings would be dedicated to debt reduction, the rest would go toward lowering tax rates for everyone, with top individual and corporate rates dropping to at least 29 percent, down from 35 percent.
WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (7/21/11): Mr. Norquist's comments come at a moment of remarkable and welcome fluidity in what had seemed to be a solid wall of Republican opposition to raising any tax revenue at any time for any reason. The surprising reemergence and expansion of the Senate Gang of Six this week was accompanied by a flurry of statements from Republican senators endorsing a proposal that included $1 trillion in new tax revenue.
According to all accounts in these two famous papers, the Gang of Six plan would have involved $1 trillion, or roughly $1 trillion, in new revenue. Now, Obama was saying that the Gang of Six plan had involved two trillion dollars! On that basis, he was saying that his own proposal for $1.2 trillion in new revenues was smaller than the Gang’s proposal. According to Obama, he had been “calling for taxes that were less than what the Gang of Six had proposed.”
Pity the fool who tries to resolve a conflict like this by reading the Post or the Times! The next day, each newspaper simply changed its account of what the Gang of Six had proposed; the papers offered no explanation for why their number had suddenly changed. If you read the Washington Post or the New York Times, you aren’t supposed to notice such things. But by the next morning, each paper had simply changed its figure, bringing its account in line with what a visibly angry man said:
MONTGOMERY (7/23/11): White House officials said that there was no handshake agreement on taxes, and acknowledged that they upped their revenue request after the bipartisan Senate "Gang of Six" released a plan to raise $2 trillion in taxes over the next decade. But they said Obama offered Thursday to drop the extra $400 billion if Boehner would accept smaller cuts to entitlement programs.
In the end, Obama told reporters he had offered Boehner "an extra-fair deal" on "the biggest debt-reduction package that we've seen in a very long time." Obama said it would have raised taxes significantly less than the Gang of Six plan, which was endorsed by the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, Lamar Alexander (Tenn.).
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (7/23/11): Mr. Obama, in fact, had already gone much too far in trying to make his deal palatable to House Republicans, offering to cut spending even further than the deficit plan proposed this week by the bipartisan ''Gang of Six,'' which includes some of the Senate's most conservative members.
[…]
The ''bargain'' would require that alongside these cuts, tax revenues would go up by $1.2 trillion, largely through a rewrite of the tax code to eliminate many deductions and loopholes. That's substantially less in revenue than the $2 trillion in the ''Gang of Six'' plan.
Pity the fools! They aren’t supposed to notice such things when they read the Post and the Times. But in this Post news report and this Times editorial, readers were now told that the Gang of Six had proposed two trillion dollars in new revenues. As far as we can tell, neither paper offered any explanation for the overnight change in their facts.
For today, we’ll leave the story right here—while noting that this pseudo-journalistic conduct is nothing new at the Post and the Times. Before the week is done, we’ll return to the halcyon days of yore; more specifically, we’ll return to August 2000, when these Potemkin newspapers (and the Associated Press) pretended that they were explaining the size of Candidate Bush’s tax cut proposal. From one day to the next, the numbers would change at these famous newspapers, without anyone making the slightest attempt to explain the reason for the ever-changing, contradictory accounts. Indeed, contradictory accounts of this seminal matter would even appear, side-by-side, on the very same page of a given day’s newspaper! Editors at these famous newspapers didn’t notice—or just didn’t care.
As we deathlessly said at the time: If voters weren’t completely confused by that point, it could only mean one thing. It meant they weren’t reading the Post!
Let’s return to last weekend’s change in the numbers. In this case, some readers may feel that they understand the conflicting accounts of how much new revenue the Gang of Six did propose. We’ll guess that very few readers could really explain this in anything like a full-blooded way—we certainly know we couldn’t—although the conflict does seem to involve those “baselines” to which Obama briefly alluded.
That said, there was no way for the average reader of the Post or the Times to understand the sudden change in the numbers which occurred at both newspapers last Saturday. That reader is supposed to flip his newspaper’s pages each day, nodding assent as he sees basic numbers change without explanation.
When papers are willing to function this way, it isn’t clear why they bother including numbers in their news reports or editorials at all. But one thing is abundantly clear: Whatever such work is supposed to be, it plainly isn’t “journalism.” Rather, it’s the type of Potemkin “journalism” which signifies a banana republic.
It’s the type of which emerges from the pages of a banana republic press.
Tomorrow: Part 3 (so many choices!)
Somersby: I pity for poor fools who must rely one ...
WE PITY THE FOOL! Number, please! We pity the fool who is forced to rely on the Post’s ever-changing facts: // link // print // previous // next //
TUESDAY, JULY 26, 2011
Charlie’s clash of the titans: David Brooks is snarking hard in this morning’s New York Times. We’ll take a bit of a guess: He may be making up for some very bad conduct on last Friday’s Charlie Rose show.
On that program, Rose produced an eighteen-minute clash of the titans—a discussion of the budget mess which matched Brooks with his colleague, Paul Krugman. Brooks told a bit too much of the truth that night. Today, he may be making up for that indiscretion.
Whatever! We thought that Charlie Rose segment was very much worth noting. We’ll direct your attention to four aspects of the titans’ discussion. To watch the whole segment, click here:
What would Krugman do: At one point, Rose asked Krugman a simple question—if someone died and made him boss, what would he do about our budget problems? We’ve often wondered about that very question as we read Krugman’s columns and blog posts, which are often written in reaction to specific unfolding events.
How would a King Krugman handle this problem? We were glad Rose asked. We thought Krugman’s answer was very much worth recording:
KRUGMAN (7/22/11): What the long-run solution to the U.S. budget problem is, is controlling health-care costs. It means more of the kinds of things that were already in the Affordable Care Act. A lot of serious, serious efforts to bring the rate of growth of health-care costs down, bending the curve—horrible metaphor, but bending the curve. Which we know can be done because other countries do it, and then we need revenue. In the end, we’re going to need three, four percent of GDP in additional revenue. You can get some of that by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, but we’re going to need more than that.
So in fact I have a prediction. If David and I are still around here 25 years from now, I predict that we will have a much more controlled health-care system that sort of matches the cost performance of other countries, and we’ll have something like a value-added tax to increase revenue. And that is how America will be solvent in the end.
For the record, we assume that Krugman is talking about letting all the Bush tax cuts expire, not just those on the highest earners. In the end, he says that even that amount of new revenue won’t be enough. Unless we’re mistaken, “three, four percent of GDP” is a lot of new revenue. Current US GDP is something like $15 trillion. Using your multiplication skills, you can compute the amount of recommended new revenue from there. (Start by computing one percent. Then, multiply by three or by four.)
We were surprised by Krugman’s assessment. By the way: In our manufactured public discourse, voters constantly hear about the alleged need for spending cuts. They virtually never hear about the alleged need for new revenue. One side has played this game very hard, for decades. The other side has sat and stared.
Brooks on all the hatred: Brother Brooks got way out of line when Charlie asked about something he called “the dysfunctionality of government.” In his first answer, Brooks pretty much trashed the Republicans. In his follow-up answer, he began walking that heresy back:
ROSE: There are two questions. One, if you look at the dysfunctionality of government, as in this case, who’s responsible?
BROOKS: I don’t pretend—I wouldn’t say it is symmetrical here. I do think the president and the Democrats have been much more flexible than the Republicans have been. I say that with a little pain maybe, but that’s just simply the case. The president, to his credit, has made his allies extremely uncomfortable. And if you are around Washington yesterday when the entire Senate Democratic caucus erupted in fury, you saw that firsthand. And so I think the Republicans are—it’s a good short- term negotiating strategy, but they are not seizing a deal which should be out there for them.
I’m sort of mystified why, if the president is offering $3 trillion reduction in the size of government, why they are not seizing upon that and potentially settling either for nothing or maybe $500 million. It’s just mystifying to me why they don’t take this deal.
ROSE: Well then, take a guess. What’s the answer?
BROOKS: Well, there are a lot of things. One, they will tell you, “We go home and nobody wants any more taxes. We ran on that. We’ve pledged it.” Second, and I think this part is bipartisan, the hatred is so strong, there is great personal resistance to doing a deal with the devil. And they regard Obama or Boehner and Cantor as the devil. There’s just sort of this emotional resistance to getting in a room, shaking their hand and having your picture taken. And so even beneath the substance of it, there is a great deal of emotional resistance. And when, even when the president makes an offer which is a pretty good offer for Republicans, they’re always looking for the weaknesses in it.
Is “the hatred” equally strong on both sides of the aisle? We don’t know, but if it is, that doesn’t explain why the Dems are being so much “more flexible”—why they would exhibit so much less resistance to “doing a deal with the devil.”
We think Brooks’ statements here deserve examination. We will only note that this demonization of major Dem leaders dates back to the demonization of Clinton, then Gore—a demonization which career liberals leaders, to this very day, largely prefer to avoid. If you’re a liberal, your “leadership” is largely in the bag—has been for a long time.
A talking-point shot down: At one point, Brooks recited a highly misleading talking-point; Krugman shot it down. This talking-point is everywhere. Do liberals know how to approach it?
BROOKS: To be fair to [Republicans], they would say, “Hey, we’ve had government at a certain level of GDP for decade after decade, it’s been roughly the same. Over the last couple of years, it has leaped up significantly. So if we want to bring it back to that level, to the 2008 level, are we radicals?” That is the argument they would make.
KRUGMAN: All of that is the recession. All of that is that the ratio of government to GDP is higher because GDP is down. And safety net programs, unemployment insurance and Medicaid and a few other programs that respond to hard times, are up. If you take that out, there has been no increase in the size of government. This is entirely myth.
Government spending has leaped up significantly! When Republicans make that familiar claim, they fail to note that the level of taxation has dropped down significantly at the same time—also in significant part because of the recession. Their talking-point is highly selective—but do liberals now how to respond? (In this July 6 blog post, Krugman went into more detail about what all that new spending is.)
Krugman’s emerging theme: A profoundly counterintuitive theme has been emerging from Krugman’s journalistic work. When Charlie asked about all the “deficit panic,” he expressed this theme again:
ROSE: You said the disappearance of unemployment from elite policy discourse and its replacement by deficit panic has been truly remarkable. It’s not a response to public opinion. In a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, 53 percent of the public named the economy and jobs as the most important problem we face, while only seven percent named the deficit. But those seven percent are in the Tea Party.
KRUGMAN: … Too many of those seven percent are actually inside the Beltway. That we have too many people who are, you know, who are serious and responsible in their own minds, who are actually, you know, fighting, fighting the wrong war right now. What we really need to do is do something about nine percent unemployment. And yes, we do have a long-run budget problem, but we have nine percent unemployment right now.
[…]
People who believe that if we resolve the budget problems, that that will somehow cause a surge in the economy, I have been calling those people who believe in the confidence fairy. It’s not going to happen. If you want to fight unemployment, fight unemployment. And if fighting the long-run deficit comes at the expense of doing something about unemployment, if it makes it worse in the short run, then you’re actually—you’re actually probably worse than even the long- run budget picture, because nothing hurts your long-run budget picture worse than an economy whose growth rate is depressed by a prolonged period of economic weakness.
So it’s all wrong. What passes for being reasonable and wise and serious inside the Beltway is in fact deeply foolish.
Say what? Our most respectable pundits and journalists are “in fact deeply foolish?” This is a highly counterintuitive claim, and Krugman has been taking this theme even farther in recent months, arguing that academic authorities in the world of economics are routinely behaving like total fools too, even in their high-profile professional work.
Such a claim is highly counterintuitive. It contradicts every presumption we have about the way our society works. And yet, we ourselves have often found this claim to be true—when we’ve reviewed the work of our “educational experts” over the past forty years, for example.
Man [sic] is the rational animal! This iconic claim lies at the heart of the western world’s self-understanding. This iconic claim is painfully inaccurate—but the authority figures about whom Krugman increasingly speaks will never say so.
They sit at the top of a broken discourse—and they have no plans to leave.
TUESDAY, JULY 26, 2011
Charlie’s clash of the titans: David Brooks is snarking hard in this morning’s New York Times. We’ll take a bit of a guess: He may be making up for some very bad conduct on last Friday’s Charlie Rose show.
On that program, Rose produced an eighteen-minute clash of the titans—a discussion of the budget mess which matched Brooks with his colleague, Paul Krugman. Brooks told a bit too much of the truth that night. Today, he may be making up for that indiscretion.
Whatever! We thought that Charlie Rose segment was very much worth noting. We’ll direct your attention to four aspects of the titans’ discussion. To watch the whole segment, click here:
What would Krugman do: At one point, Rose asked Krugman a simple question—if someone died and made him boss, what would he do about our budget problems? We’ve often wondered about that very question as we read Krugman’s columns and blog posts, which are often written in reaction to specific unfolding events.
How would a King Krugman handle this problem? We were glad Rose asked. We thought Krugman’s answer was very much worth recording:
KRUGMAN (7/22/11): What the long-run solution to the U.S. budget problem is, is controlling health-care costs. It means more of the kinds of things that were already in the Affordable Care Act. A lot of serious, serious efforts to bring the rate of growth of health-care costs down, bending the curve—horrible metaphor, but bending the curve. Which we know can be done because other countries do it, and then we need revenue. In the end, we’re going to need three, four percent of GDP in additional revenue. You can get some of that by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, but we’re going to need more than that.
So in fact I have a prediction. If David and I are still around here 25 years from now, I predict that we will have a much more controlled health-care system that sort of matches the cost performance of other countries, and we’ll have something like a value-added tax to increase revenue. And that is how America will be solvent in the end.
For the record, we assume that Krugman is talking about letting all the Bush tax cuts expire, not just those on the highest earners. In the end, he says that even that amount of new revenue won’t be enough. Unless we’re mistaken, “three, four percent of GDP” is a lot of new revenue. Current US GDP is something like $15 trillion. Using your multiplication skills, you can compute the amount of recommended new revenue from there. (Start by computing one percent. Then, multiply by three or by four.)
We were surprised by Krugman’s assessment. By the way: In our manufactured public discourse, voters constantly hear about the alleged need for spending cuts. They virtually never hear about the alleged need for new revenue. One side has played this game very hard, for decades. The other side has sat and stared.
Brooks on all the hatred: Brother Brooks got way out of line when Charlie asked about something he called “the dysfunctionality of government.” In his first answer, Brooks pretty much trashed the Republicans. In his follow-up answer, he began walking that heresy back:
ROSE: There are two questions. One, if you look at the dysfunctionality of government, as in this case, who’s responsible?
BROOKS: I don’t pretend—I wouldn’t say it is symmetrical here. I do think the president and the Democrats have been much more flexible than the Republicans have been. I say that with a little pain maybe, but that’s just simply the case. The president, to his credit, has made his allies extremely uncomfortable. And if you are around Washington yesterday when the entire Senate Democratic caucus erupted in fury, you saw that firsthand. And so I think the Republicans are—it’s a good short- term negotiating strategy, but they are not seizing a deal which should be out there for them.
I’m sort of mystified why, if the president is offering $3 trillion reduction in the size of government, why they are not seizing upon that and potentially settling either for nothing or maybe $500 million. It’s just mystifying to me why they don’t take this deal.
ROSE: Well then, take a guess. What’s the answer?
BROOKS: Well, there are a lot of things. One, they will tell you, “We go home and nobody wants any more taxes. We ran on that. We’ve pledged it.” Second, and I think this part is bipartisan, the hatred is so strong, there is great personal resistance to doing a deal with the devil. And they regard Obama or Boehner and Cantor as the devil. There’s just sort of this emotional resistance to getting in a room, shaking their hand and having your picture taken. And so even beneath the substance of it, there is a great deal of emotional resistance. And when, even when the president makes an offer which is a pretty good offer for Republicans, they’re always looking for the weaknesses in it.
Is “the hatred” equally strong on both sides of the aisle? We don’t know, but if it is, that doesn’t explain why the Dems are being so much “more flexible”—why they would exhibit so much less resistance to “doing a deal with the devil.”
We think Brooks’ statements here deserve examination. We will only note that this demonization of major Dem leaders dates back to the demonization of Clinton, then Gore—a demonization which career liberals leaders, to this very day, largely prefer to avoid. If you’re a liberal, your “leadership” is largely in the bag—has been for a long time.
A talking-point shot down: At one point, Brooks recited a highly misleading talking-point; Krugman shot it down. This talking-point is everywhere. Do liberals know how to approach it?
BROOKS: To be fair to [Republicans], they would say, “Hey, we’ve had government at a certain level of GDP for decade after decade, it’s been roughly the same. Over the last couple of years, it has leaped up significantly. So if we want to bring it back to that level, to the 2008 level, are we radicals?” That is the argument they would make.
KRUGMAN: All of that is the recession. All of that is that the ratio of government to GDP is higher because GDP is down. And safety net programs, unemployment insurance and Medicaid and a few other programs that respond to hard times, are up. If you take that out, there has been no increase in the size of government. This is entirely myth.
Government spending has leaped up significantly! When Republicans make that familiar claim, they fail to note that the level of taxation has dropped down significantly at the same time—also in significant part because of the recession. Their talking-point is highly selective—but do liberals now how to respond? (In this July 6 blog post, Krugman went into more detail about what all that new spending is.)
Krugman’s emerging theme: A profoundly counterintuitive theme has been emerging from Krugman’s journalistic work. When Charlie asked about all the “deficit panic,” he expressed this theme again:
ROSE: You said the disappearance of unemployment from elite policy discourse and its replacement by deficit panic has been truly remarkable. It’s not a response to public opinion. In a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, 53 percent of the public named the economy and jobs as the most important problem we face, while only seven percent named the deficit. But those seven percent are in the Tea Party.
KRUGMAN: … Too many of those seven percent are actually inside the Beltway. That we have too many people who are, you know, who are serious and responsible in their own minds, who are actually, you know, fighting, fighting the wrong war right now. What we really need to do is do something about nine percent unemployment. And yes, we do have a long-run budget problem, but we have nine percent unemployment right now.
[…]
People who believe that if we resolve the budget problems, that that will somehow cause a surge in the economy, I have been calling those people who believe in the confidence fairy. It’s not going to happen. If you want to fight unemployment, fight unemployment. And if fighting the long-run deficit comes at the expense of doing something about unemployment, if it makes it worse in the short run, then you’re actually—you’re actually probably worse than even the long- run budget picture, because nothing hurts your long-run budget picture worse than an economy whose growth rate is depressed by a prolonged period of economic weakness.
So it’s all wrong. What passes for being reasonable and wise and serious inside the Beltway is in fact deeply foolish.
Say what? Our most respectable pundits and journalists are “in fact deeply foolish?” This is a highly counterintuitive claim, and Krugman has been taking this theme even farther in recent months, arguing that academic authorities in the world of economics are routinely behaving like total fools too, even in their high-profile professional work.
Such a claim is highly counterintuitive. It contradicts every presumption we have about the way our society works. And yet, we ourselves have often found this claim to be true—when we’ve reviewed the work of our “educational experts” over the past forty years, for example.
Man [sic] is the rational animal! This iconic claim lies at the heart of the western world’s self-understanding. This iconic claim is painfully inaccurate—but the authority figures about whom Krugman increasingly speaks will never say so.
They sit at the top of a broken discourse—and they have no plans to leave.
Bobo Somersby - the breath of fresh air! Special report: Banana republic press corps!
Special report: Banana republic press corps!
PART 1—JUST WAIT A WHILE (permalink): We know exactly what you said when you read yesterday’s New York Times:
“Our DAILY HOWLER keeps getting results!” We could almost hear you say it!
We appreciate your kind remarks. But we’ll have to dispute your judgment a tad, in a few basic ways.
Presumably, you offered your kind remarks when you read this piece by Teresa Tritch—a piece which was described in the “Today’s Paper” listing as a “Deconstruction.”
To her credit, Tritch asked a blindingly obvious question. This is the way she began:
TRITCH (7/24/11): How the Deficit Got This Big
With President Obama and Republican leaders calling for cutting the budget by trillions over the next 10 years, it is worth asking how we got here—from healthy surpluses at the end of the Clinton era, and the promise of future surpluses, to nine straight years of deficits, including the $1.3 trillion shortfall in 2010. The answer is largely the Bush-era tax cuts, war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recessions.
Really? With the nation pretending to conduct a discussion about our raging federal deficits, “it is worth asking how we got here?” Of course it’s worth asking how we got here—how we moved from those recent surpluses to our current massive shortfalls.
Three cheers for Tritch for asking this question! It should have been done long ago.
If you had a real press corps instead of a Potemkin replacement, detailed reporting on this obvious topic would have appeared long ago; such reporting would have appeared on the New York Times front page. But judging from what she wrote in that passage, Tritch seemed to think that she was exploring an important new question—a question New York Times readers hadn’t seen thrashed out before.
We’d say Tritch was basically right in that apparent judgment. And omigod! As she continued, she finally let Times readers encounter a few basic facts! By the time she finished her short report, Tritch was letting her readers ponder a startling fact:
TRITCH: A few lessons can be drawn from the numbers. First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect. If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels.
Tritch makes a remarkable statement here. If we return to the Clinton-era tax rates, she says, “future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels.”
In recent weeks, we’ve suggested that this is one of the topics which should have been covered, long before this, on the nation’s front pages. Presumably, that’s why you gave us credit for Tritch’s long-overdue piece. Question: How many readers of the Times have ever heard that remarkable fact? Next question: Why did they have to wait till now to acquire this information—if it really is information, and if they bothered reading Tritch’s “Deconstruction” at all?
We think this piece was long overdue. Having said that, we’ll note three problems with it. Let’s start with an obvious question: Who is Teresa Tritch?
Who is Teresa Tritch: Who the heck is Teresa Tritch? We’ll admit we didn’t know her name when we saw yesterday’s piece. And indeed: According to the Nexis archives, this was just the third time her name has ever appeared in a New York Times by-line. Her previous by-lined efforts appeared in 2006 and 2007. (Based on letters to the editor, Nexis seems to have missed an earlier piece from 1999.)
Who the heck is Teresa Tritch? As it turns out, Tritch is a member of the Times editorial board—sixteen people whose names the New York Times doesn’t bruit all around. As far as we know, Tritch is a highly capable person; you can read her official bio here, along with those of her fifteen colleagues on the board. But unless you know just where to look, it isn’t real easy to find that page at the New York Times web site. Don’t waste your time with the obvious searches! If you enter “editorial board” or “masthead,” you won’t be led to those names!
Who the heck is Teresa Tritch? We think the Times should have said.
Where did Tritch’s piece appear: Tritch’s piece did not appear as a front-page news report (or news analysis). Indeed, it didn’t appear in the New York Times’ news pages at all. Instead, it appeared on page 11 of yesterday’s “Sunday Review” section, clustered there with the day’s editorials. On-line, the piece is officially branded as a “DECONSTRUCTION/EDITORIAL.”
Essentially, this seems to be the type of signed piece the Times used to publish under the somewhat puzzling name, “Editorial observer.”
Tritch’s piece didn’t appear in the paper’s news pages. As usual, you had to turn to the Times editorial page to encounter a few basic facts. But alas! This brings us to our most basic question:
Tritch makes a striking factual claim. Is her claim accurate?
Is Tritch’s claim accurate: In a rational world, citizens would have been told, long ago, about the role the Bush tax cuts have played in creating our current deficits. As a basic point of reference, they would have been told, long ago, about the likely effects of returning to the Clinton-era rates. That wouldn’t necessarily mean the Bush tax rates should be dumped; it wouldn’t necessarily mean that the Clinton-era rates should be restored. But it would give readers a basic framework for approaching two blindingly obvious questions: How did we ever get to this place? And how might we get the current problem under control?
So how about it? Is Tritch’s claim accurate? Would a return to the Clinton tax rates “cut future deficits by about half?” In a rational world, this would have been explored long ago, perhaps as part of a large series, out on the New York Times front page. It would have been hashed out in some detail, resolving possible contradictions.
Sadly, we mention those “possible contradictions” for an obvious reason. As we noted just last week, the Times’ David Leonhardt made a substantially different claim about this matter less than two weeks ago. Like Tritch, Leonhardt explained what would happen if the Bush tax cuts expire as scheduled. But doggone it! What’s a poor Times reader to do? Leonhardt gave a different account of what would happen:
LEONHARDT (7/13/11): So what kind of tax increases do Americans support? The old-fashioned kind. Seventy-two percent support raising taxes on income above $250,000, according to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, and a large majority likewise favor raising Social Security taxes on the affluent.
In the end, the most likely tax increase may be the one that's already on the books. On Jan. 1, 2013, all the Bush tax cuts—on the affluent and nonaffluent alike—are set to expire, which would solve roughly one-quarter of our long-term deficit problem. If Republicans have their way, all the tax cuts will be extended. If the Democrats have their way, most of them will be.
Tritch said future deficits “would be cut by about half.” Leonhardt seemed to say that they’d be cut by one quarter. That is a rather large difference.
As we noted last week, we were a bit surprised by Leonhardt’s claim. We thought we’d seen on-line reports that the Clinton tax rates would solve more of our long-term problem. But in this peculiar contretemps, you see the soul of Times “news coverage.” You see a problem which confronts every Times subscriber.
Tritch sits on the Times editorial board. Leonhardt is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist. Within eleven days, they gave significantly different accounts of this relatively basic matter. And as far as we know, this obvious question hasn’t been examined in the paper’s news pages at all!
It’s like the old joke about New England—if you don’t like the weather, just wait a while! But so it goes at our greatest newspaper when it comes to essential facts. This pattern has obtained for a very long time—and it has obtained all through the recent coverage of the debt limit crisis.
By and large, there are no facts in the New York Times—just changing patterns of weather. Typically, such “journalism” would be seen in a banana republic press corps.
Tomorrow—part 2: If you don’t like the editors’ data, just wait till the next day!
PART 1—JUST WAIT A WHILE (permalink): We know exactly what you said when you read yesterday’s New York Times:
“Our DAILY HOWLER keeps getting results!” We could almost hear you say it!
We appreciate your kind remarks. But we’ll have to dispute your judgment a tad, in a few basic ways.
Presumably, you offered your kind remarks when you read this piece by Teresa Tritch—a piece which was described in the “Today’s Paper” listing as a “Deconstruction.”
To her credit, Tritch asked a blindingly obvious question. This is the way she began:
TRITCH (7/24/11): How the Deficit Got This Big
With President Obama and Republican leaders calling for cutting the budget by trillions over the next 10 years, it is worth asking how we got here—from healthy surpluses at the end of the Clinton era, and the promise of future surpluses, to nine straight years of deficits, including the $1.3 trillion shortfall in 2010. The answer is largely the Bush-era tax cuts, war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recessions.
Really? With the nation pretending to conduct a discussion about our raging federal deficits, “it is worth asking how we got here?” Of course it’s worth asking how we got here—how we moved from those recent surpluses to our current massive shortfalls.
Three cheers for Tritch for asking this question! It should have been done long ago.
If you had a real press corps instead of a Potemkin replacement, detailed reporting on this obvious topic would have appeared long ago; such reporting would have appeared on the New York Times front page. But judging from what she wrote in that passage, Tritch seemed to think that she was exploring an important new question—a question New York Times readers hadn’t seen thrashed out before.
We’d say Tritch was basically right in that apparent judgment. And omigod! As she continued, she finally let Times readers encounter a few basic facts! By the time she finished her short report, Tritch was letting her readers ponder a startling fact:
TRITCH: A few lessons can be drawn from the numbers. First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect. If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels.
Tritch makes a remarkable statement here. If we return to the Clinton-era tax rates, she says, “future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels.”
In recent weeks, we’ve suggested that this is one of the topics which should have been covered, long before this, on the nation’s front pages. Presumably, that’s why you gave us credit for Tritch’s long-overdue piece. Question: How many readers of the Times have ever heard that remarkable fact? Next question: Why did they have to wait till now to acquire this information—if it really is information, and if they bothered reading Tritch’s “Deconstruction” at all?
We think this piece was long overdue. Having said that, we’ll note three problems with it. Let’s start with an obvious question: Who is Teresa Tritch?
Who is Teresa Tritch: Who the heck is Teresa Tritch? We’ll admit we didn’t know her name when we saw yesterday’s piece. And indeed: According to the Nexis archives, this was just the third time her name has ever appeared in a New York Times by-line. Her previous by-lined efforts appeared in 2006 and 2007. (Based on letters to the editor, Nexis seems to have missed an earlier piece from 1999.)
Who the heck is Teresa Tritch? As it turns out, Tritch is a member of the Times editorial board—sixteen people whose names the New York Times doesn’t bruit all around. As far as we know, Tritch is a highly capable person; you can read her official bio here, along with those of her fifteen colleagues on the board. But unless you know just where to look, it isn’t real easy to find that page at the New York Times web site. Don’t waste your time with the obvious searches! If you enter “editorial board” or “masthead,” you won’t be led to those names!
Who the heck is Teresa Tritch? We think the Times should have said.
Where did Tritch’s piece appear: Tritch’s piece did not appear as a front-page news report (or news analysis). Indeed, it didn’t appear in the New York Times’ news pages at all. Instead, it appeared on page 11 of yesterday’s “Sunday Review” section, clustered there with the day’s editorials. On-line, the piece is officially branded as a “DECONSTRUCTION/EDITORIAL.”
Essentially, this seems to be the type of signed piece the Times used to publish under the somewhat puzzling name, “Editorial observer.”
Tritch’s piece didn’t appear in the paper’s news pages. As usual, you had to turn to the Times editorial page to encounter a few basic facts. But alas! This brings us to our most basic question:
Tritch makes a striking factual claim. Is her claim accurate?
Is Tritch’s claim accurate: In a rational world, citizens would have been told, long ago, about the role the Bush tax cuts have played in creating our current deficits. As a basic point of reference, they would have been told, long ago, about the likely effects of returning to the Clinton-era rates. That wouldn’t necessarily mean the Bush tax rates should be dumped; it wouldn’t necessarily mean that the Clinton-era rates should be restored. But it would give readers a basic framework for approaching two blindingly obvious questions: How did we ever get to this place? And how might we get the current problem under control?
So how about it? Is Tritch’s claim accurate? Would a return to the Clinton tax rates “cut future deficits by about half?” In a rational world, this would have been explored long ago, perhaps as part of a large series, out on the New York Times front page. It would have been hashed out in some detail, resolving possible contradictions.
Sadly, we mention those “possible contradictions” for an obvious reason. As we noted just last week, the Times’ David Leonhardt made a substantially different claim about this matter less than two weeks ago. Like Tritch, Leonhardt explained what would happen if the Bush tax cuts expire as scheduled. But doggone it! What’s a poor Times reader to do? Leonhardt gave a different account of what would happen:
LEONHARDT (7/13/11): So what kind of tax increases do Americans support? The old-fashioned kind. Seventy-two percent support raising taxes on income above $250,000, according to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, and a large majority likewise favor raising Social Security taxes on the affluent.
In the end, the most likely tax increase may be the one that's already on the books. On Jan. 1, 2013, all the Bush tax cuts—on the affluent and nonaffluent alike—are set to expire, which would solve roughly one-quarter of our long-term deficit problem. If Republicans have their way, all the tax cuts will be extended. If the Democrats have their way, most of them will be.
Tritch said future deficits “would be cut by about half.” Leonhardt seemed to say that they’d be cut by one quarter. That is a rather large difference.
As we noted last week, we were a bit surprised by Leonhardt’s claim. We thought we’d seen on-line reports that the Clinton tax rates would solve more of our long-term problem. But in this peculiar contretemps, you see the soul of Times “news coverage.” You see a problem which confronts every Times subscriber.
Tritch sits on the Times editorial board. Leonhardt is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist. Within eleven days, they gave significantly different accounts of this relatively basic matter. And as far as we know, this obvious question hasn’t been examined in the paper’s news pages at all!
It’s like the old joke about New England—if you don’t like the weather, just wait a while! But so it goes at our greatest newspaper when it comes to essential facts. This pattern has obtained for a very long time—and it has obtained all through the recent coverage of the debt limit crisis.
By and large, there are no facts in the New York Times—just changing patterns of weather. Typically, such “journalism” would be seen in a banana republic press corps.
Tomorrow—part 2: If you don’t like the editors’ data, just wait till the next day!
It can't be easy to blog about the failures of our major news organs to inform or advise us!
BANANA REPUBLIC PRESS CORPS! If you don’t like the facts in the New York Times, you should just wait a while: // link // print // previous // next //
MONDAY, JULY 25, 2011
Name that Murdoch aide/The Times does: On Friday, we asked you to name the Murdoch aide who sat right behind the great man at last week’s hearing. That aide is a former Bloomberg aide; he scored his big pay-day last fall.
For the New York Times’ (wide-eyed) account, click here. More on this striking story at the end of the week.
The nature of manufactured consent: Yesterday, the silly-bills were out in force in the New York Times “Sunday Review.”
As the nation slid toward the sea, Frank Bruni wasted everyone’s time with worthless predictions about who will win the GOP nomination. Mostly, though, he frisked Michele Bachmann—or at least, he pretended.
Dumbly, he started like this:
BRUNI (7/24/11): Michele Bachmann is the gift that never stops giving.
One week she’s confusing the Iowa birthplaces of John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy, two men separated by a bit more than two syllables. The next she’s signing a conservative pledge that contains language extolling the family values of slavery. Her library evidently differs from most. It stocks “Uncle Tom’s Little House on the Prairie.”
In that opening sentence, Bruni expressed the ethos of the Potemkin press corps—the chuckling belief that news events must be judged by how easy they are to write about. From there, he turned to an easy but bogus claim. Did Bachmann really “confus[e] the Iowa birthplaces of John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy?” We know of no reason to think so, although it gives dumb bunnies like Bruni an easy opening laugh. (In fact, Gacy was born in Illinois. The error there is Bruni’s, weeks later.) As Bachmann later explained, without contradiction, John Wayne’s parents did live in Waterloo, Bachmann’s home town; they moved away before Wayne was born. There is no evidence that Gacy was involved in Bachmann’s pointless error. But dumb-asses must be served.
By the way: In a long, utterly pointless column about Bachmann’s headaches and alleged prospects, Bruni is too dumb to mention a highly significant fact: Bachmann has pledged that she will never vote to raise the debt limit, a truly ridiculous posture. (We’ll guess Bruni hasn’t heard.)
In this utterly pointless column, Times readers are handed a pointless laugh at Bachmann’s expense—and they’re spared from hearing about her truly ridiculous policy stance. So it goes when hambones like Bruni are handed our highest press platforms.
For our money, Nicholas Kristof was fairly silly yesterday too, although, as always, he did a better job posing.
Kristof started with a serious topic; he made a serious claim. We face a “national security threat,” he said—a threat which is coming from “our own domestic extremists:”
KRISTOF (7/24/11): House Republicans start from a legitimate concern about rising long-term debt. Politicians are usually focused only on short-term issues, so it would be commendable to see the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party seriously focused on containing long-term debt. But on this issue, many House Republicans aren’t serious, they’re just obsessive in a destructive way. The upshot is that in their effort to protect the American economy from debt, some of them are willing to drag it over the cliff of default.
We’re inclined to agree with that highlighted claim, and it thrilled Steve Benen, who got busy kissing big keister. But as always, Kristof was very careful in the things he said. Most notably, he failed to name the names of those House Republicans who he described as “domestic extremists.” In this failure, he handed Bachmann her second free pass of the morning!
Should readers know that Bachmann is one of these people? Yes, they should, but Kristof is a very careful player—and careful players avoid naming names of very powerful players. Indeed, Kristof couldn’t even sustain a full column on this critical topic. Before he was done, he wasted your time with this feel-good, paint-by-the-numbers crap about the need to help low-income kids improve their reading.
In this passage, Kristof doesn’t have any idea if what he’s saying is true. Almost surely, it isn’t:
KRISTOF: While one danger to national security comes from the risk of default, another comes from overzealous budget cuts—especially in education, at the local, state and national levels. When we cut to the education bone, we’re not preserving our future but undermining it.
It should be a national disgrace that the United States government has eliminated spending for major literacy programs in the last few months, with scarcely a murmur of dissent.
Consider Reading Is Fundamental, a 45-year-old nonprofit program that has cost the federal government only $25 million annually. It’s a public-private partnership with 400,000 volunteers, and it puts books in the hands of low-income children. The program helped four million American children improve their reading skills last year. Now it has lost all federal support.
“They have made a real difference for millions of kids,” Kyle Zimmer, founder of First Book, another literacy program that I’ve admired, said of Reading Is Fundamental. “It is a tremendous loss that their federal support has been cut. We are going to pay for these cuts in education for generations.”
Did Reading is Fundamental really “help four million American children improve their reading skills last year?” More to the point, do you think Kristof has any idea if that claim is accurate? People! Of course he doesn’t! But in the second half of his column, Kristof finds a noble way to avoid naming Bachmann’s name—and he builds his second column in the past two week around fatuous, feel-good, know-nothing claims in favor of strong education.
You can write columns like that in your sleep; even Bruni could do it! People who care about low-income kids should be sickened by this rotten man’s relentless know-nothing, feel-good posturing—by this big hustler’s endless pose.
The Times op-ed columnists frittered along, with Friedman calling for a third party and Dowd off frisking the priests once again. But to gaze on the soul of manufactured consent, consider Steven Pearlstein’s column in yesterday’s Washington Post.
Pearlstein did discuss the budget debate—and he helped manufacture consent:
PEARLSTEIN (7/24/11): Here in the United States, the urgency of the budget deficit has been apparent for five years at least. And by last December, with a newly radicalized group of Republicans taking over the House, the Senate in perpetual stalemate and a wounded center-left Democrat in the White House, it was pretty clear where the center of political gravity was to be found.
Into that breach stepped a bipartisan blue-ribbon commission with a politically and economically credible plan to right-size the Pentagon and the civilian agencies, slow the growth of entitlements and reform the tax code in a way that lowered rates while raising a modest amount of money. Budget experts agreed it was pretty much what needed to be done.
Yet the only ones willing to accept that obvious reality were a bipartisan gang of six brave senators whose efforts got a cold shoulder from the same president and House speaker who just in the past several weeks were willing to acknowledge it was the way to go. By that time, however, the momentum had been lost and positions hardened to the point that reasonable compromise now appears impossible. Treasury can probably kiss its triple-A rating goodbye.
Referring to the Simpson-Bowles commission, Pearlstein said it was “obvious” that we need to “reform the tax code in a way that lower[s] rates while raising a modest amount of money.” A person may think that’s the right way to go—but what on earth makes it “obvious?” Given the massive growth of income at the top of the income scale; given the historically low rates of taxation visited on the highest earners; given the size of projected deficits; why would someone thing it was “obvious” that we need to lower rates, thus producing modest amounts of new revenue? Why couldn’t someone think that we need to “reform the tax code in a way that raises a substantial amount of money, especially from the highest earners?”
Many people do think that, of course—but their views will rarely appear in the upper-end press corps. Readers will rarely hear that such policies are even an option. This is how press corps elites manufacture consent. They simply air-brush options away, not unlike Brother Stalin.
As Pearlstein helped manufacture consent, Bruni was clowning around about Bachmann and Kristof was playing things very safe. (He favors the interests of low-income kids.) No one mentioned this manufactured consent and none of these tools ever will.
MONDAY, JULY 25, 2011
Name that Murdoch aide/The Times does: On Friday, we asked you to name the Murdoch aide who sat right behind the great man at last week’s hearing. That aide is a former Bloomberg aide; he scored his big pay-day last fall.
For the New York Times’ (wide-eyed) account, click here. More on this striking story at the end of the week.
The nature of manufactured consent: Yesterday, the silly-bills were out in force in the New York Times “Sunday Review.”
As the nation slid toward the sea, Frank Bruni wasted everyone’s time with worthless predictions about who will win the GOP nomination. Mostly, though, he frisked Michele Bachmann—or at least, he pretended.
Dumbly, he started like this:
BRUNI (7/24/11): Michele Bachmann is the gift that never stops giving.
One week she’s confusing the Iowa birthplaces of John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy, two men separated by a bit more than two syllables. The next she’s signing a conservative pledge that contains language extolling the family values of slavery. Her library evidently differs from most. It stocks “Uncle Tom’s Little House on the Prairie.”
In that opening sentence, Bruni expressed the ethos of the Potemkin press corps—the chuckling belief that news events must be judged by how easy they are to write about. From there, he turned to an easy but bogus claim. Did Bachmann really “confus[e] the Iowa birthplaces of John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy?” We know of no reason to think so, although it gives dumb bunnies like Bruni an easy opening laugh. (In fact, Gacy was born in Illinois. The error there is Bruni’s, weeks later.) As Bachmann later explained, without contradiction, John Wayne’s parents did live in Waterloo, Bachmann’s home town; they moved away before Wayne was born. There is no evidence that Gacy was involved in Bachmann’s pointless error. But dumb-asses must be served.
By the way: In a long, utterly pointless column about Bachmann’s headaches and alleged prospects, Bruni is too dumb to mention a highly significant fact: Bachmann has pledged that she will never vote to raise the debt limit, a truly ridiculous posture. (We’ll guess Bruni hasn’t heard.)
In this utterly pointless column, Times readers are handed a pointless laugh at Bachmann’s expense—and they’re spared from hearing about her truly ridiculous policy stance. So it goes when hambones like Bruni are handed our highest press platforms.
For our money, Nicholas Kristof was fairly silly yesterday too, although, as always, he did a better job posing.
Kristof started with a serious topic; he made a serious claim. We face a “national security threat,” he said—a threat which is coming from “our own domestic extremists:”
KRISTOF (7/24/11): House Republicans start from a legitimate concern about rising long-term debt. Politicians are usually focused only on short-term issues, so it would be commendable to see the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party seriously focused on containing long-term debt. But on this issue, many House Republicans aren’t serious, they’re just obsessive in a destructive way. The upshot is that in their effort to protect the American economy from debt, some of them are willing to drag it over the cliff of default.
We’re inclined to agree with that highlighted claim, and it thrilled Steve Benen, who got busy kissing big keister. But as always, Kristof was very careful in the things he said. Most notably, he failed to name the names of those House Republicans who he described as “domestic extremists.” In this failure, he handed Bachmann her second free pass of the morning!
Should readers know that Bachmann is one of these people? Yes, they should, but Kristof is a very careful player—and careful players avoid naming names of very powerful players. Indeed, Kristof couldn’t even sustain a full column on this critical topic. Before he was done, he wasted your time with this feel-good, paint-by-the-numbers crap about the need to help low-income kids improve their reading.
In this passage, Kristof doesn’t have any idea if what he’s saying is true. Almost surely, it isn’t:
KRISTOF: While one danger to national security comes from the risk of default, another comes from overzealous budget cuts—especially in education, at the local, state and national levels. When we cut to the education bone, we’re not preserving our future but undermining it.
It should be a national disgrace that the United States government has eliminated spending for major literacy programs in the last few months, with scarcely a murmur of dissent.
Consider Reading Is Fundamental, a 45-year-old nonprofit program that has cost the federal government only $25 million annually. It’s a public-private partnership with 400,000 volunteers, and it puts books in the hands of low-income children. The program helped four million American children improve their reading skills last year. Now it has lost all federal support.
“They have made a real difference for millions of kids,” Kyle Zimmer, founder of First Book, another literacy program that I’ve admired, said of Reading Is Fundamental. “It is a tremendous loss that their federal support has been cut. We are going to pay for these cuts in education for generations.”
Did Reading is Fundamental really “help four million American children improve their reading skills last year?” More to the point, do you think Kristof has any idea if that claim is accurate? People! Of course he doesn’t! But in the second half of his column, Kristof finds a noble way to avoid naming Bachmann’s name—and he builds his second column in the past two week around fatuous, feel-good, know-nothing claims in favor of strong education.
You can write columns like that in your sleep; even Bruni could do it! People who care about low-income kids should be sickened by this rotten man’s relentless know-nothing, feel-good posturing—by this big hustler’s endless pose.
The Times op-ed columnists frittered along, with Friedman calling for a third party and Dowd off frisking the priests once again. But to gaze on the soul of manufactured consent, consider Steven Pearlstein’s column in yesterday’s Washington Post.
Pearlstein did discuss the budget debate—and he helped manufacture consent:
PEARLSTEIN (7/24/11): Here in the United States, the urgency of the budget deficit has been apparent for five years at least. And by last December, with a newly radicalized group of Republicans taking over the House, the Senate in perpetual stalemate and a wounded center-left Democrat in the White House, it was pretty clear where the center of political gravity was to be found.
Into that breach stepped a bipartisan blue-ribbon commission with a politically and economically credible plan to right-size the Pentagon and the civilian agencies, slow the growth of entitlements and reform the tax code in a way that lowered rates while raising a modest amount of money. Budget experts agreed it was pretty much what needed to be done.
Yet the only ones willing to accept that obvious reality were a bipartisan gang of six brave senators whose efforts got a cold shoulder from the same president and House speaker who just in the past several weeks were willing to acknowledge it was the way to go. By that time, however, the momentum had been lost and positions hardened to the point that reasonable compromise now appears impossible. Treasury can probably kiss its triple-A rating goodbye.
Referring to the Simpson-Bowles commission, Pearlstein said it was “obvious” that we need to “reform the tax code in a way that lower[s] rates while raising a modest amount of money.” A person may think that’s the right way to go—but what on earth makes it “obvious?” Given the massive growth of income at the top of the income scale; given the historically low rates of taxation visited on the highest earners; given the size of projected deficits; why would someone thing it was “obvious” that we need to lower rates, thus producing modest amounts of new revenue? Why couldn’t someone think that we need to “reform the tax code in a way that raises a substantial amount of money, especially from the highest earners?”
Many people do think that, of course—but their views will rarely appear in the upper-end press corps. Readers will rarely hear that such policies are even an option. This is how press corps elites manufacture consent. They simply air-brush options away, not unlike Brother Stalin.
As Pearlstein helped manufacture consent, Bruni was clowning around about Bachmann and Kristof was playing things very safe. (He favors the interests of low-income kids.) No one mentioned this manufactured consent and none of these tools ever will.
Somersby - in RE: the manufacturing of we fools!
Special report: Never explain!
PART 4—HOW WE FOOLS GET MANUFACTURED (permalink): Last night, Piers Morgan interrupted his interview with Frank Bruni to promote CNN’s upcoming 10 PM program, AC 360. He spoke with John King, who would be sitting in for the vacationing Anderson Cooper.
Alas! CNN’s transcripts don’t include such exchanges, which instead get dismissed as “news breaks.” But King told Morgan that he would be exploring a claim —- the claim that nothing really bad will occur if the debt limit stays where it is.
Amazing! Weeks and months after major Republicans began to pimp this nonsense around, CNN was finally going to get off its ass and examine this foolish assertion!
But so it has gone as our major “news orgs” have pretended to discuss the news in the past few months. Indeed, another major cable show was rushing to catch up with this basic question on yesterday’s program. On Hardball, the hapless regular host, Chris Matthews, was vacationing on Nantucket (we’re guessing). This allowed guest host Michael Smerconish to say that he would examine that long-standing GOP claim.
Right at the start of last night’s Hardball, Smerconish, who is much more serious than Matthews, said he would examine that claim—a claim which should have been examined in detail several months ago:
SMERCONISH (7/21/11): Good evening. I’m Michael Smerconish, in tonight for Chris Matthews.
Leading off: Deal or no deal? All day long, there’s been word that a deal between President Obama and Speaker John Boehner is in the works to save the U.S. from default. But publicly, at least, both sides are denying it. It’s clear that the adults on both sides are trying to avoid default. But here’s a question. How do you get to an agreement when Tea Partiers are saying no to any deal with taxes and Democrats are saying no to any deal without them?
Plus, what happens if the country does default? The Tea Partiers insist the White House, Boehner, Mitch McConnell, that they’re all just crying wolf. Really? We’ve crunched numbers, and default would seem to affect almost every American home.
In fact, “the Tea Partiers” have been making that claim for months, deceiving tens of millions of voters and putting the nation’s future in peril. As they have done so, the hapless Matthews has sat on his Welch-fed ass, clowning away as his darling, Joan Walsh, tells us how brilliant he is as he defrocks right-wing guests. But then, as Upton Sinclair once said, “It is difficult to get a Salon editor to understand something when her career standing depends on her not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair was so right!
“What happens if the country does default?” More specifically, have Obama and others been crying wolf about this matter? Republicans have been making this claim for months; last night, two major cable programs finally decided to check out their sh*t! In our view, King did a horrible job with the topic when he addressed it on AC 360. But at least, with its regular host en vacance, this “news program” gave it a try.
Question: What kind of news org would have waited until last night to evaluate what the GOP has been saying? Answer: A news org that isn’t a real news org—a Potemkin news org which clowns its way through life, giving Americans the impression that journalism still does exist. Several months later, Hardball and AC 360 decided they should check out the facts! Months later, they decided to examine the truth of what the public has been hearing from high-ranking folk.
“What happens if the country does default?” For the sake of clarity, we’d frame the question a different way: What happens if the debt limit stays where it is? For months, average Joes have been told, by a long list of players, that nothing especially bad would occur. But did that claim ever make any sense? Just consider this Kevin Drum post.
On Wednesday, Drum ran a post under this mocking headline: “40 Percent Less Government Will Be Fun!” If the debt limit stays where it is, federal spending would have to drop by a fairly immediate 40-45 percent. On the surface, it takes a very foolish person to think that nothing much would happen if that kind of overnight change did occur. But big “news” programs like AC 360 have been too busy diddling themselves about Casey Anthony to try to help their viewers learn what would actually occur.
What would “40 percent less government” look like? Drum linked to Megan McArdle, a conservative blogger at the Atlantic. At the start of her own post, McArdle described the things her conservative soul-mates have been saying—and she found a courteous way to say they’re totally nuts.
“Lots of folks” have been saying that people “are just scaremongering about the consequences of refusal to raise the ceiling,” McArdle said as she started. “I don't think people are really thinking this through.” McArdle accepted the basic idea that there would be “plenty of money for debt service, military payrolls, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid” even if the debt limit stays where it is. But uh-oh! She then listed other federal functions which would have to screech to a halt. Among them, she listed the following functions, and many more besides. We’ve picked just a few from her long laundry list and shifted her order around:
Things which will happen if the debt limit stays where it is (Megan McArdle’s language):
All of our troops stationed abroad quickly run out of electricity or fuel. Many of them are sitting in a desert with billions worth of equipment, and no way to get themselves or their equipment back to the US.
The TSA shuts down. Yay! But don't worry about terrorist attacks, you TSA-lovers, because air traffic control shut down too.
The doors of federal prisons have been thrown open, because none of the guards will work without being paid, and the vendors will not deliver food, medical supplies, electricity, etc.
The border control stations are entirely unmanned, so anyone who can buy a plane ticket, or stroll across the Mexican border, is entering the country. All the illegal immigrants currently in detention are released, since we don't have the money to put them on a plane, and we cannot actually simply leave them in a cell without electricity, sanitation, or food to see what happens.
The nation's nuclear arsenal is no longer being watched or maintained.
You just cut the IRS and all the accountants at Treasury, which means that the actual revenue you have to spend is $0.
Shorter McArdle: U.S. air travel will screech to a halt. Border control will cease to exist. Federal prisoners will all be released. U.S. nukes will be there for the taking.
By the way: How accurate are McArdle’s claims, including her more sanguine assertions? Is it true that the federal government would still have “plenty of money for debt service, military payrolls, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid” if the debt limit stays where it is?
Here at THE HOWLER, we simply don’t know. You see, your major “news organs” have made virtually no attempt to examine such piddling questions. They have been too busy stroking themselves about Casey Anthony’s bounteous bosom—about the long flowing hair Bruni caught her “petting.” We know of no major “news org” which has made a serious attempt to report on these piddling concerns. Even at our greatest “newspapers,” these topics have gone unexplored.
Let’s give credit where modest credit is due. Last Thursday, the Washington Post finally rose off its big fat ass and printed that front-page report by Zachary Goldfarb—a piece in which Goldfarb began to review the choices Obama would face if the debt limit stays where it is (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/21/11). In the next two days, the Post ran two more pieces by Goldfarb, making a very modest attempt to explore related questions. That said, the Post should have been exploring these questions long before and in greater detail—and when Goldfarb wrote his front-page piece, he made no mention of the high-ranking Republicans whose claims he seemed to be contradicting.
At long last, Post readers finally began to learn about the bad choices Obama would face. But as a courtesy, they weren’t required to hear about the famous players who have been saying or implying, for weeks and months, that there would be no bad choices—that there was no real need to raise that federal debt limit. And by the way: Goldfarb didn’t sound quite as sanguine as McArdle, although, in classic Post/Times fashion, his meaning was somewhat unclear. Here’s part of Goldfarb’s account of what will happen if the debt limit stays where it is:
GOLDFARB (7/13/11): On Wednesday night [July 12], several Republican leaders were briefed on the Bipartisan Policy Center report as concern grew in the party about the potential impact of not raising the debt ceiling.
According to the center's analysis, the government would have to cut 44 percent of spending immediately. Through August, the government could afford Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense contracts, unemployment insurance and payments to bondholders.
But then it would have to eliminate all other federal spending, including pay for veterans, members of the armed services and civil servants, as well as funding for Pell grants, special-education programs, the federal courts, law enforcement, national nuclear programs and housing assistance.
After the debt ceiling was breached, there would be no delay in the tough decisions.
According to Goldfarb, pay for the troops would have to cease if Obama kept paying for the other functions. But when would military pay have to stop—after August, or during that month? As usual, our biggest newspapers’ imprecise language left us rather unsure.
To its very modest credit, the Washington Post did some explaining about this topic—very late in the game. As best we can tell, the New York Times has still made no attempt to explore that basic question: What will happen on August 3 if the debt limit stays where it is? You can explain that failure however you like: Perhaps the darlings are too wrapped up in the annual Hamptons migration! But your biggest newspaper has behaved in a truly astonishing way—unless we agree that your biggest newspaper isn’t a newspaper at all.
Many other obvious questions have gone unexplored as we slide toward disaster. Can you explain what Moody’s is? How about S & P? By the way: If Obama does keep paying our “debt service,” would we then be “in default?” These names and concepts have floated around in a conversation few folk understand—but your “news orgs” have made no attempt to explain them. Nor have they tried to explain how we got here, or how we might attempt to get out. For example: Have you seen any major news org explain what would happen to deficit projections if we returned to the Clinton tax rates? Actually no, you haven’t! And by the tenets of Hard Pundit Law, you and your kind never will.
As this silence has occurred, a matching silence has been observed across the “liberal” world. The liberal world barely seems to notice the fact that the mainstream press corps has refused to discuss these various topics. Failing to notice, the liberal world then fails to complain. Can we talk for just one moment? The liberal world as it now exists is almost spectacularly unintelligent. We are no match for the skilled, well-funded plutocrat players who manufacture the utter nonsense which passes for “public discussion.”
Twice a week, Krugman gets 800 words. Otherwise, silence descends.
In fairness, there is one thing we liberals know how to do—we know how to name-call The Others. Long ago, Noam Chomsky described the process we’ve been describing as “manufactured consent.” When he did so, he didn’t blame the average people on various continents who get fooled by this massive deception. Instead, he blamed the powerful interests who author this scam. By doing so, he got himself banned for our ersatz “public discourse,” of course.
Last week, Digby found a different approach. She called eighty million average people “fools,” letting us see who the biggest fool is and showing the way to our final defeat. Question: When our biggest “news orgs” won’t tell average people that they’re being scammed, how are they supposed to know this?
How are they supposed to know that major player are handing them total crap?
You’ll have to ask Digby, the reigning queen, who seems to hate the proles more than the miscreants. You can’t ask the latter group this week—the people who agreed not to report. They are lounging on Nantucket—and in the Hamptons, of course.
PART 4—HOW WE FOOLS GET MANUFACTURED (permalink): Last night, Piers Morgan interrupted his interview with Frank Bruni to promote CNN’s upcoming 10 PM program, AC 360. He spoke with John King, who would be sitting in for the vacationing Anderson Cooper.
Alas! CNN’s transcripts don’t include such exchanges, which instead get dismissed as “news breaks.” But King told Morgan that he would be exploring a claim —- the claim that nothing really bad will occur if the debt limit stays where it is.
Amazing! Weeks and months after major Republicans began to pimp this nonsense around, CNN was finally going to get off its ass and examine this foolish assertion!
But so it has gone as our major “news orgs” have pretended to discuss the news in the past few months. Indeed, another major cable show was rushing to catch up with this basic question on yesterday’s program. On Hardball, the hapless regular host, Chris Matthews, was vacationing on Nantucket (we’re guessing). This allowed guest host Michael Smerconish to say that he would examine that long-standing GOP claim.
Right at the start of last night’s Hardball, Smerconish, who is much more serious than Matthews, said he would examine that claim—a claim which should have been examined in detail several months ago:
SMERCONISH (7/21/11): Good evening. I’m Michael Smerconish, in tonight for Chris Matthews.
Leading off: Deal or no deal? All day long, there’s been word that a deal between President Obama and Speaker John Boehner is in the works to save the U.S. from default. But publicly, at least, both sides are denying it. It’s clear that the adults on both sides are trying to avoid default. But here’s a question. How do you get to an agreement when Tea Partiers are saying no to any deal with taxes and Democrats are saying no to any deal without them?
Plus, what happens if the country does default? The Tea Partiers insist the White House, Boehner, Mitch McConnell, that they’re all just crying wolf. Really? We’ve crunched numbers, and default would seem to affect almost every American home.
In fact, “the Tea Partiers” have been making that claim for months, deceiving tens of millions of voters and putting the nation’s future in peril. As they have done so, the hapless Matthews has sat on his Welch-fed ass, clowning away as his darling, Joan Walsh, tells us how brilliant he is as he defrocks right-wing guests. But then, as Upton Sinclair once said, “It is difficult to get a Salon editor to understand something when her career standing depends on her not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair was so right!
“What happens if the country does default?” More specifically, have Obama and others been crying wolf about this matter? Republicans have been making this claim for months; last night, two major cable programs finally decided to check out their sh*t! In our view, King did a horrible job with the topic when he addressed it on AC 360. But at least, with its regular host en vacance, this “news program” gave it a try.
Question: What kind of news org would have waited until last night to evaluate what the GOP has been saying? Answer: A news org that isn’t a real news org—a Potemkin news org which clowns its way through life, giving Americans the impression that journalism still does exist. Several months later, Hardball and AC 360 decided they should check out the facts! Months later, they decided to examine the truth of what the public has been hearing from high-ranking folk.
“What happens if the country does default?” For the sake of clarity, we’d frame the question a different way: What happens if the debt limit stays where it is? For months, average Joes have been told, by a long list of players, that nothing especially bad would occur. But did that claim ever make any sense? Just consider this Kevin Drum post.
On Wednesday, Drum ran a post under this mocking headline: “40 Percent Less Government Will Be Fun!” If the debt limit stays where it is, federal spending would have to drop by a fairly immediate 40-45 percent. On the surface, it takes a very foolish person to think that nothing much would happen if that kind of overnight change did occur. But big “news” programs like AC 360 have been too busy diddling themselves about Casey Anthony to try to help their viewers learn what would actually occur.
What would “40 percent less government” look like? Drum linked to Megan McArdle, a conservative blogger at the Atlantic. At the start of her own post, McArdle described the things her conservative soul-mates have been saying—and she found a courteous way to say they’re totally nuts.
“Lots of folks” have been saying that people “are just scaremongering about the consequences of refusal to raise the ceiling,” McArdle said as she started. “I don't think people are really thinking this through.” McArdle accepted the basic idea that there would be “plenty of money for debt service, military payrolls, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid” even if the debt limit stays where it is. But uh-oh! She then listed other federal functions which would have to screech to a halt. Among them, she listed the following functions, and many more besides. We’ve picked just a few from her long laundry list and shifted her order around:
Things which will happen if the debt limit stays where it is (Megan McArdle’s language):
All of our troops stationed abroad quickly run out of electricity or fuel. Many of them are sitting in a desert with billions worth of equipment, and no way to get themselves or their equipment back to the US.
The TSA shuts down. Yay! But don't worry about terrorist attacks, you TSA-lovers, because air traffic control shut down too.
The doors of federal prisons have been thrown open, because none of the guards will work without being paid, and the vendors will not deliver food, medical supplies, electricity, etc.
The border control stations are entirely unmanned, so anyone who can buy a plane ticket, or stroll across the Mexican border, is entering the country. All the illegal immigrants currently in detention are released, since we don't have the money to put them on a plane, and we cannot actually simply leave them in a cell without electricity, sanitation, or food to see what happens.
The nation's nuclear arsenal is no longer being watched or maintained.
You just cut the IRS and all the accountants at Treasury, which means that the actual revenue you have to spend is $0.
Shorter McArdle: U.S. air travel will screech to a halt. Border control will cease to exist. Federal prisoners will all be released. U.S. nukes will be there for the taking.
By the way: How accurate are McArdle’s claims, including her more sanguine assertions? Is it true that the federal government would still have “plenty of money for debt service, military payrolls, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid” if the debt limit stays where it is?
Here at THE HOWLER, we simply don’t know. You see, your major “news organs” have made virtually no attempt to examine such piddling questions. They have been too busy stroking themselves about Casey Anthony’s bounteous bosom—about the long flowing hair Bruni caught her “petting.” We know of no major “news org” which has made a serious attempt to report on these piddling concerns. Even at our greatest “newspapers,” these topics have gone unexplored.
Let’s give credit where modest credit is due. Last Thursday, the Washington Post finally rose off its big fat ass and printed that front-page report by Zachary Goldfarb—a piece in which Goldfarb began to review the choices Obama would face if the debt limit stays where it is (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/21/11). In the next two days, the Post ran two more pieces by Goldfarb, making a very modest attempt to explore related questions. That said, the Post should have been exploring these questions long before and in greater detail—and when Goldfarb wrote his front-page piece, he made no mention of the high-ranking Republicans whose claims he seemed to be contradicting.
At long last, Post readers finally began to learn about the bad choices Obama would face. But as a courtesy, they weren’t required to hear about the famous players who have been saying or implying, for weeks and months, that there would be no bad choices—that there was no real need to raise that federal debt limit. And by the way: Goldfarb didn’t sound quite as sanguine as McArdle, although, in classic Post/Times fashion, his meaning was somewhat unclear. Here’s part of Goldfarb’s account of what will happen if the debt limit stays where it is:
GOLDFARB (7/13/11): On Wednesday night [July 12], several Republican leaders were briefed on the Bipartisan Policy Center report as concern grew in the party about the potential impact of not raising the debt ceiling.
According to the center's analysis, the government would have to cut 44 percent of spending immediately. Through August, the government could afford Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense contracts, unemployment insurance and payments to bondholders.
But then it would have to eliminate all other federal spending, including pay for veterans, members of the armed services and civil servants, as well as funding for Pell grants, special-education programs, the federal courts, law enforcement, national nuclear programs and housing assistance.
After the debt ceiling was breached, there would be no delay in the tough decisions.
According to Goldfarb, pay for the troops would have to cease if Obama kept paying for the other functions. But when would military pay have to stop—after August, or during that month? As usual, our biggest newspapers’ imprecise language left us rather unsure.
To its very modest credit, the Washington Post did some explaining about this topic—very late in the game. As best we can tell, the New York Times has still made no attempt to explore that basic question: What will happen on August 3 if the debt limit stays where it is? You can explain that failure however you like: Perhaps the darlings are too wrapped up in the annual Hamptons migration! But your biggest newspaper has behaved in a truly astonishing way—unless we agree that your biggest newspaper isn’t a newspaper at all.
Many other obvious questions have gone unexplored as we slide toward disaster. Can you explain what Moody’s is? How about S & P? By the way: If Obama does keep paying our “debt service,” would we then be “in default?” These names and concepts have floated around in a conversation few folk understand—but your “news orgs” have made no attempt to explain them. Nor have they tried to explain how we got here, or how we might attempt to get out. For example: Have you seen any major news org explain what would happen to deficit projections if we returned to the Clinton tax rates? Actually no, you haven’t! And by the tenets of Hard Pundit Law, you and your kind never will.
As this silence has occurred, a matching silence has been observed across the “liberal” world. The liberal world barely seems to notice the fact that the mainstream press corps has refused to discuss these various topics. Failing to notice, the liberal world then fails to complain. Can we talk for just one moment? The liberal world as it now exists is almost spectacularly unintelligent. We are no match for the skilled, well-funded plutocrat players who manufacture the utter nonsense which passes for “public discussion.”
Twice a week, Krugman gets 800 words. Otherwise, silence descends.
In fairness, there is one thing we liberals know how to do—we know how to name-call The Others. Long ago, Noam Chomsky described the process we’ve been describing as “manufactured consent.” When he did so, he didn’t blame the average people on various continents who get fooled by this massive deception. Instead, he blamed the powerful interests who author this scam. By doing so, he got himself banned for our ersatz “public discourse,” of course.
Last week, Digby found a different approach. She called eighty million average people “fools,” letting us see who the biggest fool is and showing the way to our final defeat. Question: When our biggest “news orgs” won’t tell average people that they’re being scammed, how are they supposed to know this?
How are they supposed to know that major player are handing them total crap?
You’ll have to ask Digby, the reigning queen, who seems to hate the proles more than the miscreants. You can’t ask the latter group this week—the people who agreed not to report. They are lounging on Nantucket—and in the Hamptons, of course.
Somersby gives credit to where it's due: the Grover mon! Grover has worked extremely hard down through all these years. His dogged efforts help explain why American political and journalistic cultures tilt quite hard toward spending cuts rather than toward tax increases. Along with other skillful, well-funded players, Grover has worked to defeat the ol debbil, higher taxes—as is his perfect right.
HOW WE FOOLS GET MANUFACTURED! Chomsky described this scam long ago. He didn’t blame average people
FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2011
Norquist v. Chance the gardener: Frank Bruni appeared with Piers Morgan last night, chatting away with the ex-Murdoch hack. But first, let’s examine Grover’s Norquist’s appearance in today’s New York Times.
Grover appears on the Times op-ed page, right beneath a pointless piece in which the Times’ own Judith Warner muses about Bachmann’s headaches. As Warner piddles your life away, Grover’s column helps explain how your country got to its current place:
NORQUIST (7/22/11): Reap My Lips: No New Taxes
The Taxpayer Protection Pledge has received increased attention as the Aug. 2 deadline for raising the debt ceiling approaches. My organization, Americans for Tax Reform, created the pledge in 1986 as a simple, written commitment by a candidate or elected official that he or she will oppose, and vote against, tax increases. Over the years many candidates and elected officials have signed the pledge, including 236 current members of the House of Representatives and 41 current senators.
Nevertheless, there is some confusion these days about what the pledge does and doesn’t mean, and numerous people have tried to reconfigure its intent to somehow allow its signatories to support tax increases. But in fact the pledge has not changed—indeed, fiscal conservatives must stick to their commitment to oppose tax increases and fight to reduce the size of the federal government.
Thoreau began Walden in a similar way, explaining why he was saying the things which followed. (“I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life…Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like.”) Similarly, Grover is only speaking today because “there is some confusion these days about what the pledge does and doesn’t mean, and numerous people have tried to reconfigure its intent.” At any rate, what Grover says as he starts is quite true: He created the Taxpayer Protection Pledge in 1986. And he has been pushing it very hard, with great effect, for the past twenty-five years. In today’s piece, he goes on to describe the semantics of “tax increase,” a topic he could discuss in his sleep, even when the things he says don’t quite exactly parse.
In his column, Grover says (net) taxes must never be raised. That too he can limn while asleep.
Grover has worked extremely hard down through all these years. His dogged efforts help explain why American political and journalistic cultures tilt quite hard toward spending cuts rather than toward tax increases. Along with other skillful, well-funded players, Grover has worked to defeat the ol debbil, higher taxes—as is his perfect right.
We liberals get mad at Grover for this. We think the problem lies elsewhere.
Ask yourself this: Can you think of a comparable liberal figure? For example, can you think of a liberal figure who has worked in a similar way regarding Social Security? Can you think of a liberal figure who wrote a pledge in 1986 to this effect: Social Security benefits, present and promised, must never be lowered for any reason? Can you think of a liberal figure who spent the last twenty-five years exploring every possible aspect of that basic position? Who doggedly fought the endless deceptions churned against that program?
Of course you can’t think of such a figure! For various reasons, no such liberal figure exists, which helps explain why your side is getting its ass royally kicked once again. Why everyone talks about cutting SS, while it seems to be against the law to even discuss tax increases.
This morning, Grover takes us into the weeds of no new taxes semantics. Above him, a major mainstream journalist piddles around about the meaning of Bachmann’s headaches. Then too, there was Bruni, chatting with Morgan last night.
Are the leading tribunes of the mainstream press corps any match for players like Grover? Please! Bruni may be the world’s nicest guy; he may have been a great restaurant writer. But he has absolutely nothing to say about the world’s major problems. Despite this rather obvious fact, he was recently named a Times op-ed columnist, with Andrew Rosenthal boasting about all the “big events” the guy would surely explore (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/5/11).
Simple story: The mainstream press corps is vastly outmatched by well-funded, dogged players like Grover. Just consider the things Bruni said to Morgan, the ex-Murdoch hack.
Morgan started in an oafish way, as you can note in the transcript. But after discussing Bruni’s status as “one of the first openly gay op-ed columnists that we've seen,” Morgan began to explore Bruni’s views on various big major issues. Bruni may be the world’s nicest guy and a top food writer to boot. But when it came to such basic political topics, he sounded more like Chance the gardener.
Morgan’s first question was almost comically broad. So was Bruni’s answer:
MORGAN (7/21/11): What's your take on America right now? We had an interesting interview with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal from Saudi. We have talked to some senators. Obviously, America's got big problems. Let's just face up to this. It's in massive debt. You've got these no-longer emerging countries, China and India are here, Brazil. America's status as the sole super power is in real peril, isn't it?
BRUNI: It is. The world has changed a lot in that regard. And I think in some ways, it feels like we're at that pivot of empire moment, when the arc is a little downward.
I think there's a sort of dislocation and apprehension about that. That is one of the things being manifested in Washington, with all this bickering and all this gridlock.
We have got to become more mature in Washington, certainly. And we've got to become more reasonable if we're going to get through this moment and have a country as strong on the far side of it as we had coming into it.
Huh! According to Bruni, we need to become more mature and more reasonable. And China is on the move! Morgan moved on to a paint-by-the-numbers Bruni piece concerning the end of the space shuttle:
MORGAN (continuing directly): I liked your column about the sort of lack of ambition when you see the space travel being dramatically reduced and that kind of dream ending. I think, when you and I were younger, you remember these amazing explorations into space. And they were fantastically ambitious and exciting. And they kind of motivated everybody.
What worries me about what's going on now is that everything’s been cut back. The great aspiration that America always stood for doesn’t seem to be there so much now. People aren't, I think, living that dream in the way they used to.
BRUNI: You know, the space program was always a great metaphor for our belief in this country, that we could do anything we set our minds to, that the future was going to be brighter than the past. What's really interesting, when you look at public opinion surveys and when you listen to people, is that sort of bedrock American belief that my kids will do better than I do, that's gone away.
And American confidence is on the wane. And I think what's happening in Washington right now is not helping that at all. It is compounding those fears and that anxiety greatly.
Interesting! American confidence is on the wane—and what's happening now doesn’t help!
By now, it was time to seek “the answer.” Blather in, blather back out:
MORGAN (continuing directly): What's the answer, do you think, Frank? When you look at your country, you have a great platform to talk about all the problems. What's the answer?
BRUNI: Well, part of the answer is an end to the kind of polarized politics and bickering that we have. I think when you talk to people, when you talk to your friends, everyone looks at what's going on in Washington with a significant measure of disgust.
The fact that we're coming this close to the deadline without any agreement about raising the debt ceiling, despite what the consequences of that would be, it's kind of surreal and mind boggling and nightmarish.
If we were able to follow his chain of reasoning, Bruni thinks our “polarized politics and bickering” would have to be part of the answer. And don’t even get this columnist started on the wild ways we spend:
MORGAN (continuing directly): How much do you blame the American public for being reckless with their own spending?
BRUNI: We've all been reckless. The baby boomer generation has been reckless. But right now, I think the problem is in Washington and not elsewhere in the land.
Although, you know, when we go to the ballot box and we exert our will, we need to be grown up and informed and intelligent about that. But I think we all want a better caliber of politics than we get from Washington. And I don't think it's the American people's fault that what's going on in Washington right now has the kind of tenor it does.
According to Bruni, we Americans “need to be grown up and informed and intelligent about” something when we vote—perhaps about excessive spending.
At this point, Morgan asked about Presideent Obama’s leadership, producing one more fuzzy reply. And then, Morgan told Bruni what they’d discuss when they Came back from a break:
MORGAN: We're going to have a short break, Frank. When we come back, I'm going to talk to you about Casey Anthony, about Harry Potter, about restaurants. And I want to ask you the greatest meal you've ever had and the worst.
BRUNI: OK.
Having disposed of the world’s major problems, the pair would move on to dessert.
Bruni may be the world’s nicest guy. But he has nothing whatever to say about the nation’s various problems. Question: If the New York Times was a real newspaper, would they ever have hired this guy as a twice-weekly op-ed writer? Next question: If CNN was a real news channel, would an empty suit like Morgan have been hired there?
In your country, you have an aggressive, well-funded plutocrat movement—and you have Potemkin news orgs. Grover Norquist is very determined.
Your nation’s “press corps” is not.
Coming Monday/speaking of Murdoch hacks: To see a photo of Murdoch testifying, click here. Question: Do you know who that fellow is right next to Murdoch’s wife?
FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2011
Norquist v. Chance the gardener: Frank Bruni appeared with Piers Morgan last night, chatting away with the ex-Murdoch hack. But first, let’s examine Grover’s Norquist’s appearance in today’s New York Times.
Grover appears on the Times op-ed page, right beneath a pointless piece in which the Times’ own Judith Warner muses about Bachmann’s headaches. As Warner piddles your life away, Grover’s column helps explain how your country got to its current place:
NORQUIST (7/22/11): Reap My Lips: No New Taxes
The Taxpayer Protection Pledge has received increased attention as the Aug. 2 deadline for raising the debt ceiling approaches. My organization, Americans for Tax Reform, created the pledge in 1986 as a simple, written commitment by a candidate or elected official that he or she will oppose, and vote against, tax increases. Over the years many candidates and elected officials have signed the pledge, including 236 current members of the House of Representatives and 41 current senators.
Nevertheless, there is some confusion these days about what the pledge does and doesn’t mean, and numerous people have tried to reconfigure its intent to somehow allow its signatories to support tax increases. But in fact the pledge has not changed—indeed, fiscal conservatives must stick to their commitment to oppose tax increases and fight to reduce the size of the federal government.
Thoreau began Walden in a similar way, explaining why he was saying the things which followed. (“I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life…Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like.”) Similarly, Grover is only speaking today because “there is some confusion these days about what the pledge does and doesn’t mean, and numerous people have tried to reconfigure its intent.” At any rate, what Grover says as he starts is quite true: He created the Taxpayer Protection Pledge in 1986. And he has been pushing it very hard, with great effect, for the past twenty-five years. In today’s piece, he goes on to describe the semantics of “tax increase,” a topic he could discuss in his sleep, even when the things he says don’t quite exactly parse.
In his column, Grover says (net) taxes must never be raised. That too he can limn while asleep.
Grover has worked extremely hard down through all these years. His dogged efforts help explain why American political and journalistic cultures tilt quite hard toward spending cuts rather than toward tax increases. Along with other skillful, well-funded players, Grover has worked to defeat the ol debbil, higher taxes—as is his perfect right.
We liberals get mad at Grover for this. We think the problem lies elsewhere.
Ask yourself this: Can you think of a comparable liberal figure? For example, can you think of a liberal figure who has worked in a similar way regarding Social Security? Can you think of a liberal figure who wrote a pledge in 1986 to this effect: Social Security benefits, present and promised, must never be lowered for any reason? Can you think of a liberal figure who spent the last twenty-five years exploring every possible aspect of that basic position? Who doggedly fought the endless deceptions churned against that program?
Of course you can’t think of such a figure! For various reasons, no such liberal figure exists, which helps explain why your side is getting its ass royally kicked once again. Why everyone talks about cutting SS, while it seems to be against the law to even discuss tax increases.
This morning, Grover takes us into the weeds of no new taxes semantics. Above him, a major mainstream journalist piddles around about the meaning of Bachmann’s headaches. Then too, there was Bruni, chatting with Morgan last night.
Are the leading tribunes of the mainstream press corps any match for players like Grover? Please! Bruni may be the world’s nicest guy; he may have been a great restaurant writer. But he has absolutely nothing to say about the world’s major problems. Despite this rather obvious fact, he was recently named a Times op-ed columnist, with Andrew Rosenthal boasting about all the “big events” the guy would surely explore (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/5/11).
Simple story: The mainstream press corps is vastly outmatched by well-funded, dogged players like Grover. Just consider the things Bruni said to Morgan, the ex-Murdoch hack.
Morgan started in an oafish way, as you can note in the transcript. But after discussing Bruni’s status as “one of the first openly gay op-ed columnists that we've seen,” Morgan began to explore Bruni’s views on various big major issues. Bruni may be the world’s nicest guy and a top food writer to boot. But when it came to such basic political topics, he sounded more like Chance the gardener.
Morgan’s first question was almost comically broad. So was Bruni’s answer:
MORGAN (7/21/11): What's your take on America right now? We had an interesting interview with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal from Saudi. We have talked to some senators. Obviously, America's got big problems. Let's just face up to this. It's in massive debt. You've got these no-longer emerging countries, China and India are here, Brazil. America's status as the sole super power is in real peril, isn't it?
BRUNI: It is. The world has changed a lot in that regard. And I think in some ways, it feels like we're at that pivot of empire moment, when the arc is a little downward.
I think there's a sort of dislocation and apprehension about that. That is one of the things being manifested in Washington, with all this bickering and all this gridlock.
We have got to become more mature in Washington, certainly. And we've got to become more reasonable if we're going to get through this moment and have a country as strong on the far side of it as we had coming into it.
Huh! According to Bruni, we need to become more mature and more reasonable. And China is on the move! Morgan moved on to a paint-by-the-numbers Bruni piece concerning the end of the space shuttle:
MORGAN (continuing directly): I liked your column about the sort of lack of ambition when you see the space travel being dramatically reduced and that kind of dream ending. I think, when you and I were younger, you remember these amazing explorations into space. And they were fantastically ambitious and exciting. And they kind of motivated everybody.
What worries me about what's going on now is that everything’s been cut back. The great aspiration that America always stood for doesn’t seem to be there so much now. People aren't, I think, living that dream in the way they used to.
BRUNI: You know, the space program was always a great metaphor for our belief in this country, that we could do anything we set our minds to, that the future was going to be brighter than the past. What's really interesting, when you look at public opinion surveys and when you listen to people, is that sort of bedrock American belief that my kids will do better than I do, that's gone away.
And American confidence is on the wane. And I think what's happening in Washington right now is not helping that at all. It is compounding those fears and that anxiety greatly.
Interesting! American confidence is on the wane—and what's happening now doesn’t help!
By now, it was time to seek “the answer.” Blather in, blather back out:
MORGAN (continuing directly): What's the answer, do you think, Frank? When you look at your country, you have a great platform to talk about all the problems. What's the answer?
BRUNI: Well, part of the answer is an end to the kind of polarized politics and bickering that we have. I think when you talk to people, when you talk to your friends, everyone looks at what's going on in Washington with a significant measure of disgust.
The fact that we're coming this close to the deadline without any agreement about raising the debt ceiling, despite what the consequences of that would be, it's kind of surreal and mind boggling and nightmarish.
If we were able to follow his chain of reasoning, Bruni thinks our “polarized politics and bickering” would have to be part of the answer. And don’t even get this columnist started on the wild ways we spend:
MORGAN (continuing directly): How much do you blame the American public for being reckless with their own spending?
BRUNI: We've all been reckless. The baby boomer generation has been reckless. But right now, I think the problem is in Washington and not elsewhere in the land.
Although, you know, when we go to the ballot box and we exert our will, we need to be grown up and informed and intelligent about that. But I think we all want a better caliber of politics than we get from Washington. And I don't think it's the American people's fault that what's going on in Washington right now has the kind of tenor it does.
According to Bruni, we Americans “need to be grown up and informed and intelligent about” something when we vote—perhaps about excessive spending.
At this point, Morgan asked about Presideent Obama’s leadership, producing one more fuzzy reply. And then, Morgan told Bruni what they’d discuss when they Came back from a break:
MORGAN: We're going to have a short break, Frank. When we come back, I'm going to talk to you about Casey Anthony, about Harry Potter, about restaurants. And I want to ask you the greatest meal you've ever had and the worst.
BRUNI: OK.
Having disposed of the world’s major problems, the pair would move on to dessert.
Bruni may be the world’s nicest guy. But he has nothing whatever to say about the nation’s various problems. Question: If the New York Times was a real newspaper, would they ever have hired this guy as a twice-weekly op-ed writer? Next question: If CNN was a real news channel, would an empty suit like Morgan have been hired there?
In your country, you have an aggressive, well-funded plutocrat movement—and you have Potemkin news orgs. Grover Norquist is very determined.
Your nation’s “press corps” is not.
Coming Monday/speaking of Murdoch hacks: To see a photo of Murdoch testifying, click here. Question: Do you know who that fellow is right next to Murdoch’s wife?
Somersby lets us know: On Thursday morning, July 14, a truly amazing event occurred: Information appeared in the Washington Post concerning the debt limit mess!
Special report: Never explain!
PART 3—A TRULY AMAZING EVENT (permalink): On Thursday morning, July 14, a truly amazing event occurred:
Information appeared in the Washington Post concerning the debt limit mess!
More specifically, the Post explained some of the things which might occur if the debt limit doesn’t get raised by August 2. This amazing report appeared at the top of the Washington Post’s front page. Showing how easily it can be done, Zachary Goldfarb began his report with a blindingly obvious question:
GOLDFARB (7/14/11): What happens if President Obama and Congress don't strike a debt deal?
Duh! By last Thursday, this question had been lurking behind the debt limit fight for weeks, if not for months. Major Republicans had told the public that nothing of consequence would occur if the August 2 target date passed. But our biggest news orgs had made little attempt to address this implausible claim.
Now, at long last, the Washington Post was addressing this blindingly obvious question in a front-page news report! What would happen if the debt limit didn’t get raised? “On Aug. 3,” Obama would be “forced to make a set of extraordinarily difficult choices about what to pay or not pay,” Goldfarb said as he continued. “By then, the government's savings account would be nearly empty and the president would be relying on daily tax revenue to pay the nation's bills.”
As he continued, Goldfarb discussed the kinds of choices Obama would face, describing the range of federal services which might have to be dumped. We’ll recommend Goldfarb’s whole report—a report which should have appeared in the Post weeks, if not months, before. But in the following highlighted passages we highlight below, Goldfarb sketched the basic numbers underlying this onrushing mess.
In a dimly rational world, such numbers seem to invalidate the claim that there would be no major problem if the debt limit stays where it is. The key element of this debate is captured in those two percentages:
GOLDFARB: Some skeptics in Congress and conservative economists say that Obama has overstated the risk of not raising the debt ceiling and that tax revenue could pay for up to 60 percent of government operations.
"You do not have to default and you don't have to shut down the government if you choose not to," said Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland. If Congress raises the debt ceiling without a long-term plan for reducing the federal deficit, he added, "they'll never solve the problem, and we'll end up like Greece."
Obama's advisers have said that prioritizing some payments over others is impractical and would be chaotic. Money comes in and flows out at an inconsistent rate.
"You would have to make heinous choices about which bills you would pay," White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday.
On Wednesday night, several Republican leaders were briefed on the Bipartisan Policy Center report as concern grew in the party about the potential impact of not raising the debt ceiling.
According to the center's analysis, the government would have to cut 44 percent of spending immediately.
According to the analysis Goldfarb was using, the federal government would have to cut 44 percent of spending immediately. In Goldfarb’s own formulation, “skeptics in Congress” have been reassuring the public by saying that Obama could continue to “pay for up to 60 percent of government operations.”
Exactly! In a dimly rational world, that is precisely the problem.
What would happen if forty percent (or 44 percent) of federal services suddenly stopped? This is a blindingly obvious question—but it didn’t occur to the hapless Chris Matthews when he interviewed Rep. Steve King, the Iowa Republican, on July 13, one night before Goldfarb’s piece appeared (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/20/11). A chimp or a chipmunk would have known to pose this obvious question to King, who kept implying that nothing especially bad would occur if the August 2 target date passed.
A chimp or a chipmunk would have known to pose that obvious question to King. Matthews, a multimillionaire “journalist,” was as always less well prepared.
Alas! On last Wednesday’s Hardball, King told Matthews that we could still pay the troops if the debt limit stays where it is. He said we could pay our debt service too; he even seemed to say that we could keep sending out Social Security checks. For the sake of argument, let’s assume those claims are true. A poo-flinging chimp, or even a chipmunk, would have spotted the obvious logical problem with King’s blithe assurances:
Even if we could continue to pay those bills, many other federal payments (and many basic federal services) would presumably have to cease.
On Thursday morning, the very next day, an amazing event occurred. On the front page of the Washington Post, Goldfarb began to describe the essential services which would likely grind to a halt if the August 2 target date passed. But Matthews, an utterly hopeless incompetent, didn’t raise this obvious problem when he spoke with King on Wednesday night. This is the way our most hapless tool responded to King’s blithe assurances; we resume the interview where it left off in yesterday’s DAILY HOWLER:
KING (7/13/11): I think what I’ve done today, with Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert, introducing the Promises Act, it says, it directs this: That we pay our military first. They’re in uniform. Their lives are on the line and their families are living paycheck to military paycheck and they become a political pawn instead. They should be guaranteed to be paid first for all time.
And we need to service our debt. And that needs to also be guaranteed for all time. That consumes right now about 15.2 percent of our revenue stream before you touch the part that we’re borrowing. So we can do this. And Social Security needs to be paid, as does the military. And so that’s what we’re trying to do is to lend some confidence to the markets.
MATTHEWS: So wait a minute. What’s your, let me— Let me get you straight. You don’t believe we go into default.
KING: No.
MATTHEWS: You believe that Geithner is lying, the president’s lying, McConnell’s wrong. Everybody in the country is worried about this, but you have some superior knowledge. What basis do you have for your judgment? Where do you get—
KING: Yes, I do!
MATTHEWS: —the information from?
KING: [Joking] I do have superior knowledge! Thanks for recognizing it!
MATTHEWS: Where have you got it from?
KING: I have watched this come out of the White House and I’ve watched this transition. I’ve listened to the administration, the executives that are part of this administration. Many of them will say what the president wants them to say. You have to put that through a filter before you can figure out what the truth is. That’s not a mystery. It’s not unique knowledge, but it’s common knowledge.
MATTHEWS: So they’re all— So Jack Lew, the OMB director, the treasury secretary, everyone around the president, the business community that’s now scared to death, Tom Donohue, head of the U.S. Chamber, all those people are lying, and you’ve got the truth.
KING: Yes.
MATTHEWS: You and Bachmann have the truth!
On their face, King’s blithe assurances make little sense. It’s extremely hard to believe we can drop 44 percent of federal services without a giant problem ensuing. But Christopher Matthews, a hopeless incompetent, was too unprepared to introduce this obvious logical framework. Instead, he turned to the least convincing of all arguments, especially in the current environment: He turned to the argument from authority. He asked why viewers should believe Rep. King instead of the deathless Jack Lew.
Here at THE HOWLER, we do believe Lew (and the others) on balance; we do believe giant problems will ensue if the debt limit stays where it is. But Matthews, as always, was unprepared to make the obvious logical argument. He got all snide when he called Bachmann’s name—and if you were already on the Obama team, this made for some good entertainment. (When we played this tape for a group of federal managers, Matthews’ snarky evocation of Bachmann produced a pretty good laugh.) But if you don’t really know what you think about this matter; if you don’t already think you know who is telling the truth in this matter; Matthews’ argument wouldn’t likely help you see the obvious problem with King’s blithe assurances.
A few days later, Queen Digby announced that eighty million people are fools; on balance, they think there won’t be any huge problems if the debt limit stays where it is. Royalty has its rewards, of course. But when major broadcasters perform in the way Matthews does; when the Washington Post waits until July 14 to publish a report like Goldfarb’s; when the New York Times publishes no such reports at all, right up to the present day; then how are all those foolish voters supposed to know what the truth really is?
People like Digby semi-love to hate. The desire to hate and insult The Fools lies at the heart of our brave new pseudo-liberalism. This approach pleases the Masters of the Universe, who strive to divide and conquer.
But does the real problem in this exchange lie with those eighty million fools? With the forty million more who said they didn’t know? On balance, we’d say the real problem lies elsewhere. We’d say it starts with people like Matthews, with those of his high store-bought class.
Tomorrow: How are we fools supposed to know? A list of things the Post and the Times still haven’t bothered reporting.
PART 3—A TRULY AMAZING EVENT (permalink): On Thursday morning, July 14, a truly amazing event occurred:
Information appeared in the Washington Post concerning the debt limit mess!
More specifically, the Post explained some of the things which might occur if the debt limit doesn’t get raised by August 2. This amazing report appeared at the top of the Washington Post’s front page. Showing how easily it can be done, Zachary Goldfarb began his report with a blindingly obvious question:
GOLDFARB (7/14/11): What happens if President Obama and Congress don't strike a debt deal?
Duh! By last Thursday, this question had been lurking behind the debt limit fight for weeks, if not for months. Major Republicans had told the public that nothing of consequence would occur if the August 2 target date passed. But our biggest news orgs had made little attempt to address this implausible claim.
Now, at long last, the Washington Post was addressing this blindingly obvious question in a front-page news report! What would happen if the debt limit didn’t get raised? “On Aug. 3,” Obama would be “forced to make a set of extraordinarily difficult choices about what to pay or not pay,” Goldfarb said as he continued. “By then, the government's savings account would be nearly empty and the president would be relying on daily tax revenue to pay the nation's bills.”
As he continued, Goldfarb discussed the kinds of choices Obama would face, describing the range of federal services which might have to be dumped. We’ll recommend Goldfarb’s whole report—a report which should have appeared in the Post weeks, if not months, before. But in the following highlighted passages we highlight below, Goldfarb sketched the basic numbers underlying this onrushing mess.
In a dimly rational world, such numbers seem to invalidate the claim that there would be no major problem if the debt limit stays where it is. The key element of this debate is captured in those two percentages:
GOLDFARB: Some skeptics in Congress and conservative economists say that Obama has overstated the risk of not raising the debt ceiling and that tax revenue could pay for up to 60 percent of government operations.
"You do not have to default and you don't have to shut down the government if you choose not to," said Peter Morici, an economist at the University of Maryland. If Congress raises the debt ceiling without a long-term plan for reducing the federal deficit, he added, "they'll never solve the problem, and we'll end up like Greece."
Obama's advisers have said that prioritizing some payments over others is impractical and would be chaotic. Money comes in and flows out at an inconsistent rate.
"You would have to make heinous choices about which bills you would pay," White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday.
On Wednesday night, several Republican leaders were briefed on the Bipartisan Policy Center report as concern grew in the party about the potential impact of not raising the debt ceiling.
According to the center's analysis, the government would have to cut 44 percent of spending immediately.
According to the analysis Goldfarb was using, the federal government would have to cut 44 percent of spending immediately. In Goldfarb’s own formulation, “skeptics in Congress” have been reassuring the public by saying that Obama could continue to “pay for up to 60 percent of government operations.”
Exactly! In a dimly rational world, that is precisely the problem.
What would happen if forty percent (or 44 percent) of federal services suddenly stopped? This is a blindingly obvious question—but it didn’t occur to the hapless Chris Matthews when he interviewed Rep. Steve King, the Iowa Republican, on July 13, one night before Goldfarb’s piece appeared (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/20/11). A chimp or a chipmunk would have known to pose this obvious question to King, who kept implying that nothing especially bad would occur if the August 2 target date passed.
A chimp or a chipmunk would have known to pose that obvious question to King. Matthews, a multimillionaire “journalist,” was as always less well prepared.
Alas! On last Wednesday’s Hardball, King told Matthews that we could still pay the troops if the debt limit stays where it is. He said we could pay our debt service too; he even seemed to say that we could keep sending out Social Security checks. For the sake of argument, let’s assume those claims are true. A poo-flinging chimp, or even a chipmunk, would have spotted the obvious logical problem with King’s blithe assurances:
Even if we could continue to pay those bills, many other federal payments (and many basic federal services) would presumably have to cease.
On Thursday morning, the very next day, an amazing event occurred. On the front page of the Washington Post, Goldfarb began to describe the essential services which would likely grind to a halt if the August 2 target date passed. But Matthews, an utterly hopeless incompetent, didn’t raise this obvious problem when he spoke with King on Wednesday night. This is the way our most hapless tool responded to King’s blithe assurances; we resume the interview where it left off in yesterday’s DAILY HOWLER:
KING (7/13/11): I think what I’ve done today, with Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert, introducing the Promises Act, it says, it directs this: That we pay our military first. They’re in uniform. Their lives are on the line and their families are living paycheck to military paycheck and they become a political pawn instead. They should be guaranteed to be paid first for all time.
And we need to service our debt. And that needs to also be guaranteed for all time. That consumes right now about 15.2 percent of our revenue stream before you touch the part that we’re borrowing. So we can do this. And Social Security needs to be paid, as does the military. And so that’s what we’re trying to do is to lend some confidence to the markets.
MATTHEWS: So wait a minute. What’s your, let me— Let me get you straight. You don’t believe we go into default.
KING: No.
MATTHEWS: You believe that Geithner is lying, the president’s lying, McConnell’s wrong. Everybody in the country is worried about this, but you have some superior knowledge. What basis do you have for your judgment? Where do you get—
KING: Yes, I do!
MATTHEWS: —the information from?
KING: [Joking] I do have superior knowledge! Thanks for recognizing it!
MATTHEWS: Where have you got it from?
KING: I have watched this come out of the White House and I’ve watched this transition. I’ve listened to the administration, the executives that are part of this administration. Many of them will say what the president wants them to say. You have to put that through a filter before you can figure out what the truth is. That’s not a mystery. It’s not unique knowledge, but it’s common knowledge.
MATTHEWS: So they’re all— So Jack Lew, the OMB director, the treasury secretary, everyone around the president, the business community that’s now scared to death, Tom Donohue, head of the U.S. Chamber, all those people are lying, and you’ve got the truth.
KING: Yes.
MATTHEWS: You and Bachmann have the truth!
On their face, King’s blithe assurances make little sense. It’s extremely hard to believe we can drop 44 percent of federal services without a giant problem ensuing. But Christopher Matthews, a hopeless incompetent, was too unprepared to introduce this obvious logical framework. Instead, he turned to the least convincing of all arguments, especially in the current environment: He turned to the argument from authority. He asked why viewers should believe Rep. King instead of the deathless Jack Lew.
Here at THE HOWLER, we do believe Lew (and the others) on balance; we do believe giant problems will ensue if the debt limit stays where it is. But Matthews, as always, was unprepared to make the obvious logical argument. He got all snide when he called Bachmann’s name—and if you were already on the Obama team, this made for some good entertainment. (When we played this tape for a group of federal managers, Matthews’ snarky evocation of Bachmann produced a pretty good laugh.) But if you don’t really know what you think about this matter; if you don’t already think you know who is telling the truth in this matter; Matthews’ argument wouldn’t likely help you see the obvious problem with King’s blithe assurances.
A few days later, Queen Digby announced that eighty million people are fools; on balance, they think there won’t be any huge problems if the debt limit stays where it is. Royalty has its rewards, of course. But when major broadcasters perform in the way Matthews does; when the Washington Post waits until July 14 to publish a report like Goldfarb’s; when the New York Times publishes no such reports at all, right up to the present day; then how are all those foolish voters supposed to know what the truth really is?
People like Digby semi-love to hate. The desire to hate and insult The Fools lies at the heart of our brave new pseudo-liberalism. This approach pleases the Masters of the Universe, who strive to divide and conquer.
But does the real problem in this exchange lie with those eighty million fools? With the forty million more who said they didn’t know? On balance, we’d say the real problem lies elsewhere. We’d say it starts with people like Matthews, with those of his high store-bought class.
Tomorrow: How are we fools supposed to know? A list of things the Post and the Times still haven’t bothered reporting.
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