Special report: Still amazed after all these years!
PART 1—STILL AMAZED AFTER ALL THESE YEARS (permalink): Just for the record, Rachel Maddow isn’t willing to name their names either.
The darling child is a slick career player, skillful at running us rubes. She likes to makes us think she fighting for us even as she protects her own interests. So it went on last night’s program, when Her Slickness pushed back against all those hacks in the mainstream press—very bad players whose famous names she slickly refused to name:
MADDOW (8/8/11): Of all of the Republican presidential candidates this year, all of them but one, all of them but Jon Huntsman, said they would vote against raising the debt ceiling—meaning that as presidential candidates, they are advising Republican members of Congress to vote against raising the debt ceiling. They are advising Congress to let the United States of America default.
Members of Congress, who in some cases seemed like they would be delighted to do that. Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz of Utah quoted in the Washington Post this weekend, saying, “We weren’t kidding around, either. We would have taken it down.”
And by it, he means you. He means the U.S. economy. We would have defaulted. We wanted it to go nuclear.
If we’re talking about the risk of default, if we’re talking about playing with fire, this was not a “both sides” kind of thing. The Beltway loves to say, “Oh, both sides deserve the blame. Be evenhanded here.” This is the platonic form of, “Not both sides’ fault.”
I’m sorry if this sounds partisan to point out, but this was not both sides committing the same error. This was one side. This was Republicans alone causing this problem by saying they would not raise the debt ceiling. And it’s liberals and Democrats who have been saying all along that that take by the Republicans was dangerous.
[...]
This was not both sides. I’m sorry to tell the Beltway. I know it’s upsetting. This was not both sides.
Maddow was right about one thing, of course. It was Republicans, and Republicans only, who said they wouldn’t raise the debt ceiling. But who has been saying that it was “both sides?” Who was Maddow chastising here?
Of course! “The Beltway” has been saying that! Bravely daring to “sound partisan,” the slick career hustler went after “The Beltway.” She failed to explain how a highway can make absurd statements, then get “upset” when challenged.
Paul Krugman’s a hero and Maddow’s a hack. But will anyone ever name the names of the people who are saying that both sides did it? Will anyone ever name names like “Bob Schieffer?”
Darlings! It just isn’t done! Here’s how Kathleen Parker handled this general problem as the August 2 target date neared. Writing in the Washington Post, Parker criticized those media figures who encouraged the debt limit brinksmanship. Or did she? Prepare for some wonderful clownistry:
PARKER (7/29/11): Take names. Remember them. The behavior of certain Republicans who call themselves Tea Party conservatives makes them the most destructive posse of misguided “patriots” we’ve seen in recent memory.
If the nation defaults on its financial obligations, the blame belongs to the Tea Party Republicans who fragged their own leader, John Boehner. They had victory in their hands and couldn’t bring themselves to support his debt-ceiling plan, which, if not perfect, was more than anyone could have imagined just a few months ago. No new taxes, significant spending cuts, a temporary debt-ceiling solution with the possibility of more spending cuts down the line as well as action on their beloved balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.
These people wouldn’t recognize a hot fudge sundae if the cherry started talking to them.
The tick-tock of the debt-ceiling debate is too long for this space, but the bottom line is that the Tea Party got too full of itself with help from certain characters whose names you’ll want to remember when things go south. They include, among others, media personalities who need no further recognition; a handful of media-created “leaders,” including Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips and Tea Party Patriots co-founders Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler (both Phillips and Martin declared bankruptcy, yet they’re advising Tea Party Republicans on debt?); a handful of outside groups that love to hurl ad hominems such as “elite” and “inside the Beltway” when talking about people like Boehner when they are, in fact, the elite (FreedomWorks, Heritage Action, Club for Growth, National Taxpayers Union, Americans for Prosperity); and elected leaders such as Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, head of the Republican Study Committee, and South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, who grandstand and make political assertions and promises that are sheer fantasy.
Too funny! At two separate points, Parker said we should “take names” of those who created the debt limit mess. We’ll want to remember those names “when things so south,” she said. But when it came to those “media personalities,” she found a very slick way to avoid such typing such names.
We’ll want to remember their names, Parker said. But then, when it came to this one special class, she said it was wrong to include them!
To her credit, Parker was willing to name many other names; she even correctly pounded Bachmann, a task from which Nicholas Kristof predictably shrank that week. But when it came to those media figures, no names were allowed—immediately after she said that we’d want to remember such monikers!
The clowning is general when major press figures pretend to critique their colleagues. Center-right columnists and pseudo-left phonies agree on the need to keep quiet. But then, we also emitted low mordant chuckles as we read Sunday’s New York Times editorials.
Eventually, the editors said some intriguing things. But they started like this:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (8/7/11): A week later and we are still amazed at how the Republicans in Congress pulled it off. They held the economy hostage, won some cheap political points, and all of us will spend the next decade paying the ransom as government programs—$900 billion over 10 years in the first round—are slashed and the recovery is put at risk.
We know—it’s just a figure of speech. But why were the editors “still amazed” at the way “the Republicans pulled it off?” Why were they amazed at all? The GOP did exactly what it said it would do, acting on things it says it believes in. It was helped by familiar political narratives which have been decades in the making—and by the relentless refusal of this “newspaper” to do any real reporting.
We don’t know why the eds were amazed by the fact that the GOP “pulled it off.” But the editors seem to be amazed by most things that happened last week:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (continuing directly): The only glimmer of hope is that the battle is not completely over—if President Obama is finally willing to fight.
Under the terms of the ill-conceived debt agreement, Congress has to propose another $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction measures by December. Just to ensure that rationality does not have a chance, Republican leaders said they would not put anyone on the deficit-cutting “super-committee” who might entertain the idea of raising taxes.
A week later and we are even more amazed by the failure of Mr. Obama and the Democratic leadership to stand up to this intransigence. If they do not start pushing back, with the same ferocity, the results will be disastrous.
We know—it’s only a figure of speech. But we don’t know why the eds are amazed by this phenomenon either. There are various ways to explain that “failure,” some of which are Obama-friendly, some of which are not. But should the editors be amazed? Given the sweep of the past thirty years, what happened was hardly surprising.
Should the editors be “amazed” when spending cuts win out and tax increases get dumped? Perhaps—if they’re living on Neptune! In fact, the editors live on a different far planet; they live on “the planet of the press corps,” a well-ordered orb with a very strange culture. One oddity among many: On that strange planet, major press figures know that they must never name each other’s names.
Why were the editors so amazed? We’ll ponder that topic all week. We’ll also review the intriguing things the editors went on to propose—until they suffered a panic attack and took back what they had said.
Darling Rachel played you last night—but such things have gone on for a very long time. How has this puzzling system worked out? And why were the editors so amazed by its predictable fruit?
Tomorrow—part 2: Intriguing ideas about taxes
Sunday, August 14, 2011
A script is a script of course of coure, unless you've heard of the talking horse, that is of course unless the hourse is the famous let's not give them discourse - let's GIVE THEM DEATH! (More Somersby, as my readers eyes continue to glaze over)
STILL AMAZED AFTER ALL THESE YEARS! The editors said they were amazed when spending cuts won over tax hikes:
TUESDAY, AUGUST 9, 2011
Gore among the Aspens: You can’t blame Al Gore for being frustrated. He was speaking at a meeting of the Aspen Institute, after all.
The expert-laden association is headed by Walter Isaacson. How much more must be said?
Whatever! Gore was addressing these experts last week. We’ll let Politico’s Darren Samuelsohn take the expletive-laden story from there:
SAMUELSOHN (8/8/11): Al Gore is calling B.S. on global warming skeptics.
The former vice president and climate crusader told an Aspen Institute communications seminar Thursday that people who doubt climate science are the same ones who helped tobacco companies over four decades question the dangers of cigarette smoking.
"Some of the exact same people—by name I can go down a list of their names—are involved in this," Gore said. "And so what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: 'This climate thing, it's nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn't trap heat. It may be volcanoes.' Bullsh-! 'It may be sun spots.' Bullsh-! 'It's not getting warmer.' Bullsh-!"
Gore's speech to the Aspen Institute was reported by Real Aspen, which added a brief audio segment of his comments Monday. Video of the event is expected to be available later this week, according to an official from the Aspen Institute. Carbondale, Colo., NPR affiliate KDNK also reported Gore's remarks Friday morning.
If you live in Carbondale, Colorado, you probably heard all about it!
Politico was too dainty to print the full word “bullshit.” For a fuller transcript of what Gore said, along with an audio tape of his comments, you can visit Think Progress Green. Just click here.
Gore was describing a basic part of modern American culture. Pseudo-experts rule the day in almost all realms of public discussion. Routinely, they’re funded by interested parties. For some pseudo-experts, Exxon Mobil might be a source of funding-for-propaganda. In the realm of “education reform,” Bloomberg News might be another.
But over and over, our discourse is shaped by Potemkin pseudo-experts. Just last week, the intellectual giants at S&P couldn’t even do the math! And even Politico came up short! As Samuelsohn continued, he managed to bungle one part of what Gore said:
SAMUELSOHN (continuing directly): "There about 10 names [sic] out there," Gore added. "When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again. They have polluted the sh-. There's no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. People have no idea!"
Climate skeptics, Gore added, have made it nearly impossible to talk about the issue anymore.
"It's no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the goddamn word climate," he said. "It is not acceptable. They have polluted it to the point where we cannot possibly come to an agreement on it."
Actually, Gore said, “There are about ten other memes out there.” In that one short sentence, Samuelsohn made three mistakes. Transcribing can be hard!
Gore was describing the basic structure of all American discourse. Pseudo-experts and pseudo-journalists invent strings of memes (standard stories). Everyone in the in-group repeats them—and soon, these tales are in everyone’s heads. Gore described the basic nature of all American discourse: “When you go and talk to any audience about [any topic], you hear [standard stories] washing back at you, the same crap over and over and over again.”
This has been true for a very long time. For one example, this practice decided Campaign 2000, sending George W. Bush to the White House. You can read about it at our companion site—and almost nowhere else. (Chapter 6 is almost ready for posting.)
The mainstream “press corps” rarely mentions such facts about our “bullsh--” laden discourse. Darlings! Be sensible! It simply isn’t done!
Krugman said the same thing: In 2004, Paul Krugman described this process, using an alternate term:
KRUGMAN (8/3/04): Reading the Script
A message to my fellow journalists: check out media watch sites like campaigndesk.org, mediamatters.org and dailyhowler.com. It's good to see ourselves as others see us. I've been finding The Daily Howler's concept of a media ''script,'' a story line that shapes coverage, often in the teeth of the evidence, particularly helpful in understanding cable news.
A script is a meme. Those fellow journalists sent their regrets.
TUESDAY, AUGUST 9, 2011
Gore among the Aspens: You can’t blame Al Gore for being frustrated. He was speaking at a meeting of the Aspen Institute, after all.
The expert-laden association is headed by Walter Isaacson. How much more must be said?
Whatever! Gore was addressing these experts last week. We’ll let Politico’s Darren Samuelsohn take the expletive-laden story from there:
SAMUELSOHN (8/8/11): Al Gore is calling B.S. on global warming skeptics.
The former vice president and climate crusader told an Aspen Institute communications seminar Thursday that people who doubt climate science are the same ones who helped tobacco companies over four decades question the dangers of cigarette smoking.
"Some of the exact same people—by name I can go down a list of their names—are involved in this," Gore said. "And so what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: 'This climate thing, it's nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn't trap heat. It may be volcanoes.' Bullsh-! 'It may be sun spots.' Bullsh-! 'It's not getting warmer.' Bullsh-!"
Gore's speech to the Aspen Institute was reported by Real Aspen, which added a brief audio segment of his comments Monday. Video of the event is expected to be available later this week, according to an official from the Aspen Institute. Carbondale, Colo., NPR affiliate KDNK also reported Gore's remarks Friday morning.
If you live in Carbondale, Colorado, you probably heard all about it!
Politico was too dainty to print the full word “bullshit.” For a fuller transcript of what Gore said, along with an audio tape of his comments, you can visit Think Progress Green. Just click here.
Gore was describing a basic part of modern American culture. Pseudo-experts rule the day in almost all realms of public discussion. Routinely, they’re funded by interested parties. For some pseudo-experts, Exxon Mobil might be a source of funding-for-propaganda. In the realm of “education reform,” Bloomberg News might be another.
But over and over, our discourse is shaped by Potemkin pseudo-experts. Just last week, the intellectual giants at S&P couldn’t even do the math! And even Politico came up short! As Samuelsohn continued, he managed to bungle one part of what Gore said:
SAMUELSOHN (continuing directly): "There about 10 names [sic] out there," Gore added. "When you go and talk to any audience about climate, you hear them washing back at you the same crap over and over and over again. They have polluted the sh-. There's no longer a shared reality on an issue like climate even though the very existence of our civilization is threatened. People have no idea!"
Climate skeptics, Gore added, have made it nearly impossible to talk about the issue anymore.
"It's no longer acceptable in mixed company, meaning bipartisan company, to use the goddamn word climate," he said. "It is not acceptable. They have polluted it to the point where we cannot possibly come to an agreement on it."
Actually, Gore said, “There are about ten other memes out there.” In that one short sentence, Samuelsohn made three mistakes. Transcribing can be hard!
Gore was describing the basic structure of all American discourse. Pseudo-experts and pseudo-journalists invent strings of memes (standard stories). Everyone in the in-group repeats them—and soon, these tales are in everyone’s heads. Gore described the basic nature of all American discourse: “When you go and talk to any audience about [any topic], you hear [standard stories] washing back at you, the same crap over and over and over again.”
This has been true for a very long time. For one example, this practice decided Campaign 2000, sending George W. Bush to the White House. You can read about it at our companion site—and almost nowhere else. (Chapter 6 is almost ready for posting.)
The mainstream “press corps” rarely mentions such facts about our “bullsh--” laden discourse. Darlings! Be sensible! It simply isn’t done!
Krugman said the same thing: In 2004, Paul Krugman described this process, using an alternate term:
KRUGMAN (8/3/04): Reading the Script
A message to my fellow journalists: check out media watch sites like campaigndesk.org, mediamatters.org and dailyhowler.com. It's good to see ourselves as others see us. I've been finding The Daily Howler's concept of a media ''script,'' a story line that shapes coverage, often in the teeth of the evidence, particularly helpful in understanding cable news.
A script is a meme. Those fellow journalists sent their regrets.
My readers' eyes must surely be rolling to the backs of their sockets as Somersby persists with installment 4 of who even gives a damn any more - FORK CHEW UND DA INTERCOURSE YOU FLOWED INN AWN!
Special report: The discourse you rode in on!
EPILOG—NAMING BOB SCHIEFFER: Today, we have the naming of names. We’ll start with a big name: Bob Schieffer.
Last Friday, Schieffer appeared on the CBS Evening News. Presumably, he was there to offer analysis, though Scott Pelley didn’t say.
As he started the program, Pelley reported on the day’s very large drop in the Dow. (The S&P downgrade hadn’t yet happened.) Then he turned his attention to Schieffer. This was the first “Q”-and-“A:”
PELLEY (8/5/11): Bob Schieffer is our chief Washington correspondent and anchor of Face the Nation. Bob, the president says Republicans and Democrats have to work together.
SCHIEFFER: I don’t think you’ll get any argument on that. The question is how, Scott. Everybody says we have to build confidence in this economy, but this parade of partisan foolishness that we’ve been treated to in Washington in recent weeks did nothing to increase anyone’s confidence. I think if anything, it made all of us more doubtful that Congress and the White House can do anything together.
If the president has said it once, he has said it a hundred times—we’re going to focus on getting people back to work. But, you know, Washington seems to have lost its way. In the span of 18 months, we’ve gone from spending nearly a trillion dollars on a stimulus to cutting over a trillion from spending. But whatever they’ve tried, nothing seems to change.
I guess you can say things are getting back to normal in one way here, Scott—the president went off to a fundraiser the day after the debt crisis was resolved and Congress went on another vacation. So on that front, at least, it’s business as usual.
Pelley didn’t quite ask a question—and Schieffer didn’t quite give an answer. Indeed, in the course of his session with Pelley, Schieffer did something substantially different—he crafted a perfect example of the phenomenon Paul Krugman discussed in his July 29 column, the column we had discussed right here last Friday. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/5/11.
In that July 29 column, Krugman criticized a powerful cult; he called it the “cult of balance.” He described the work of this cult as “the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts.” In that first non-answer answer last Friday, Schieffer leaned in that direction. He said there had been a “parade of partisan foolishness in Washington in recent weeks,” but he gave no specific examples. He made no attempt to direct more blame to one party or to one person—though as he closed, he portrayed Obama and the Congress as equally feckless souls.
One was going to a fundraiser, the other was off on vacation! This was “business as usual,” Schieffer proclaimed, as he engaged in that business himself.
Schieffer hadn’t tried to dish differential blame—but then again, he hadn’t been asked to. But in his second exchange with Pelley, the liturgy of that powerful cult came through loud and clear.
Pelley lobbed another softball—and Schieffer squared around and bunted. In his imitation of an answer, he adopted the unmistakable stance of that useless, overpaid cult:
PELLEY (continuing directly): Do you see any of this changing, Bob?
SCHIEFFER: You know, frankly, I don’t. And I don’t think it will until both sides find some things they can work on together to make it better. But I’m still not sure either side is ready to put aside the politics and do that.
Yet, how bad is this? I mean, when people were saying today it’s good news that unemployment has gone from 9.2 to 9.1? That just tells you how deep this hole is where we find ourselves. It’s pretty bad when 9.1 percent unemployment is going on, and that’s hailed as glad tidings.
PELLEY: Thanks, Bob! Sunday on Face the Nation, Bob’s guests will be...
According to Schieffer, neither side was “ready to put aside the politics” and “find some things they can work on together.” This is exactly the type of “analysis” Krugman described in that column.
Who knows? That may really be the way Schieffer sees the current situation. He may really feel that the various parties and players were equally at fault in the debt limit fight. But plainly, this is precisely the type of punditry Krugman had critiqued in that column, just one week before. “And this is no laughing matter,” Krugman had said. “The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism.”
Go ahead—reread Krugman’s column. In Krugman’s opinion, it’s obvious that one side in the debt limit debate was much more ready to work with the other—that no one but a hackish cult member could possibly fail to see this. But when it came time to name the names of those who belong to this dangerous cult, Krugman failed to do so—again. Instead, he cited an unobjectionable AP report, written several weeks earlier.
Schieffer’s utterly worthless “commentary” hadn’t occurred at the time of that column. But big-name media players like Schieffer offer such piffle each night of the week. As they do, they give the public the reassuring impression that commentary and analysis are actually happening.
That impression is wrong; commentary and analysis really aren’t happening. That said, we’re long past the point where Krugman needs to get off his keister and name the names of the actual people who belong to this cult, which “has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster.” Either that, or it’s time to stop the shit where Krugman pretends to be giving us commentary. That AP report just isn’t what that column was really about.
Today, we have the naming of names. We’ll start with a very big name: Bob Schieffer. It’s possible to name big names while maintaining a tone of decorum. But Krugman’s readers deserve to know who he is talking about.
Today, we have the naming of names. But will he name names tomorrow?
As the poet had it: For Henry Reed’s deathless “Naming of parts,” go ahead—just click here.
According to Wikipedia, Reed “was forever being confused with the much better known Sir Herbert Read.” In much the same way, The Club for Growth is often confused with The Hair Club for Men.
EPILOG—NAMING BOB SCHIEFFER: Today, we have the naming of names. We’ll start with a big name: Bob Schieffer.
Last Friday, Schieffer appeared on the CBS Evening News. Presumably, he was there to offer analysis, though Scott Pelley didn’t say.
As he started the program, Pelley reported on the day’s very large drop in the Dow. (The S&P downgrade hadn’t yet happened.) Then he turned his attention to Schieffer. This was the first “Q”-and-“A:”
PELLEY (8/5/11): Bob Schieffer is our chief Washington correspondent and anchor of Face the Nation. Bob, the president says Republicans and Democrats have to work together.
SCHIEFFER: I don’t think you’ll get any argument on that. The question is how, Scott. Everybody says we have to build confidence in this economy, but this parade of partisan foolishness that we’ve been treated to in Washington in recent weeks did nothing to increase anyone’s confidence. I think if anything, it made all of us more doubtful that Congress and the White House can do anything together.
If the president has said it once, he has said it a hundred times—we’re going to focus on getting people back to work. But, you know, Washington seems to have lost its way. In the span of 18 months, we’ve gone from spending nearly a trillion dollars on a stimulus to cutting over a trillion from spending. But whatever they’ve tried, nothing seems to change.
I guess you can say things are getting back to normal in one way here, Scott—the president went off to a fundraiser the day after the debt crisis was resolved and Congress went on another vacation. So on that front, at least, it’s business as usual.
Pelley didn’t quite ask a question—and Schieffer didn’t quite give an answer. Indeed, in the course of his session with Pelley, Schieffer did something substantially different—he crafted a perfect example of the phenomenon Paul Krugman discussed in his July 29 column, the column we had discussed right here last Friday. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/5/11.
In that July 29 column, Krugman criticized a powerful cult; he called it the “cult of balance.” He described the work of this cult as “the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts.” In that first non-answer answer last Friday, Schieffer leaned in that direction. He said there had been a “parade of partisan foolishness in Washington in recent weeks,” but he gave no specific examples. He made no attempt to direct more blame to one party or to one person—though as he closed, he portrayed Obama and the Congress as equally feckless souls.
One was going to a fundraiser, the other was off on vacation! This was “business as usual,” Schieffer proclaimed, as he engaged in that business himself.
Schieffer hadn’t tried to dish differential blame—but then again, he hadn’t been asked to. But in his second exchange with Pelley, the liturgy of that powerful cult came through loud and clear.
Pelley lobbed another softball—and Schieffer squared around and bunted. In his imitation of an answer, he adopted the unmistakable stance of that useless, overpaid cult:
PELLEY (continuing directly): Do you see any of this changing, Bob?
SCHIEFFER: You know, frankly, I don’t. And I don’t think it will until both sides find some things they can work on together to make it better. But I’m still not sure either side is ready to put aside the politics and do that.
Yet, how bad is this? I mean, when people were saying today it’s good news that unemployment has gone from 9.2 to 9.1? That just tells you how deep this hole is where we find ourselves. It’s pretty bad when 9.1 percent unemployment is going on, and that’s hailed as glad tidings.
PELLEY: Thanks, Bob! Sunday on Face the Nation, Bob’s guests will be...
According to Schieffer, neither side was “ready to put aside the politics” and “find some things they can work on together.” This is exactly the type of “analysis” Krugman described in that column.
Who knows? That may really be the way Schieffer sees the current situation. He may really feel that the various parties and players were equally at fault in the debt limit fight. But plainly, this is precisely the type of punditry Krugman had critiqued in that column, just one week before. “And this is no laughing matter,” Krugman had said. “The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism.”
Go ahead—reread Krugman’s column. In Krugman’s opinion, it’s obvious that one side in the debt limit debate was much more ready to work with the other—that no one but a hackish cult member could possibly fail to see this. But when it came time to name the names of those who belong to this dangerous cult, Krugman failed to do so—again. Instead, he cited an unobjectionable AP report, written several weeks earlier.
Schieffer’s utterly worthless “commentary” hadn’t occurred at the time of that column. But big-name media players like Schieffer offer such piffle each night of the week. As they do, they give the public the reassuring impression that commentary and analysis are actually happening.
That impression is wrong; commentary and analysis really aren’t happening. That said, we’re long past the point where Krugman needs to get off his keister and name the names of the actual people who belong to this cult, which “has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster.” Either that, or it’s time to stop the shit where Krugman pretends to be giving us commentary. That AP report just isn’t what that column was really about.
Today, we have the naming of names. We’ll start with a very big name: Bob Schieffer. It’s possible to name big names while maintaining a tone of decorum. But Krugman’s readers deserve to know who he is talking about.
Today, we have the naming of names. But will he name names tomorrow?
As the poet had it: For Henry Reed’s deathless “Naming of parts,” go ahead—just click here.
According to Wikipedia, Reed “was forever being confused with the much better known Sir Herbert Read.” In much the same way, The Club for Growth is often confused with The Hair Club for Men.
NAMING BOB SCHIEFFER! Today, we have the naming of names. We’ll start with a big name: Bob Schieffer:
MONDAY, AUGUST 8, 2011
Snapshots from a banana republic/Joe Nocera edition: In this blog post and in today’s column, Paul Krugman explains why Standard and Poor’s is wrong in its basic conceptual framework. (From the blog post: “US solvency depends hardly at all on what happens in the near or even medium term: an extra trillion in debt adds only a fraction of a percent of GDP to future interest costs, so a couple of trillion more or less barely signifies in the long term.”)
Is S&P wrong in its basic framework? Until someone shows us he’s wrong, we defer to Krugman’s judgment in such policy areas. But within our banana republic culture, it’s rarely enough for an “expert” elite to be wrong in its basic understandings. Such elites also tend to showcase their incompetence through groaning technical errors. They rarely seem happy until they have done so. And so it was when the S&P gang constructed its latest report:
KRUGMAN (8/8/11): Before downgrading U.S. debt, S.& P. sent a preliminary draft of its press release to the U.S. Treasury. Officials there quickly spotted a $2 trillion error in S.& P.’s calculations. And the error was the kind of thing any budget expert should have gotten right. After discussion, S.& P. conceded that it was wrong—and downgraded America anyway, after removing some of the economic analysis from its report.
Oof. For a fuller description of this error, see this Krugman blog post.
It’s surprising to think that our expert elites can’t even get the basic math right. But for decades, we have observed the same phenomenon in the groaning technical efforts of our “educational expert” class. In a banana republic like ours, many groups of players are assigned the role of expert elites. But these people are really Potemkin elites. In reality, they exist to recite preferred story lines—and to give the public the false impression that experts are still in charge.
All around your banana republic, you see the work of Potemkin elites. The career liberal world rarely mentions this fact. For the most part, they’re also Potemkin.
Today, let’s review the recent work of a journalistic Potemkin—the New York Times’ Joe Nocera.
On Saturday, Nocera apologized for the “intemperate” language in his previous column. We don’t think Nocera was necessarily wrong to apologize; we thought he said foolish, counterproductive things in that earlier column. But people! In this three-step history of his recent work, Step One is by far most important:
Step One, April through July: Nocera says nothing at all, in any column, about the debt limit debate. He clarifies nothing; he explains nothing. He sits like a bump on a log.
Step Two, August 2: After the debt limit deal is done, Nocera explodes in anger. “The Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people,” he writes. He refers to them as “terrorists” who can “put aside their suicide vests” now that they have won; in his headline, he says that these people have conducted a “War on America.” He doesn’t name any such people; he doesn’t say who exactly he means. Does he refer to all Tea Party supporters, including Aunt Madge? Or does he refer to professional politicians? In his fury, and perhaps in his cowardice, Nocera doesn’t say.
Step Three, August 6: Nocera apologizes for his previous column. “The words I chose were intemperate and offensive to many, and I’ve been roundly criticized,” he writes. “I was a hypocrite, the critics said, for using such language when on other occasions I’ve called for a more civil politics.”
Whatever. In the comments to Nocera’s most recent column, long lists of liberals urge him on, saying he shouldn’t have retracted his insults. In our view, that reaction is dumb enough. (To see the way your fellow citizens reason, just look at comments 20-25.) But much more importantly, we haven’t seen a single person in those comments who asked Nocera an obvious question:
If you felt so strongly about the debt limit deal, why didn’t you write about it until after the deal was done?
No one asked Nocera that question. But then, we liberals have terrible intellectual leadership, just like our neighbors who watch Fox. Beyond that, we liberals aren’t especially smart, and we aren’t always especially principled. We do like to call the other team names, though we tend to cry real tears when the other team does it to us. (“I was a hypocrite, the critics said, for using such language when on other occasions I’ve called for a more civil politics.”)
It gets worse: We don’t understand the way these tribal divisions serve plutocrat interests! But then, our “intellectual leaders” are much more likely to urge us to hate than they are to explain such matters.
Now that Nocera has snapped awake, perhaps he’ll start explaining basic aspects of the whole debt limit matter, which will likely come center stage again. Other “journalists” are still drifting along in a dream state. Consider the gigantic front-page report in yesterday’s Washington Post.
The report runs almost 6000 words. It explains the way the GOP leadership framed its approach to the debt limit deal, starting back in 2010. But guess what? Despite all those words, the team of authors never explain what would have happened if the debt limit didn’t get raised. There were several obvious places to do so—but they never did.
Can we talk? This country is full of people who have never heard an explanation of what would have happened if the debt limit stayed where it was! As best we can tell, the Washington Post reported this matter once, in a July 15 front-page report; the New York Times never bothered. Our question: How are voters supposed to know such things if people like Nocera, and the Washington Post, are too clueless to tell them?
Also in yesterday’s Washington Post, Nicolle Wallace seemed to praise Michele Bachmann for saying she’ll never raise the debt limit. How are people supposed to know how crazy that stance really is? How are people supposed to know that the number two GOP White House candidate has adopted a ludicrous stance?
Within our banana republic culture, such basic matters rarely get explained. We liberals then name-call the rubes who don’t know squat from squadoodle, even as our own dumb bunnies keep misstating what S&P said. Meanwhile, Nocera is there to give the impression that experts are in charge—that they’re crafting a real public discourse.
Guess what? They’re doing no such thing! But we liberals, bright as we say we are, rarely seem to notice. We’re living in a banana republic, where ignorance—mixed with name-calling—seem to constitute bliss.
Somersby's "THE DISCOURSE YOU RODE IN ON" series continues (as in Fuck You and the Discourse You Rode in on)!
Special report: The discourse you rode in on!
PART 3—PLANET OF THE PRESS CORPS (permalink): The editors make an astounding proposal in today’s New York Times. Within our culture, it just isn’t done—but the editors go there anyway!
In this morning’s editorial, the editors sensibly say that the debt limit should be eliminated. But good lord! In service to that sensible goal, look at what they suggest:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (8/5/11): The debt limit should ideally be dispensed with, but, at a minimum, it can no longer be held for ransom. The president and Congress are free to continue talks to reduce the deficit, but not while the economy is dangling in the balance. The president should assemble a coalition of business leaders, mayors, governors and ordinary Americans ready to spend the next year explaining to voters why the debt limit should be eliminated, or blunted as a tool to change budgetary policy. If Democrats continuously remind the country how dangerous this path is, Republicans may think twice about repeating it.
Someone should “explain this to voters!” Darlings! It just isn’t done!
For our money, this editorial makes perfect sense—but we almost spat our Ovaltine out when we read that highlighted sentence. It’s ironic to see the New York Times make that suggestion, since the paper made little attempt to explain any part of the months-long debt limit fight.
That isn’t the fault of the editorial board; as we’ve noted, readers routinely get more information from Times editorials than from the paper’s feckless “news pages.” But during the recent debt limit fight, very few things got explained to voters on the Times’ alleged “news pages.” No one explained what would occur if the debt limit didn’t get raised. No one explained the role of the Bush tax cuts in creating our current deficits. Did anyone ever try to explain the likely role of federal spending cuts during an economic downturn?
Even at the top of our “press corps,” voters rarely see things get explained. And propaganda abhors a vacuum! In the absence of explanations, voters hear the darnedest things from other post-journalist news orgs. On Monday evening, to cite one example, misused viewers of Fox News saw Mr. O say this:
O'REILLY (8/1/11): Congressman Cleaver is misleading you. America can take care of the poor and the elderly in a responsible way. Change the tax code—that can happen. But Mr. Cleaver doesn't want that. He wants to redistribute income. And so does Paul Krugman.
KRUGMAN (videotape): From the perspective of a rational person—in other words of a progressive—on this stuff, we shouldn't be talking about spending cuts at all now. We have nine percent unemployment. These spending cuts are going to worsen unemployment. That's not even—it's even going to hurt the long-run fiscal picture because we have a situation where more and more people are becoming permanent long-term unemployed.
O'REILLY: Now you may remember Professor Krugman supported a massive stimulus spending package saying it would bring down unemployment. He said it over and over and over again; it didn't happen. But instead of learning his lesson, Krugman demands even more stimulus spending. And this guy teaches economics at Princeton University? How much is the tuition there?
Mr. O took that video clip from Sunday’s This Week. On that program, Krugman went out of his way to make a key point; he noted that he had said all along that the Obama stimulus package wouldn’t be large enough. (He then made the same accurate point in Monday morning’s column.) But so what? Mr. O (or his staff) played viewers for fools, pretending that Krugman had endorsed Obama’s “massive stimulus spending package.” As the Times refuses to explain basic things, others “explain” what’s untrue.
But then, voters hear the darnedest things all over the cable dial. On that same Monday evening, Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) appeared on Piers Morgan Live. He offered a ginormous howler—and Morgan let it pass:
MORGAN (8/1/11): The real problem, though, Congressman, is that actually the reality is that the American people are watching these farcical scenes in Washington and they believe it's a complete disconnect between politicians today in America and ordinary members of the public, because what they have seen over the last 11, 12 years is a dysfunctional series of administrations taking the economy in this country into the cart.
MACK: I agree with you 100 percent, and that's why for up until now all we've been doing is spending more and taxing more. That is not the way forward. The way forward is to cut spending. So right now, did you know that we spend about 7.5 percent more a year every year?
So if you try to take that from 7.5 to, let's say, 6 percent, that's considered a cut in Washington. No one back home would believe that if they got an increase year after year, and if you took a little bit from that, then that would be a cut.
We need to get serious, and the people out in America are saying, “Tell us the truth, give us a solution.”
Really? Has someone been “taxing more?” Who in the world has that been? The New York Times has refused to explain the role of Bush’s tax cuts in the budget debacle. At the same time, hustlers like Mack offer scripted deceptions, even as they picture voters saying, “Tell us the truth.”
This is the shape of the public discourse you and your neighbors rode in on. (This includes those neighbors who aren’t inclined to vote the same way you do.) Essentially, your country no longer has newspapers. Potemkin “newspapers” are published each day, giving the public a pleasing illusion. But these successors to newspapers rarely explain squadoosh or even squadoodle. And in the place of such explanations, hacks like O’Reilly and Mack—and Matthews and Maddow—keep handing American voters grotesque imitations of life.
The liberal world rarely seems to notice the failure of the overall discourse. We notice the deceptions on Fox. But we rarely notice the overall failure of the reigning, upper-end “news orgs,” especially those which give us our jobs—and it’s completely against the law to see what Matthews and Maddow are doing. We don’t denounce the Noceras and Dowds, who say nothing at all in real time, then engage in name-calling after the damage is done. In fact, we love it when they issue their insults, including the insults they aim at the millions of voters who have seen nothing explained.
Insults are pretty much all we have. In truth, we’re every bit as dumb as “those people” in the other tribe are.
At the upper end of the mainstream press corps, the liberal world has one explainer; that person’s name is Paul Krugman. Twice a week, he explains X, Y or Z. In the past ten years, about 95 percent of what liberals know has come to us from Paul Krugman.
That’s why the end of the world is surely near when even Krugman starts getting it wrong, as he so dramatically did in his column from Friday, July 29. Good God! Did he really say this at the start of that column?
KRUGMAN (7/29/11): The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren't complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats—who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether—have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.
As I said, it's not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can't bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality.
You may agree with Krugman’s account, though we wouldn’t put it that way ourselves. But can it be true that our brightest player thinks he’s really reciting “the facts” when he describes what happened this way? Obviously, it isn’t a “fact” to say that Republicans “have taken America hostage;” Krugman acknowledges as much when he adds the key words, “in effect.” You may agree with the thrust of this account, but Krugman isn’t reciting “the facts.” Nor was he reciting “the facts” when he ended his column with this jumbled account:
KRUGMAN: So what's with the buzz about a centrist uprising? As I see it, it's coming from people who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics, but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. And it's not hard to guess at their motivation. After all, pointing out the obvious truth gets you labeled as a shrill partisan, not just from the right, but from the ranks of self-proclaimed centrists.
But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out—a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you're not willing to say that, you're helping make that problem worse.
You may believe that “the problem...right now is Republican extremism,” but that belief isn’t a “fact.” Beyond that, “news reports” aren’t exactly supposed to “place blame” for situations at all. Krugman is a superb policy man, by far the best the liberal world has. But in this column, he adopted some of the frameworks of our least impressive press critics. And yes, such lack of clarity actually does matter, especially when it reaches all the way to the only person on our side who has been able to explain anything at all.
Krugman’s important column that day dealt with the press corps’ failures. He was talking about important problems, but doing so rather poorly. Once again, we call your attention to a cultural problem—Krugman’s refusal to tell the world who he is talking about.
Krugman makes sweeping claims in the following passage. The claims he makes are very important. But who is he talking about?
KRUGMAN (continuing directly): Some of us have long complained about the cult of ''balance,'' the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ''Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'' But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?
The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won't punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.
Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. As you may know, President Obama initially tried to strike a ''Grand Bargain'' with Republicans over taxes and spending. To do so, he not only chose not to make an issue of G.O.P. extortion, he offered extraordinary concessions on Democratic priorities: an increase in the age of Medicare eligibility, sharp spending cuts and only small revenue increases. As The Times's Nate Silver pointed out, Mr. Obama effectively staked out a position that was not only far to the right of the average voter's preferences, it was if anything a bit to the right of the average Republican voter's preferences.
But Republicans rejected the deal. So what was the headline on an Associated Press analysis of that breakdown in negotiations? ''Obama, Republicans Trapped by Inflexible Rhetoric.'' A Democratic president who bends over backward to accommodate the other side—or, if you prefer, who leans so far to the right that he's in danger of falling over—is treated as being just the same as his utterly intransigent opponents. Balance!
In that passage, Krugman starts with a very good joke—a joke about an alleged “cult of balance.” The joke imagines some foolish conduct on the part of the press corps. But did anything like that really occur in the course of the debt limit fight?
As he continues, Krugman discusses that “cult of balance.” He says this cult produces “reporting on political disputes [which] always implies that both sides are to blame.” He says this cult “has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster.” But who is Krugman talking about? For his one example, he cites this AP news report, written on July 12. But can we talk? There was nothing wrong with that news report, except for a lightly bungled headline, which paraphrased the first paragraph poorly. Sorry: News reports like that did not “play an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster.” Whoever Krugman is talking about, that just can’t be it.
Who was Krugman really discussing in that important column? By long-standing rules of professional courtesy, Krugman once again didn’t say. As he continued, he correctly said this: “Many pundits view taking a position in the middle of the political spectrum as a virtue in itself.”
Presumably, those pundits all have names. Presumably, some of them are quite influential. But none of their names were actually cited. Another thing went unexplained.
Krugman has been a journalistic hero in the past eleven years. (In part, that’s why O’Reilly goes on TV and talks all that smack about him.) Almost everything we liberals know has come from his columns and books. By way of contrast, what have you learned from E. J. Dionne? Go ahead! We’ll wait!
But alas! Krugman works inside a Potemkin press corps which refuses to explain things to voters—and he himself keeps refusing to name the names of the prominent pundits who comprise that cult of balance. Who is Krugman talking about? At some point, explainers must tell.
Voters hear the darnedest things! But when it comes to the names of the press corps’ most influential players, they keep hearing the sounds of silence, even in Krugman’s important columns.
How are voters supposed to know when we won’t explain?
PART 3—PLANET OF THE PRESS CORPS (permalink): The editors make an astounding proposal in today’s New York Times. Within our culture, it just isn’t done—but the editors go there anyway!
In this morning’s editorial, the editors sensibly say that the debt limit should be eliminated. But good lord! In service to that sensible goal, look at what they suggest:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (8/5/11): The debt limit should ideally be dispensed with, but, at a minimum, it can no longer be held for ransom. The president and Congress are free to continue talks to reduce the deficit, but not while the economy is dangling in the balance. The president should assemble a coalition of business leaders, mayors, governors and ordinary Americans ready to spend the next year explaining to voters why the debt limit should be eliminated, or blunted as a tool to change budgetary policy. If Democrats continuously remind the country how dangerous this path is, Republicans may think twice about repeating it.
Someone should “explain this to voters!” Darlings! It just isn’t done!
For our money, this editorial makes perfect sense—but we almost spat our Ovaltine out when we read that highlighted sentence. It’s ironic to see the New York Times make that suggestion, since the paper made little attempt to explain any part of the months-long debt limit fight.
That isn’t the fault of the editorial board; as we’ve noted, readers routinely get more information from Times editorials than from the paper’s feckless “news pages.” But during the recent debt limit fight, very few things got explained to voters on the Times’ alleged “news pages.” No one explained what would occur if the debt limit didn’t get raised. No one explained the role of the Bush tax cuts in creating our current deficits. Did anyone ever try to explain the likely role of federal spending cuts during an economic downturn?
Even at the top of our “press corps,” voters rarely see things get explained. And propaganda abhors a vacuum! In the absence of explanations, voters hear the darnedest things from other post-journalist news orgs. On Monday evening, to cite one example, misused viewers of Fox News saw Mr. O say this:
O'REILLY (8/1/11): Congressman Cleaver is misleading you. America can take care of the poor and the elderly in a responsible way. Change the tax code—that can happen. But Mr. Cleaver doesn't want that. He wants to redistribute income. And so does Paul Krugman.
KRUGMAN (videotape): From the perspective of a rational person—in other words of a progressive—on this stuff, we shouldn't be talking about spending cuts at all now. We have nine percent unemployment. These spending cuts are going to worsen unemployment. That's not even—it's even going to hurt the long-run fiscal picture because we have a situation where more and more people are becoming permanent long-term unemployed.
O'REILLY: Now you may remember Professor Krugman supported a massive stimulus spending package saying it would bring down unemployment. He said it over and over and over again; it didn't happen. But instead of learning his lesson, Krugman demands even more stimulus spending. And this guy teaches economics at Princeton University? How much is the tuition there?
Mr. O took that video clip from Sunday’s This Week. On that program, Krugman went out of his way to make a key point; he noted that he had said all along that the Obama stimulus package wouldn’t be large enough. (He then made the same accurate point in Monday morning’s column.) But so what? Mr. O (or his staff) played viewers for fools, pretending that Krugman had endorsed Obama’s “massive stimulus spending package.” As the Times refuses to explain basic things, others “explain” what’s untrue.
But then, voters hear the darnedest things all over the cable dial. On that same Monday evening, Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) appeared on Piers Morgan Live. He offered a ginormous howler—and Morgan let it pass:
MORGAN (8/1/11): The real problem, though, Congressman, is that actually the reality is that the American people are watching these farcical scenes in Washington and they believe it's a complete disconnect between politicians today in America and ordinary members of the public, because what they have seen over the last 11, 12 years is a dysfunctional series of administrations taking the economy in this country into the cart.
MACK: I agree with you 100 percent, and that's why for up until now all we've been doing is spending more and taxing more. That is not the way forward. The way forward is to cut spending. So right now, did you know that we spend about 7.5 percent more a year every year?
So if you try to take that from 7.5 to, let's say, 6 percent, that's considered a cut in Washington. No one back home would believe that if they got an increase year after year, and if you took a little bit from that, then that would be a cut.
We need to get serious, and the people out in America are saying, “Tell us the truth, give us a solution.”
Really? Has someone been “taxing more?” Who in the world has that been? The New York Times has refused to explain the role of Bush’s tax cuts in the budget debacle. At the same time, hustlers like Mack offer scripted deceptions, even as they picture voters saying, “Tell us the truth.”
This is the shape of the public discourse you and your neighbors rode in on. (This includes those neighbors who aren’t inclined to vote the same way you do.) Essentially, your country no longer has newspapers. Potemkin “newspapers” are published each day, giving the public a pleasing illusion. But these successors to newspapers rarely explain squadoosh or even squadoodle. And in the place of such explanations, hacks like O’Reilly and Mack—and Matthews and Maddow—keep handing American voters grotesque imitations of life.
The liberal world rarely seems to notice the failure of the overall discourse. We notice the deceptions on Fox. But we rarely notice the overall failure of the reigning, upper-end “news orgs,” especially those which give us our jobs—and it’s completely against the law to see what Matthews and Maddow are doing. We don’t denounce the Noceras and Dowds, who say nothing at all in real time, then engage in name-calling after the damage is done. In fact, we love it when they issue their insults, including the insults they aim at the millions of voters who have seen nothing explained.
Insults are pretty much all we have. In truth, we’re every bit as dumb as “those people” in the other tribe are.
At the upper end of the mainstream press corps, the liberal world has one explainer; that person’s name is Paul Krugman. Twice a week, he explains X, Y or Z. In the past ten years, about 95 percent of what liberals know has come to us from Paul Krugman.
That’s why the end of the world is surely near when even Krugman starts getting it wrong, as he so dramatically did in his column from Friday, July 29. Good God! Did he really say this at the start of that column?
KRUGMAN (7/29/11): The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren't complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats—who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether—have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.
As I said, it's not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can't bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality.
You may agree with Krugman’s account, though we wouldn’t put it that way ourselves. But can it be true that our brightest player thinks he’s really reciting “the facts” when he describes what happened this way? Obviously, it isn’t a “fact” to say that Republicans “have taken America hostage;” Krugman acknowledges as much when he adds the key words, “in effect.” You may agree with the thrust of this account, but Krugman isn’t reciting “the facts.” Nor was he reciting “the facts” when he ended his column with this jumbled account:
KRUGMAN: So what's with the buzz about a centrist uprising? As I see it, it's coming from people who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics, but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. And it's not hard to guess at their motivation. After all, pointing out the obvious truth gets you labeled as a shrill partisan, not just from the right, but from the ranks of self-proclaimed centrists.
But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out—a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you're not willing to say that, you're helping make that problem worse.
You may believe that “the problem...right now is Republican extremism,” but that belief isn’t a “fact.” Beyond that, “news reports” aren’t exactly supposed to “place blame” for situations at all. Krugman is a superb policy man, by far the best the liberal world has. But in this column, he adopted some of the frameworks of our least impressive press critics. And yes, such lack of clarity actually does matter, especially when it reaches all the way to the only person on our side who has been able to explain anything at all.
Krugman’s important column that day dealt with the press corps’ failures. He was talking about important problems, but doing so rather poorly. Once again, we call your attention to a cultural problem—Krugman’s refusal to tell the world who he is talking about.
Krugman makes sweeping claims in the following passage. The claims he makes are very important. But who is he talking about?
KRUGMAN (continuing directly): Some of us have long complained about the cult of ''balance,'' the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ''Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'' But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?
The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won't punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.
Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. As you may know, President Obama initially tried to strike a ''Grand Bargain'' with Republicans over taxes and spending. To do so, he not only chose not to make an issue of G.O.P. extortion, he offered extraordinary concessions on Democratic priorities: an increase in the age of Medicare eligibility, sharp spending cuts and only small revenue increases. As The Times's Nate Silver pointed out, Mr. Obama effectively staked out a position that was not only far to the right of the average voter's preferences, it was if anything a bit to the right of the average Republican voter's preferences.
But Republicans rejected the deal. So what was the headline on an Associated Press analysis of that breakdown in negotiations? ''Obama, Republicans Trapped by Inflexible Rhetoric.'' A Democratic president who bends over backward to accommodate the other side—or, if you prefer, who leans so far to the right that he's in danger of falling over—is treated as being just the same as his utterly intransigent opponents. Balance!
In that passage, Krugman starts with a very good joke—a joke about an alleged “cult of balance.” The joke imagines some foolish conduct on the part of the press corps. But did anything like that really occur in the course of the debt limit fight?
As he continues, Krugman discusses that “cult of balance.” He says this cult produces “reporting on political disputes [which] always implies that both sides are to blame.” He says this cult “has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster.” But who is Krugman talking about? For his one example, he cites this AP news report, written on July 12. But can we talk? There was nothing wrong with that news report, except for a lightly bungled headline, which paraphrased the first paragraph poorly. Sorry: News reports like that did not “play an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster.” Whoever Krugman is talking about, that just can’t be it.
Who was Krugman really discussing in that important column? By long-standing rules of professional courtesy, Krugman once again didn’t say. As he continued, he correctly said this: “Many pundits view taking a position in the middle of the political spectrum as a virtue in itself.”
Presumably, those pundits all have names. Presumably, some of them are quite influential. But none of their names were actually cited. Another thing went unexplained.
Krugman has been a journalistic hero in the past eleven years. (In part, that’s why O’Reilly goes on TV and talks all that smack about him.) Almost everything we liberals know has come from his columns and books. By way of contrast, what have you learned from E. J. Dionne? Go ahead! We’ll wait!
But alas! Krugman works inside a Potemkin press corps which refuses to explain things to voters—and he himself keeps refusing to name the names of the prominent pundits who comprise that cult of balance. Who is Krugman talking about? At some point, explainers must tell.
Voters hear the darnedest things! But when it comes to the names of the press corps’ most influential players, they keep hearing the sounds of silence, even in Krugman’s important columns.
How are voters supposed to know when we won’t explain?
PLANET OF THE PRESS CORPS! The editors have an astounding idea: “Let’s explain this to the voters!”
FRIDAY, AUGUST 5, 2011
One of the worst segments ever: On Tuesday, out in Beverly Hills, the elders brought the brilliant child forward, letting the press corps gape at her answers. Later, when she spoke to a home-town reporter, she explained how her own channel’s work differs from that at Fox:
BARNEY (8/3/11): One of the people behind [MSNBC’s] success is East Bay native Rachel Maddow, whose evening ratings are up 23 percent over a three-month period ending in June. Her reward? A brand-new contract extension that will keep her at MSNBC for, um, well, she doesn't want to talk about it.
"It's for a few years. That's all I'm saying," she said when approached after the news conference.
[...]
Maddow, who grew up in Castro Valley, bristles at the often-uttered assertion that MSNBC is simply the political and ideological polar opposite of Fox News.
"I think that's a caricature of us ... but I don't think it's a fair caricature," she said, claiming that MSNBC brings more "nuance" to its presentation and is "more unpredictable."
To enjoy the “nuance” Maddow brings to her work, we’ll suggest you watch her Wednesday and Thursday reports about the now-settled FAA dispute. The Wednesday report is especially instructive. To watch that full segment, click here.
This “report” was more than eleven minutes long. Indeed, Maddow’s opening monologue lasted more than seven minutes all by itself. But go ahead—watch the whole thing! Were you ever told, in any real way, what this dispute was about? Don’t get us wrong! As Maddow goes on and on and on, you do get handed the bumper stickers you should repeat about this dispute; repeatedly, you learn that you’re supposed to say that the Republicans were “trying to break the backs of American unions” through their “union-busting demands”—in their “union-stripping” behavior.
Granted, you learned what phrases you should repeat. But did Maddow ever try to explain what this dispute was about?
In fact, Maddow’s presentations in the past two nights have been examples of pure propaganda. There wasn’t an ounce of “nuance” to them—though she did engage in the ludicrous, screeching, hey-look-at-me conduct which is her stock in trade. (Catch her screeching review of the last Super Bowl in the first two minutes of Wednesday’s segment. And people, don’t be afraid to adore her! That’s what this shit’s all about!) For ourselves, we wouldn’t say the GOP was “trying to break the backs of American unions” in this latest dispute. But we wouldn’t have any idea what to say from watching Maddow’s worthless report. It was nothing but propaganda and bumper-stickers, delivered with no hint of nuance.
In our view, MSNBC is more like Fox every day—though as with Fox, the channel’s ditto-head viewers insist there is no comparison. But for a truly gruesome segment, we recommend the performance by Matthews, Fineman and Walsh from Wednesday evening’s Hardball. We’d have to say it’s one of the worst cable segments we’ve ever seen.
To watch this god-awful segment, click here. But first, a bit of background:
As everyone knows, Obama has taken a beating among liberals in the wake of the debt limit deal. Fairly plainly, the Wednesday evening Hardball segment was an attempt to counteract that reaction, which may not coordinate well with this channel’s business model.
When Cenk Uygur recently left this channel, he claimed that the channel’s management strategy pretty much involved propping Obama. We can’t tell you if Uygur was right about his own interactions with network suits. But it’s hard to watch this Foxified Hardball segment without recalling the things Uygur said.
Rather plainly, this segment was designed to restore viewer sympathy for embattled Obama. This was done by jacking up the viewer’s loathing for those who would oppose him, especially by playing every possible race card, then moving on to secession.
As they started, Matthews and Fineman returned to Inaugural Day 2009. Everyone was out on the mall—everyone but the secessionists!
FINEMAN (8/3/11): I was out there on the Mall when Obama was, the president was inaugurated. You thought that perhaps all of America was out there. There were 1.5 million people there.
MATTHEWS: Yes.
FINEMAN: But it wasn’t all of America. It was Barack Obama’s America. And the people on the right, the conservatives, the corporate leaders for the most part, decided from day one that that crowd that they saw on the Mall, and that president that they saw taking the oath, was not their president.
MATTHEWS: It was like the secessionists. You know, the way you said that, the way you phrased it because of your history sense, was almost like even as he was being inaugurated, the voices of secession were uniting in the South and planning to bring this guy down. Right? And to divide.
FINEMAN: Well, that’s my view of it.
It’s hard to get more clownish than that, even if you’re on Fox. But as these long-standing hustlers went on and on, so did their rank propaganda. The boys pushed every racial hot button, trying to bring viewers back to the fold. Heroically, Fineman returned to the secession theme a bit later on. (Enjoy a good laugh when Matthews refers to “the racial part of this,” saying “I hate to say it.”)
Matthews and Fineman played all their cards, in the most ludicrous manner. And then, there was the code of silence engaged in by Joan Walsh. The problem began when Matthews made the following oddball comment:
MATTHEWS: You know, my executive producer here, runs this show, basically, has said for a while now that the Republicans cannot stand the idea of a Democrat being president.
WALSH: Well—
MATTHEWS: And I was thinking back, Howard, that goes back to Eisenhower. When did they first lay claim to the United States presidency?
That goes back to Eisenhower? We have no real idea what that meant. But a few minutes later, Walsh returned to this framework. When she did, she told you the truth—or at least, as much of the truth as this channel allows:
WALSH: The only thing I guess I would add—and to go back your brilliant executive producer, because all your staff is brilliant, is he’s right, that this also goes back to Bill Clinton because, you know, Bill Clinton had his problems, had his problems, but the effort to delegitimize him, to say he was involved with running drugs, to say he was involved with murder, with poor Vince Foster, that was coming from Jerry Falwell, that was coming from the Arkansas Project—
MATTHEWS: Yes.
WALSH: —that was even coming from Congress, it was similar. It wasn’t the same, but it was similar. There was a real dehumanization of this man as our leader. He just wasn’t fit, and he could be accused of literally anything, anything—
MATTHEWS: It’s funny that—
WALSH: —and it tore the country apart.
MATTHEWS: Yes. It’s funny, you guys, the worst thing the left can say about somebody is not that they’re not American. They usually accept the fact the other side is American. They just call them idiots. Anyway–I’m serious! That seems to be the worst you can say about a right- winger. The worst thing you can say about a left-winger is, “He’s not one of us.”
WALSH: Right.
The worst thing you can say about a left-winger is, “He’s not one of us!” Surely, Matthews should know about that! You see, that is precisely what Matthews said about Al Gore in the fall of 2001, on the Imus program, at a time when Matthews was still in the employ of Jack Welch. (“He doesn't look like one of us,” Matthews disgracefully said. “He doesn't seem very American, even.”)
We’ll assume Walsh knows that Matthews said that, but she surely knows something else. She surely knows that the Clinton-hating conduct she describes was also “coming from” Hardball during those horrible years. No one chased Bill Clinton around any more than Matthews did, during the years when Jack Welch was making him wealthy; in March 1999, he transferred this ugly, disgraceful pursuit over to Candidate Gore. Fineman was Matthews’ right-hand man in the twenty months of repulsive Gore-trashing. There was nothing these two didn’t say and do. George Bush ended up in the White House.
Joan Walsh understands these facts. She just won’t tell them to you.
Matthews and Fineman are horrible people. In 1999 and 2000, they played a very active role in changing world history. As of today, they’re also quislings; they now play the fool for the other side. And Walsh is now along for the ride. She wouldn’t tell you the truth about these matters if her country’s life was at stake—which, of course, it is.
This is nothing like Fox, Darling Rachel would say. On Hardball, you get so much nuance!
We strongly suggest you watch that segment. It’s one of the worst cable segments we’ve ever seen. The reaction to the Joe Walsh tape is especially pathetic. (File under: Never explain. Propagandize.)
A nation simply can’t function this way. If you doubt that, take a good look around!
The incomprable Bob Somersby, stand-up comic supreme, public school teacher, author, political analysist, cultural critic, weighs in with a special two-parter - the beginning of a series of serious discourse (most curious)
Special report: The discourse you rode in on!
PART 2—KRUGMAN FROM MARS: Paul Krugman may as well have spoken his piece from the dark side of Mars.
On Sunday morning’s This Week, Krugman restated his long-held views about the state of the economy. “We shouldn't be even talking about spending cuts at all now,” the prize-winning economist said. Krugman stressed that he has always said that Obama’s 2009 stimulus package “wasn't remotely big enough.”
George Will simply rolled his eyes at Krugman’s improbable statements. “It would be good to go to the electorate and have a Krugman election,” the famous man wrily mused.
Will imagined what Krugman would tell the voters in such an election: “Resolved, the government is too frugal. Let's vote!”
Will assumed that such an election would turn out badly for Krugman. He assumed that the voters would simply laugh at such improbable views.
For ourselves, we’ll guess that Will was right. Just consider the survey CNN conducted this Monday.
In fact, voters believe the darnedest things. If you doubt that proposition, you have to consider that survey.
By the time the CNN survey was taken, the debt limit deal was pretty much done. In a fleeting aside, Digby summarized what the survey said. We’ll highlight one striking result:
DIGBY (8/2/11): The new CNN poll shows that the public thinks everyone is Washington acts like spoiled children and that they don't think default would have amounted to much. They are pretty much evenly divided as to whether or not this was a good deal. (Most people approve of the big cuts but quite a few also think that there should have been some revenues.) Overall, most people think the deal was a good one and only 15% think the cuts were too big.
Respondents didn’t think that a government default would have amounted to much! Digby was overstating a bit, but these are the questions to which she referred, along with the survey’s results:
Do you think that a failure to raise the debt ceiling by Tuesday would create a crisis for the United States, major problems, minor problems, or no problems at all?
Crisis 14 percent
Major problems 38 percent
Minor problems 31 percent
No problems at all 15 percent
No opinion 2 percent
As you may know, the agreement would raise the debt ceiling through the year 2013. Regardless of how you feel about the overall agreement, do you approve or disapprove of raising the debt ceiling at this time?
Approve 48 percent
Disapprove 51 percent
No opinion 2 percent
Would a failure to raise the debt limit create major problems? On this question, the public was pretty much evenly split. Indeed, a narrow majority, 51 percent, said they flatly disapproved of raising the debt ceiling at all at this time!
We think those views are utterly daft. We think a failure to raise the debt limit would have produced an obvious social disaster. But how was the average voter supposed to know such a thing? Over the course of the past few months, America’s “press corps” made little attempt to explain what would happen on August 3 if the debt limit stayed where it was.
This post-journalistic refusal to splain involved our most famous “news organs.”
What would happen on August 3 if the debt limit stayed where it was? The Washington Post made a feeble attempt to explain, offering this front-page report on Thursday morning, July 14. But to all intents and purposes, the New York Times never tried to answer this central question, along with a long list of others. On Thursday morning, July 28, the Times finally presented a barely-coherent “crash course in all things debt ceiling.” But what would happen on August 3 if the debt limit stayed where it was?
In its self-parodic “crash course,” the Times made little attempt to say. When it came to this basic question, the malfeasance of America’s “press corps” started right there, at the top.
Can we talk? Essentially, your country no longer has a “press corps.” It no longer has a public discourse—at least, it no longer has a public discourse of a journalistic kind. But in a culture which functions this way, how is an average voter supposed to understand basic questions?
Voters believe the darnedest things! But in a culture which no longer has a “press corps,” it will ever be thus.
According to that CNN survey, voters believed something else. Fleetingly, Digby cited this outcome too. This is the question CNN asked, along with the responses:
As you may know, the agreement does not include any tax increases for business or higher income Americans. Regardless of how you feel about the overall agreement, do you approve or disapprove of the fact that the debt ceiling agreement does not include tax increases for those groups?
Approve 40 percent
Disapprove 60 percent
No opinion 1 percent
Most respondents thought the deal should have included tax increases “for business or higher income Americans” [sic]. But forty percent didn’t want any tax increases at all—and this question only concerned tax increases on higher-income people.
As far as we know, it’s hard to get from here to there without tax increases across the board. But in the past several months, your big news orgs made little attempt to explain the role of the Bush tax cuts in creating our current unbalanced budgets. How are average voters supposed to know about such things, when our biggest “news orgs,” from the top down, avoid discussing such topics? When the “liberal world” barely seems to notice this abject failure?
Let’s return to Krugman on This Week, being eye-rolled by Will. Krugman expressed very basic economic views on Sunday’s program. But given the nutrition-free tapioca which currently passes for “public discourse,” he may as well have been speaking from Mars, so odd would his views have seemed to many average voters.
George Will understands that fact. We’d assume that Will was basically right about how us rubes would react.
Can we talk? In fact, your country no longer has a press corps; it barely has a public discourse at all. As a matter of basic economics, Krugman’s views were quite elementary—but to judge by the baseline of our D-minus discourse, he may as well have been speaking from a vacation home on the dark side of Mars.
In recent weeks, many “liberals” have cherry-picked polling data, pretending the public holds liberal views. In this way, the people currently cast as “liberals” help extend the ball of confusion.
Tomorrow—part 3: When even Krugman goes wrong
PART 2—KRUGMAN FROM MARS: Paul Krugman may as well have spoken his piece from the dark side of Mars.
On Sunday morning’s This Week, Krugman restated his long-held views about the state of the economy. “We shouldn't be even talking about spending cuts at all now,” the prize-winning economist said. Krugman stressed that he has always said that Obama’s 2009 stimulus package “wasn't remotely big enough.”
George Will simply rolled his eyes at Krugman’s improbable statements. “It would be good to go to the electorate and have a Krugman election,” the famous man wrily mused.
Will imagined what Krugman would tell the voters in such an election: “Resolved, the government is too frugal. Let's vote!”
Will assumed that such an election would turn out badly for Krugman. He assumed that the voters would simply laugh at such improbable views.
For ourselves, we’ll guess that Will was right. Just consider the survey CNN conducted this Monday.
In fact, voters believe the darnedest things. If you doubt that proposition, you have to consider that survey.
By the time the CNN survey was taken, the debt limit deal was pretty much done. In a fleeting aside, Digby summarized what the survey said. We’ll highlight one striking result:
DIGBY (8/2/11): The new CNN poll shows that the public thinks everyone is Washington acts like spoiled children and that they don't think default would have amounted to much. They are pretty much evenly divided as to whether or not this was a good deal. (Most people approve of the big cuts but quite a few also think that there should have been some revenues.) Overall, most people think the deal was a good one and only 15% think the cuts were too big.
Respondents didn’t think that a government default would have amounted to much! Digby was overstating a bit, but these are the questions to which she referred, along with the survey’s results:
Do you think that a failure to raise the debt ceiling by Tuesday would create a crisis for the United States, major problems, minor problems, or no problems at all?
Crisis 14 percent
Major problems 38 percent
Minor problems 31 percent
No problems at all 15 percent
No opinion 2 percent
As you may know, the agreement would raise the debt ceiling through the year 2013. Regardless of how you feel about the overall agreement, do you approve or disapprove of raising the debt ceiling at this time?
Approve 48 percent
Disapprove 51 percent
No opinion 2 percent
Would a failure to raise the debt limit create major problems? On this question, the public was pretty much evenly split. Indeed, a narrow majority, 51 percent, said they flatly disapproved of raising the debt ceiling at all at this time!
We think those views are utterly daft. We think a failure to raise the debt limit would have produced an obvious social disaster. But how was the average voter supposed to know such a thing? Over the course of the past few months, America’s “press corps” made little attempt to explain what would happen on August 3 if the debt limit stayed where it was.
This post-journalistic refusal to splain involved our most famous “news organs.”
What would happen on August 3 if the debt limit stayed where it was? The Washington Post made a feeble attempt to explain, offering this front-page report on Thursday morning, July 14. But to all intents and purposes, the New York Times never tried to answer this central question, along with a long list of others. On Thursday morning, July 28, the Times finally presented a barely-coherent “crash course in all things debt ceiling.” But what would happen on August 3 if the debt limit stayed where it was?
In its self-parodic “crash course,” the Times made little attempt to say. When it came to this basic question, the malfeasance of America’s “press corps” started right there, at the top.
Can we talk? Essentially, your country no longer has a “press corps.” It no longer has a public discourse—at least, it no longer has a public discourse of a journalistic kind. But in a culture which functions this way, how is an average voter supposed to understand basic questions?
Voters believe the darnedest things! But in a culture which no longer has a “press corps,” it will ever be thus.
According to that CNN survey, voters believed something else. Fleetingly, Digby cited this outcome too. This is the question CNN asked, along with the responses:
As you may know, the agreement does not include any tax increases for business or higher income Americans. Regardless of how you feel about the overall agreement, do you approve or disapprove of the fact that the debt ceiling agreement does not include tax increases for those groups?
Approve 40 percent
Disapprove 60 percent
No opinion 1 percent
Most respondents thought the deal should have included tax increases “for business or higher income Americans” [sic]. But forty percent didn’t want any tax increases at all—and this question only concerned tax increases on higher-income people.
As far as we know, it’s hard to get from here to there without tax increases across the board. But in the past several months, your big news orgs made little attempt to explain the role of the Bush tax cuts in creating our current unbalanced budgets. How are average voters supposed to know about such things, when our biggest “news orgs,” from the top down, avoid discussing such topics? When the “liberal world” barely seems to notice this abject failure?
Let’s return to Krugman on This Week, being eye-rolled by Will. Krugman expressed very basic economic views on Sunday’s program. But given the nutrition-free tapioca which currently passes for “public discourse,” he may as well have been speaking from Mars, so odd would his views have seemed to many average voters.
George Will understands that fact. We’d assume that Will was basically right about how us rubes would react.
Can we talk? In fact, your country no longer has a press corps; it barely has a public discourse at all. As a matter of basic economics, Krugman’s views were quite elementary—but to judge by the baseline of our D-minus discourse, he may as well have been speaking from a vacation home on the dark side of Mars.
In recent weeks, many “liberals” have cherry-picked polling data, pretending the public holds liberal views. In this way, the people currently cast as “liberals” help extend the ball of confusion.
Tomorrow—part 3: When even Krugman goes wrong
KRUGMAN FROM MARS! Voters believe the darnedest things! Just consider that CNN survey:
THURSDAY, AUGUST 4, 2011
Ezra speaks: Good lord! Hold the phone! While we’re at it, will Katie please bar the door?
Impossible! In one of the nation’s biggest newspapers, someone has actually written a piece describing some basic, bone-simple realities! Basic realities involving the role of current tax policy in creating our yawning deficits!
The person in question is Ezra Klein, writing in yesterday’s Washington Post. And no, we’re not talking about a blog post! Klein’s piece appeared on page A10, right in the hard-copy Post! For evidence of this unlikely fact, go ahead—just click here!
To what extent have current tax rates helped create our deficit problem? Your big “news organs” have spent the past year refusing to discuss this question—but yesterday, Klein stepped up to the plate. Here’s how he started, including his headline. We’ll translate his words below:
KLEIN (8/3/11): One shot on taxes: Don’t blow it, Democrats
There are now two sides in the American tax debate: the Republican Party, which refuses to have a serious conversation about taxes, and the Democratic Party, which . . . refuses to have a serious conversation about taxes.
Let's start here: We cannot fund anything close to the government's commitments if we don't raise taxes, or if we let only the Bush tax cuts for income over $250,000 expire. And that's true even if we make deep cuts across all categories of federal spending.
Good lord! That highlighted statement is rather opaque, so let’s get clear on what Klein said. If we want to get close to solving this problem, we have to let the Bush tax cuts expire! And that means all the Bush tax cuts! Not just those on high earners!
We have to dump all the Bush tax rates! By now, you can probably see that Klein really did say that in the statement we have highlighted. But later on, he stated the point more clearly:
KLEIN: Democrats will have exactly one chance to overcome the GOP's resistance to tax revenue. Next year, the Bush tax cuts expire. If Congress does nothing, we revert to Clinton-era tax rates for everyone, and the federal coffers fill with $3.6 trillion in additional revenue over the next 10 years—enough to stabilize deficits. This is a rare opportunity in which it's Democrats who hold the hostage and Republicans who have to compromise.
[...]
To govern responsibly, Democrats cannot simply raise taxes on the rich and call it a day. That's a world in which Republicans continuously force crises, refuse taxes, and extract deeper and deeper cuts.
You can read the whole piece for yourself. We’re not saying that Klein is right; we’d like to see the point discussed further. But at long last, a major “newspaper” has permitted this topic to enter the public discussion! Katie, report to the door!
Over the last six months, your major “newspapers” have pretended to discuss the budget situation. As part of this Potemkin discussion, these news orgs have avoided discussing the role played by the Bush tax cuts in creating the current situation. There have been a few exceptions, of course. On Sunday, July 24, Teresa Tritch created a one-day sensation when she made a dramatic if claim about what would occur if we dropped all the Bush tax cuts.
On-line, the liberal world got excited. For part of one whole day!
You live in a post-journalistic society. In truth, your country has no real “press corps.” It has no real “public discussion.”
Yesterday, the Washington Post published an actual claim about the actual state of the actual budget! How long will such an unusual action be allowed to stand?
Tomorrow: Hardball and Maddow, so awful
Ezra speaks: Good lord! Hold the phone! While we’re at it, will Katie please bar the door?
Impossible! In one of the nation’s biggest newspapers, someone has actually written a piece describing some basic, bone-simple realities! Basic realities involving the role of current tax policy in creating our yawning deficits!
The person in question is Ezra Klein, writing in yesterday’s Washington Post. And no, we’re not talking about a blog post! Klein’s piece appeared on page A10, right in the hard-copy Post! For evidence of this unlikely fact, go ahead—just click here!
To what extent have current tax rates helped create our deficit problem? Your big “news organs” have spent the past year refusing to discuss this question—but yesterday, Klein stepped up to the plate. Here’s how he started, including his headline. We’ll translate his words below:
KLEIN (8/3/11): One shot on taxes: Don’t blow it, Democrats
There are now two sides in the American tax debate: the Republican Party, which refuses to have a serious conversation about taxes, and the Democratic Party, which . . . refuses to have a serious conversation about taxes.
Let's start here: We cannot fund anything close to the government's commitments if we don't raise taxes, or if we let only the Bush tax cuts for income over $250,000 expire. And that's true even if we make deep cuts across all categories of federal spending.
Good lord! That highlighted statement is rather opaque, so let’s get clear on what Klein said. If we want to get close to solving this problem, we have to let the Bush tax cuts expire! And that means all the Bush tax cuts! Not just those on high earners!
We have to dump all the Bush tax rates! By now, you can probably see that Klein really did say that in the statement we have highlighted. But later on, he stated the point more clearly:
KLEIN: Democrats will have exactly one chance to overcome the GOP's resistance to tax revenue. Next year, the Bush tax cuts expire. If Congress does nothing, we revert to Clinton-era tax rates for everyone, and the federal coffers fill with $3.6 trillion in additional revenue over the next 10 years—enough to stabilize deficits. This is a rare opportunity in which it's Democrats who hold the hostage and Republicans who have to compromise.
[...]
To govern responsibly, Democrats cannot simply raise taxes on the rich and call it a day. That's a world in which Republicans continuously force crises, refuse taxes, and extract deeper and deeper cuts.
You can read the whole piece for yourself. We’re not saying that Klein is right; we’d like to see the point discussed further. But at long last, a major “newspaper” has permitted this topic to enter the public discussion! Katie, report to the door!
Over the last six months, your major “newspapers” have pretended to discuss the budget situation. As part of this Potemkin discussion, these news orgs have avoided discussing the role played by the Bush tax cuts in creating the current situation. There have been a few exceptions, of course. On Sunday, July 24, Teresa Tritch created a one-day sensation when she made a dramatic if claim about what would occur if we dropped all the Bush tax cuts.
On-line, the liberal world got excited. For part of one whole day!
You live in a post-journalistic society. In truth, your country has no real “press corps.” It has no real “public discussion.”
Yesterday, the Washington Post published an actual claim about the actual state of the actual budget! How long will such an unusual action be allowed to stand?
Tomorrow: Hardball and Maddow, so awful
The incomprable Bob Somersby, stand-up comic supreme, public school teacher, author, political analysist, cultural critic, weighs in with a special two-parter - the beginning of a series of serious discourse (most curious)
Special report: The discourse you rode in on!
PART 1—THE TWO DISCUSSIONS (permalink): By Sunday morning, the outlines of the debt limit deal were fairly clear. Within that context, a fascinating exchange took place between George Will and Paul Krugman.
The exchange occurred on ABC’s This Week. Let’s start with the things Krugman said.
Krugman spoke to the merits, or to the demerits, of the pending deal. On the merits, Krugman basically said the deal was no good. In this slightly snarky chunk, he explained the problems:
KRUGMAN (7/31/11): You know, from, from the perspective of a rational person—in other words, a progressive on this stuff—we shouldn't be even talking about spending cuts at all now. We have 9 percent unemployment. These spending cuts are going to worsen unemployment. That's not even—it's even going to hurt the long-run fiscal picture, because we have a situation where more and more people are becoming permanent long-term unemployed. And if you have a situation in which you're going to permanently raise the unemployment rate, which is what this is going to do, that's actually going to reduce future revenues.
So this, this thing, these spending cuts are even going to hurt the long-run fiscal position, let alone cause lots of misery. And then on top of that, we've got these budget cuts, which are entirely— Basically, the Republicans said, “We'll blow up the world economy unless you give us exactly what we want,” and the president said, “Okay.” That's what happened.
According to Krugman, the spending cuts in the new budget deal will make unemployment worse. In that way, the cuts will reduce future revenues, thus worsening the long-run fiscal picture.
To anyone who has followed Krugman, this (somewhat truncated) analysis wasn’t surprising. He has long said that we should engage in more stimulus spending now, that we shouldn’t address the long-term deficit problem until the economy is stronger. On Sunday, Christiane Amanpour cited this long-standing view, and Krugman spoke again:
AMANPOUR (continuing directly): You know, you've been consistent about this, saying that there should be no cuts at a time of recession and weak recovery. What is your scenario, though, once this goes through and there are significant spending cuts and no revenues?
KRUGMAN: We're looking— I mean, we used to talk about the Japanese and their lost decade. We're going to look to them as a role model. They did better than we're doing. We're, this is going to go on— I have nobody I know who thinks that the unemployment rate is going to be below 8 percent at the end of next year. With these spending cuts, it might well be above 9 percent at the end of next year. There is no light at the end of this tunnel.
And all the— We're having a debate in Washington which is all about, “Gee, we're going to make this economy worse, but are we going to make it worse on 90 percent of the Republicans' terms or 100 percent of the Republicans' terms?” And the answer is 100 percent.
Krugman opposed this new budget deal. In his view, the terms of this new budget deal will only “make this economy worse.” Moments later, he added a point. He has been consistent in these gloomy views, he now said:
KRUGMAN: One important point is to make that, is that people like me said in advance this wasn't remotely big enough. It's not an after-the-fact. It's not coming back afterwards. Right from the beginning, we looked, I looked at the numbers, people like me looked at the numbers, said we have, we're going to have huge cutbacks at the state and local level. You've got a federal increase which is going to be barely enough to limit those cutbacks. There is going to be no net fiscal stimulus, if you look at government as a whole, which is what happened.
So here we are.
The stimulus was never remotely big enough, Krugman said. Quite correctly, he also noted that he had said the same thing in real time. There is no doubt that this latter statement is accurate. In the first few weeks of Obama’s reign, Krugman was saying that the proposed stimulus package wouldn’t be large enough. Obviously, there’s no way to prove what would have happened with a larger stimulus plan.
In these exchanges, Krugman spoke to the merits, or to the demerits, of the new budget deal. In his Monday column, Krugman offered the same gloomy analysis. “[T]he deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster,” he wrote. “It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America's long-run deficit problem worse, not better.”
Such predictions are hard to check, of course, especially given the comic-book discourse which rules our political culture. That in mind, it’s worth noting the way George Will responded to Krugman’s analysis on Sunday’s program. Krugman had addressed the merits of the deal, arguing that this is the wrong time to cut federal spending. After a brief attempt to argue the merits (see below), Will substituted a different order of reasoning. This is the full exchange which ended this discussion:
KRUGMAN: Can I just say, in advance— One important point is to make that, is that people like me said in advance this wasn't remotely big enough. It's not an after-the-fact. It's not coming back afterwards. Right from the beginning, we looked, I looked at the numbers, people like me looked at the numbers, said we have, we're going to have huge cutbacks at the state and local level. You've got a federal increase which is going to be barely enough to limit those cutbacks. There is going to be no net fiscal stimulus, if you look at government as a whole, which is what happened.
So here we are.
WILL: It would be good to go to the election, electorate and have a Krugman election this time, saying, “Resolved, the government is too frugal. Let's vote.”
That was Will’s full rebuttal. Amanpour made no attempt to referee this dispute; at this point, she simply moved to a different question. In effect, Will abandoned any attempt to argue this matter on the merits. Instead, he basically said the following:
The voters wouldn’t agree with Krugman. If we built an election around these claims, Krugman’s side would lose.
Krugman had argued the merits of the deal; Will responded with a claim about the politics. He didn’t say Krugman was wrong on the merits. He simply said the voters would judge that Krugman was wrong.
A person might claim that Will was being cynical. He made little attempt to dispute Krugman’s substantive claims; he simply said the voters would disagree. In fairness, though, we must say the following:
It certainly isn’t clear that Will’s assertion is wrong.
Krugman was presenting some very basic economics. It can’t be proven that his claims are right, but his claims are quite basic. And yet, within the gong-show discourse churned by America’s political press corps, Krugman may as well have been speaking from Mars, in the Martian language.
Krugman was making some very basic points. But you live in a country which enjoys a banana republic discourse. Krugman’s very famous newspaper is an obvious, rather large part of the problem. This helps explain an unfortunate fact:
Like Krugman, Will was probably right in the things he said.
Tomorrow—part 2: That CNN poll
Will on the merits: Will made a brief, very modest attempt to argue the case on the merits. In this passage, you see what he said after Krugman cited Japan:
KRUGMAN: We used to talk about the Japanese and their lost decade. We're going to look to them as a role model. They did better than we're doing. We're, this is going to go on— I have nobody I know who thinks that the unemployment rate is going to be below 8 percent at the end of next year. With these spending cuts, it might well be above 9 percent at the end of next year. There is no light at the end of this tunnel.
And all the— We're having a debate in Washington which is all about, “Gee, we're going to make this economy worse, but are we going to make it worse on 90 percent of the Republicans' terms or 100 percent of the Republicans' terms?” And the answer is 100 percent.
WILL: Paul's right. We are a third of the way through a lost decade, but we're a third of the way after TARP, the stimulus, Cash for Clunkers, dollars for dishwashers, cash for caulkers, the entire range of stimulus, the Keynesian approach, which by its own evidence simply hasn't worked. Now Paul says double down.
It was at this point that Krugman noted an accurate fact—he always said the stimulus would be too small. At this point, Will abandoned the merits, arguing—correctly, we’d have to guess—that the voters wouldn’t agree with Krugman’s viewpoint.
What do the voters currently think? On to that topic tomorrow.
PART 1—THE TWO DISCUSSIONS (permalink): By Sunday morning, the outlines of the debt limit deal were fairly clear. Within that context, a fascinating exchange took place between George Will and Paul Krugman.
The exchange occurred on ABC’s This Week. Let’s start with the things Krugman said.
Krugman spoke to the merits, or to the demerits, of the pending deal. On the merits, Krugman basically said the deal was no good. In this slightly snarky chunk, he explained the problems:
KRUGMAN (7/31/11): You know, from, from the perspective of a rational person—in other words, a progressive on this stuff—we shouldn't be even talking about spending cuts at all now. We have 9 percent unemployment. These spending cuts are going to worsen unemployment. That's not even—it's even going to hurt the long-run fiscal picture, because we have a situation where more and more people are becoming permanent long-term unemployed. And if you have a situation in which you're going to permanently raise the unemployment rate, which is what this is going to do, that's actually going to reduce future revenues.
So this, this thing, these spending cuts are even going to hurt the long-run fiscal position, let alone cause lots of misery. And then on top of that, we've got these budget cuts, which are entirely— Basically, the Republicans said, “We'll blow up the world economy unless you give us exactly what we want,” and the president said, “Okay.” That's what happened.
According to Krugman, the spending cuts in the new budget deal will make unemployment worse. In that way, the cuts will reduce future revenues, thus worsening the long-run fiscal picture.
To anyone who has followed Krugman, this (somewhat truncated) analysis wasn’t surprising. He has long said that we should engage in more stimulus spending now, that we shouldn’t address the long-term deficit problem until the economy is stronger. On Sunday, Christiane Amanpour cited this long-standing view, and Krugman spoke again:
AMANPOUR (continuing directly): You know, you've been consistent about this, saying that there should be no cuts at a time of recession and weak recovery. What is your scenario, though, once this goes through and there are significant spending cuts and no revenues?
KRUGMAN: We're looking— I mean, we used to talk about the Japanese and their lost decade. We're going to look to them as a role model. They did better than we're doing. We're, this is going to go on— I have nobody I know who thinks that the unemployment rate is going to be below 8 percent at the end of next year. With these spending cuts, it might well be above 9 percent at the end of next year. There is no light at the end of this tunnel.
And all the— We're having a debate in Washington which is all about, “Gee, we're going to make this economy worse, but are we going to make it worse on 90 percent of the Republicans' terms or 100 percent of the Republicans' terms?” And the answer is 100 percent.
Krugman opposed this new budget deal. In his view, the terms of this new budget deal will only “make this economy worse.” Moments later, he added a point. He has been consistent in these gloomy views, he now said:
KRUGMAN: One important point is to make that, is that people like me said in advance this wasn't remotely big enough. It's not an after-the-fact. It's not coming back afterwards. Right from the beginning, we looked, I looked at the numbers, people like me looked at the numbers, said we have, we're going to have huge cutbacks at the state and local level. You've got a federal increase which is going to be barely enough to limit those cutbacks. There is going to be no net fiscal stimulus, if you look at government as a whole, which is what happened.
So here we are.
The stimulus was never remotely big enough, Krugman said. Quite correctly, he also noted that he had said the same thing in real time. There is no doubt that this latter statement is accurate. In the first few weeks of Obama’s reign, Krugman was saying that the proposed stimulus package wouldn’t be large enough. Obviously, there’s no way to prove what would have happened with a larger stimulus plan.
In these exchanges, Krugman spoke to the merits, or to the demerits, of the new budget deal. In his Monday column, Krugman offered the same gloomy analysis. “[T]he deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster,” he wrote. “It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America's long-run deficit problem worse, not better.”
Such predictions are hard to check, of course, especially given the comic-book discourse which rules our political culture. That in mind, it’s worth noting the way George Will responded to Krugman’s analysis on Sunday’s program. Krugman had addressed the merits of the deal, arguing that this is the wrong time to cut federal spending. After a brief attempt to argue the merits (see below), Will substituted a different order of reasoning. This is the full exchange which ended this discussion:
KRUGMAN: Can I just say, in advance— One important point is to make that, is that people like me said in advance this wasn't remotely big enough. It's not an after-the-fact. It's not coming back afterwards. Right from the beginning, we looked, I looked at the numbers, people like me looked at the numbers, said we have, we're going to have huge cutbacks at the state and local level. You've got a federal increase which is going to be barely enough to limit those cutbacks. There is going to be no net fiscal stimulus, if you look at government as a whole, which is what happened.
So here we are.
WILL: It would be good to go to the election, electorate and have a Krugman election this time, saying, “Resolved, the government is too frugal. Let's vote.”
That was Will’s full rebuttal. Amanpour made no attempt to referee this dispute; at this point, she simply moved to a different question. In effect, Will abandoned any attempt to argue this matter on the merits. Instead, he basically said the following:
The voters wouldn’t agree with Krugman. If we built an election around these claims, Krugman’s side would lose.
Krugman had argued the merits of the deal; Will responded with a claim about the politics. He didn’t say Krugman was wrong on the merits. He simply said the voters would judge that Krugman was wrong.
A person might claim that Will was being cynical. He made little attempt to dispute Krugman’s substantive claims; he simply said the voters would disagree. In fairness, though, we must say the following:
It certainly isn’t clear that Will’s assertion is wrong.
Krugman was presenting some very basic economics. It can’t be proven that his claims are right, but his claims are quite basic. And yet, within the gong-show discourse churned by America’s political press corps, Krugman may as well have been speaking from Mars, in the Martian language.
Krugman was making some very basic points. But you live in a country which enjoys a banana republic discourse. Krugman’s very famous newspaper is an obvious, rather large part of the problem. This helps explain an unfortunate fact:
Like Krugman, Will was probably right in the things he said.
Tomorrow—part 2: That CNN poll
Will on the merits: Will made a brief, very modest attempt to argue the case on the merits. In this passage, you see what he said after Krugman cited Japan:
KRUGMAN: We used to talk about the Japanese and their lost decade. We're going to look to them as a role model. They did better than we're doing. We're, this is going to go on— I have nobody I know who thinks that the unemployment rate is going to be below 8 percent at the end of next year. With these spending cuts, it might well be above 9 percent at the end of next year. There is no light at the end of this tunnel.
And all the— We're having a debate in Washington which is all about, “Gee, we're going to make this economy worse, but are we going to make it worse on 90 percent of the Republicans' terms or 100 percent of the Republicans' terms?” And the answer is 100 percent.
WILL: Paul's right. We are a third of the way through a lost decade, but we're a third of the way after TARP, the stimulus, Cash for Clunkers, dollars for dishwashers, cash for caulkers, the entire range of stimulus, the Keynesian approach, which by its own evidence simply hasn't worked. Now Paul says double down.
It was at this point that Krugman noted an accurate fact—he always said the stimulus would be too small. At this point, Will abandoned the merits, arguing—correctly, we’d have to guess—that the voters wouldn’t agree with Krugman’s viewpoint.
What do the voters currently think? On to that topic tomorrow.
THE TWO DISCOURSES! When Krugman said we need more stimulus, George Will turned to the public:
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2011
Life is good for the corporate right with Maddow and Dowd around: Remember how sticks and stones can break their bones? But names can never hurt them?
We recalled that schoolyard wisdom as we read the hapless new column by one of our dumbest “journalists.”
Maureen Dowd had absolutely nothing to offer to the months-long debate about the debt limit. On July 10, she wrote a column about Liz and Dick’s torrid love affair. Three days later, her addled column concerned “Hitler’s Talking Dogs.”
But like her colleague Joe Nocera, Maureen Dowd is all fired up now that the moment has passed! Now that the debt debate is done, she responds with her only known tool—she does a whole lot of name-calling. This is part of the garbage she churns today from deep down in a very dark well. If you want to know why your country’s political discourse is broken, this column helps explain it quite well:
DOWD (8/3/11): Tea Party budget-slashers didn't sport the black capes with blood-red lining beloved by the campy Vincent Price or wield the tinglers deployed by [director] William Castle. But in their feral attack on Washington, in their talent for raising goose bumps from Wall Street to Westminster, this strange, compelling and uncompromising new force epitomized ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers'' and evoked comparisons to our most mythic creatures of the night.
They were like cannibals, eating their own party and leaders alive. They were like vampires, draining the country's reputation, credit rating and compassion. They were like zombies, relentlessly and mindlessly coming back again and again to assault their unnerved victims, Boehner and President Obama. They were like the metallic beasts in ''Alien'' flashing mouths of teeth inside other mouths of teeth, bursting out of Boehner's stomach every time he came to a bouquet of microphones.
[...]
The influential horror writer H. P. Lovecraft knew better than to be too literal in his description of monsters.
In the short story ''The Outsider,'' Lovecraft's narrator offers a description that matches how some alarmed Democrats view Tea Partiers: ''I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity and desolation; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation; the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world.''
The Pulitzer-winner with nothing to say is all of a sudden all mouth! And as usual, it’s hard to get dumber. In that deeply ridiculous passage, she manages to slip in a disclaimer, making it seem that she’s merely channeling what “some alarmed Democrats” are saying. Before long, though, we’re allowed to learn more about the crackpot herself:
DOWD: I didn't think I had anything in common with Lady Gaga until I read in a magazine profile of her that she likes to fall asleep watching horror movies. Growing up, my brothers were obsessed with Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman and the Mummy. (There was no model of the Invisible Man.) I have an old picture of my brother Kevin and me as children sitting rapt on a bed in our underwear watching ''Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.''
Kevin spent his free time meticulously building and painting models of monsters, which he still keeps in a spare bedroom, half a century later. For their second date, he took the woman who would become his wife to a triple feature of horror movies.
Tales about her crackpot family are never far away when Dowd types a column like this one. For sheer dumbness, though, we would recommend this puzzling passage:
DOWD: As Jason Zinoman writes in his new book on horror films, ''Shock Value,'' ''The monster has traditionally been a stand-in for some anxiety, political, social, or cultural.'' The monsters of '70s films channeled grievances similar to the Tea Party's about, as Zinoman wrote, ''government power and mocking nihilism.'' Audiences sometimes sympathized with the monsters, as Marilyn Monroe did in ''The Seven Year Itch'' with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, who, she said, ''just craved a little affection.''
In the current instance, Dowd is the one who is conjuring monsters. Doesn’t that mean that she is using her florid descriptions as “a stand-in for some anxiety” she is too inept to express?
Nocera said nothing in real time, then started with the name-calling (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/2/11). Dowd takes the same low-IQ route today, jacking the name-calling up a bit. This is the way we “liberals” lose, as fools like these engage in this conduct.
By the way: Twelve years ago, it was President Clinton, then Candidate Gore, who this idiot reinvented as monsters. Crackpot then, crackpot today.
Then too, there is the fool Maddow, back at her station last night after the kind of vacation permitted by millions in salary. Might we ask one small indulgence? Now that the GOP has kicked our side’s ass, might this pitiful child finally drop her low-IQ theme about John Boehner being so bad at his job? Incredibly, she was at it again three weeks ago, re-reciting her monstrously pointless “examples.” This was only part of her foolish, comfort-food nonsense:
MADDOW (7/13/11): This is the House speaker who forgot to swear in two of his new members of Congress on the first day he was in charge of the House.
This is the House speaker who allowed two different members of his caucus to give a rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union Address and they didn’t agree with each other. This is the House speaker who made a big self-important photo-op out of reading the Constitution on the floor of the House to start the legislative year, and then he left some parts of the Constitution out and had to do them later.
This is the House speaker who made another big, self-important show of imposing new rules for the House, that every time they’d propose spending, they would have to propose cutting something to offset that spending. He makes a big deal out of this big, new, responsible rule and then with the very first bill he introduces, he violates his own rule.
This is the House speaker who does photo ops like this one.
BOEHNER (videotape): When we say we’re going to cut spending, read my lips: We’re going to cut spending. Thanks.
MADDOW: After saying "read my lips," Mr. Boehner then walks offstage and was heard saying to himself as he walked offstage right there, quote, "I can’t believe I just said."
It’s his own press conference! Nobody said, “Mr. Speaker, can we read your lips on this?” No, he just brought it up, repeating the most famous Republican screw-up line of the last 30 years. Unforced error, own goal, again.
Here he is on Fox News last night talking about the biggest political fight in the country right now, the need to raise the debt ceiling.
(begin video clip)
BRET BAIER: So, what is next? What if you don’t get a deal?
BOEHNER: I don’t know.
(end video clip)
MADDOW: Third in line to the presidency, Speaker of the House : “Dunno!”
Whether or not you agree with John Boehner on policy, whether or not you think John Boehner on policy is right or wrong, whether or not you want him to succeed politically or you don’t want him to succeed politically, John Boehner is not good at his job. John Boehner is not succeeding. Whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I think it’s factually evident he’s not good at being Speaker of the House.
Can we talk? Maddow is so dumb it squeaks, despite all the propaganda about this glorious child being Our Own Rhodes Scholar.
We’d suggest that you look at the tape of this utterly pitiful segment. But for some reason, the tape of this segment doesn’t exist at the Maddow Show site. (We would have chosen to lose that tape too. To read the full transcript, click this.)
Having said that, might we also say this?
Boehner kicked your side’s keister in the past week. Might we make one minor request? Could Maddow possibly drop the theme about how bad he is at his job?
Maureen Dowd is a Pulitzer winner. Maddow is Our Own Rhodes Scholar. Life is sweet for the corporate right with monsters like these around.
Life is good for the corporate right with Maddow and Dowd around: Remember how sticks and stones can break their bones? But names can never hurt them?
We recalled that schoolyard wisdom as we read the hapless new column by one of our dumbest “journalists.”
Maureen Dowd had absolutely nothing to offer to the months-long debate about the debt limit. On July 10, she wrote a column about Liz and Dick’s torrid love affair. Three days later, her addled column concerned “Hitler’s Talking Dogs.”
But like her colleague Joe Nocera, Maureen Dowd is all fired up now that the moment has passed! Now that the debt debate is done, she responds with her only known tool—she does a whole lot of name-calling. This is part of the garbage she churns today from deep down in a very dark well. If you want to know why your country’s political discourse is broken, this column helps explain it quite well:
DOWD (8/3/11): Tea Party budget-slashers didn't sport the black capes with blood-red lining beloved by the campy Vincent Price or wield the tinglers deployed by [director] William Castle. But in their feral attack on Washington, in their talent for raising goose bumps from Wall Street to Westminster, this strange, compelling and uncompromising new force epitomized ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers'' and evoked comparisons to our most mythic creatures of the night.
They were like cannibals, eating their own party and leaders alive. They were like vampires, draining the country's reputation, credit rating and compassion. They were like zombies, relentlessly and mindlessly coming back again and again to assault their unnerved victims, Boehner and President Obama. They were like the metallic beasts in ''Alien'' flashing mouths of teeth inside other mouths of teeth, bursting out of Boehner's stomach every time he came to a bouquet of microphones.
[...]
The influential horror writer H. P. Lovecraft knew better than to be too literal in his description of monsters.
In the short story ''The Outsider,'' Lovecraft's narrator offers a description that matches how some alarmed Democrats view Tea Partiers: ''I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity and desolation; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation; the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world.''
The Pulitzer-winner with nothing to say is all of a sudden all mouth! And as usual, it’s hard to get dumber. In that deeply ridiculous passage, she manages to slip in a disclaimer, making it seem that she’s merely channeling what “some alarmed Democrats” are saying. Before long, though, we’re allowed to learn more about the crackpot herself:
DOWD: I didn't think I had anything in common with Lady Gaga until I read in a magazine profile of her that she likes to fall asleep watching horror movies. Growing up, my brothers were obsessed with Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman and the Mummy. (There was no model of the Invisible Man.) I have an old picture of my brother Kevin and me as children sitting rapt on a bed in our underwear watching ''Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.''
Kevin spent his free time meticulously building and painting models of monsters, which he still keeps in a spare bedroom, half a century later. For their second date, he took the woman who would become his wife to a triple feature of horror movies.
Tales about her crackpot family are never far away when Dowd types a column like this one. For sheer dumbness, though, we would recommend this puzzling passage:
DOWD: As Jason Zinoman writes in his new book on horror films, ''Shock Value,'' ''The monster has traditionally been a stand-in for some anxiety, political, social, or cultural.'' The monsters of '70s films channeled grievances similar to the Tea Party's about, as Zinoman wrote, ''government power and mocking nihilism.'' Audiences sometimes sympathized with the monsters, as Marilyn Monroe did in ''The Seven Year Itch'' with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, who, she said, ''just craved a little affection.''
In the current instance, Dowd is the one who is conjuring monsters. Doesn’t that mean that she is using her florid descriptions as “a stand-in for some anxiety” she is too inept to express?
Nocera said nothing in real time, then started with the name-calling (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/2/11). Dowd takes the same low-IQ route today, jacking the name-calling up a bit. This is the way we “liberals” lose, as fools like these engage in this conduct.
By the way: Twelve years ago, it was President Clinton, then Candidate Gore, who this idiot reinvented as monsters. Crackpot then, crackpot today.
Then too, there is the fool Maddow, back at her station last night after the kind of vacation permitted by millions in salary. Might we ask one small indulgence? Now that the GOP has kicked our side’s ass, might this pitiful child finally drop her low-IQ theme about John Boehner being so bad at his job? Incredibly, she was at it again three weeks ago, re-reciting her monstrously pointless “examples.” This was only part of her foolish, comfort-food nonsense:
MADDOW (7/13/11): This is the House speaker who forgot to swear in two of his new members of Congress on the first day he was in charge of the House.
This is the House speaker who allowed two different members of his caucus to give a rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union Address and they didn’t agree with each other. This is the House speaker who made a big self-important photo-op out of reading the Constitution on the floor of the House to start the legislative year, and then he left some parts of the Constitution out and had to do them later.
This is the House speaker who made another big, self-important show of imposing new rules for the House, that every time they’d propose spending, they would have to propose cutting something to offset that spending. He makes a big deal out of this big, new, responsible rule and then with the very first bill he introduces, he violates his own rule.
This is the House speaker who does photo ops like this one.
BOEHNER (videotape): When we say we’re going to cut spending, read my lips: We’re going to cut spending. Thanks.
MADDOW: After saying "read my lips," Mr. Boehner then walks offstage and was heard saying to himself as he walked offstage right there, quote, "I can’t believe I just said."
It’s his own press conference! Nobody said, “Mr. Speaker, can we read your lips on this?” No, he just brought it up, repeating the most famous Republican screw-up line of the last 30 years. Unforced error, own goal, again.
Here he is on Fox News last night talking about the biggest political fight in the country right now, the need to raise the debt ceiling.
(begin video clip)
BRET BAIER: So, what is next? What if you don’t get a deal?
BOEHNER: I don’t know.
(end video clip)
MADDOW: Third in line to the presidency, Speaker of the House : “Dunno!”
Whether or not you agree with John Boehner on policy, whether or not you think John Boehner on policy is right or wrong, whether or not you want him to succeed politically or you don’t want him to succeed politically, John Boehner is not good at his job. John Boehner is not succeeding. Whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I think it’s factually evident he’s not good at being Speaker of the House.
Can we talk? Maddow is so dumb it squeaks, despite all the propaganda about this glorious child being Our Own Rhodes Scholar.
We’d suggest that you look at the tape of this utterly pitiful segment. But for some reason, the tape of this segment doesn’t exist at the Maddow Show site. (We would have chosen to lose that tape too. To read the full transcript, click this.)
Having said that, might we also say this?
Boehner kicked your side’s keister in the past week. Might we make one minor request? Could Maddow possibly drop the theme about how bad he is at his job?
Maureen Dowd is a Pulitzer winner. Maddow is Our Own Rhodes Scholar. Life is sweet for the corporate right with monsters like these around.
THE DISCOURSE YOU RODE IN ON! Joe Nocera is very angry. Except for the fact that he isn’t:
TUESDAY, AUGUST 2, 2011
A fine place to say you will: Cooperstown is a very nice place for a wedding, especially one with such all-star participants. Each party said that he or she will. Finest bride we ever witnessed!
Otsego Lake has never looked wetter. Locals admit that it’s not a Great Lake. All the same, it’s a very good lake, and we heard no one say different.
Much earlier, these acts occurred. History takes a long time, though things can go down very fast.
Special report: The discourse you rode in on!
PRELUDE—SITTING IT OUT (permalink): Joe Nocera feels very strongly about the debt limit deal.
Except for the fact that he doesn’t.
Four months ago, on April 2, Nocera published his first column as a twice-weekly New York Times op-ed writer. (Before that, he had been writing a Saturday column in the Business/Financial Desk section.) Today, the gentleman blows a gasket about the debt limit deal.
As you can see, Nocera is very angry. Except for the fact that he isn’t:
NOCERA (8/2/11): The Tea Party's War On America
You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.
These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America's most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn't care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that's what it took.
As he closes, he does a bit more name-calling. “For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests,” he angrily proclaims. “But rest assured: They'll have them on again soon enough. After all, they've gotten so much encouragement.”
You can tell Nocera is very angry from all this exquisite name-calling. He refers to a recent “war on America”—a “jihad” conducted by a group of terrorists in suicide vests who were trying to blow up the country.
“Much of the country has watched in horror” as this jihad has been waged, Nocera reports. He neglects to say that he himself wasn’t one of those people.
How can you tell that Nocera wasn’t consumed by horror? Here’s how: According to the Nexis archives, this is just the second time he has ever used the term “debt limit” or “debt ceiling” in a New York Times column. His previous usage occurred last Tuesday, in a column which didn’t concern the debt limit debacle—a column which dealt with an action the Federal Reserve had taken against Wells Fargo. And not only that! This is the first time Nocera has ever used the term “Tea Party” in a Times column!
Weird, isn’t it? Writing two columns a week for four months, he failed to mention the fact that a group of jihadists were conducting a “war on America!”
Nocera is in a state of high fury—today. But as this ridiculous episode unfolded, Nocera had nothing to say about it—zilch, rien, nada, squat. He made no attempt—none at all—to explain or clarify any of the points he finally discusses today. And today, when Nocera finally speaks, he speaks in a loud and stupid name-calling rage, the kind of fury the other side uses to show the world how dumb your side is.
Nocera is very late to the party. And when the gentleman finally arrives, he’s very loud, possibly drunk
. Don’t get us wrong: As Nocera continues, he describes the problems with the debt limit deal in ways we assume to be accurate. (“America's real crisis is not a debt crisis. It's an unemployment crisis. Yet this agreement not only doesn't address unemployment, it's guaranteed to make it worse...The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.”) But this description is very brief, and it shows up many months too late. As such, Nocera’s pretend-to-be-angry column captures the astonishing failure of the social club known as New York Times to deal with this months-long episode.
Has any “newspaper” ever refused to discuss a major topic in quite the way the New York Times has? Consider the performance of this famous “newspaper” in just the past six days:
First, let’s take a guess. By Saturday morning, many citizens were quite concerned about the possibility that no debt limit deal would be reached. Presumably, some of these citizens opened copies of the Times hoping for crumbs of insight. But when they turned to the op-ed page, they found four columns, none of which dealt with the debt limit matter! The Times had commissioned two columns by guest contributors; one piece dealt with the TVA, the other with Israel’s response to the Arab Spring. Among regular New York Times columnists, Charles Blow at least seemed to feel he should explain why he wasn’t discussing the crisis:
BLOW (7/30/11): My grandfather spoke to me this week. That would've been unremarkable if not for the fact that he died four years ago.
I had ducked into a movie theater to escape the maddening debt-limit debacle. I chose ''Captain America: The First Avenger.'' Surely that would reset the patriotic optimism.
But as I watched the scenes of a fictitious integrated American Army fighting in Europe at the end of World War II, I became unsettled. Yes, I know that racial revisionism has become so common in film that it's almost customary, so much so that moviegoers rarely balk or even blink. And even I try not to think too deeply about shallow fare. Escapism by its nature must bend away from reality. But this time I was forced to bend it back. It was personal.
As the Times continues to move past self-parody, Blow at least felt he should explain why he was “escaping” this fairly obvious topic. He went on to explain that the U.S. army wasn’t integrated during World War II. Never mind what that new movie says!
The fourth column on Saturday’s op-ed page was written Nocera himself. Nocera is very angry—today. But last Saturday, he wrote a piece assuring us that one of the Bernie Madoff trustees would be dealt with fairly, or something.
Amazing, isn’t it? A war was being waged on your country (we’re now told) and that’s what this big numb-nut wrote about? Do you believe Nocera is angry?
Sorry, but no—we do not.
We found Saturday’s lack of discussion astounding. That said, the “Sunday Review” section wasn’t much better, although a number of familiar players (including the Silly Twins, Bruni and Dowd) pretended to offer relevant discussions. On page 1, the Times led the section in typical fashion—with a sweeping historical overview of a tendency it has abjectly refused to cover in its current manifestation. (Headline: “Jefferson’s Tea Party Moment.” And yes, that’s Thomas Jefferson.) To marvel at the Times’ upper-class fatuity, we’ll direct you to pages 3 and 4 of the section, where you could peruse these pieces:
* A lengthy “news analysis” by a science reporter about the way Obama’s face has aged. (Headline: “What’s in a face at fifty?” No, we’re not making this up.)
* An “opinion” piece on a perennial feel-good topic: Should executions be televised?
* An “opinion” piece about the marvelous way the Dutch ride their bikes all around and shop for fresh bread every day.
As a war was being waged on your country, those were the topics the Times was exploring! And by the way: Just as Blow did at the start of his Saturday piece, Sam Tanenhaus started his historical overview with another bit of unintended institutional self-parody:
TANENHAUS (7/31/11): Whatever the outcome of the debate on the debt ceiling, everyone seems to agree that it has been one of the most alienating spectacles in recent political history—a peculiarly Beltway form of theater, with much of the public still confused about what exactly is at stake.
Too funny! We can’t imagine why “much of the public” might have “still been confused” about this topic!
This morning, Nocera is in a very loud rage, complaining about an ugly war he previously failed to mention. But why is “much of the public” confused? Presumably, many Times readers are still confused because they’ve been reading the New York Times—including the columns by Nocera, the columns which never mentioned the war he now says was waged on this nation.
The New York Times, an upper-class former newspaper, is thick with noblesse oblige—with upper-class indolence trading off with fury aimed at “those people.” And make no mistake: When an indolent upper-class cohort takes control of an enterprise, the intelligence with which that enterprise is run drops to basement levels. Consider:
Last Thursday, the Times staged an earlier move past self-parody (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/28/11). Finally, the paper devoted an entire page to a series of questions about the debt limit—obvious questions the former newspaper had ignored for months.
“Perhaps the time has finally come for a crash course in all things debt ceiling,” the hapless former newspaper wrote, with no apparent sense of irony or embarrassment. (Unintentionally comical headline: “As 11th Hour Nears, a Look at the Debt Ceiling.” Should the paper perhaps have taken “a look” at this topic before the 11th hour? Mercifully, this ridiculous headline has been dropped from the on-line version of this piece.) But good God! If you want to understand the dilemma in which we’re all mired, just read through the hapless work the Times performed on that page! This was the very first Q-and-A by the former newspaper’s crash course tandem, Professors Cooper and Story:
COOPER/STORY (7/28/11): Q. Republicans and Democrats alike keep talking about the need to reduce the federal deficit. Won't refusing to raise the debt limit cut the deficit?
A. No. The debt limit, or ceiling, which is the amount that the nation is allowed to borrow, must be raised if the United States is to pay for all the things that Congress has already bought: the spending in the budget bills it has already passed, the Social Security checks promised to retirees, the payments due to private companies with federal contracts and the interest on bonds it has sold. Washington has long spent more money than it takes in, and planned to make up the difference with borrowing. Both parties agree that this cannot go on forever. But if the debt limit is not raised, it will not cut the nation's deficit or allow the government to get out of its existing obligations. It will simply make it impossible to borrow the money that the government needs to pay for them.
Some Republicans argue that the dangers of a default are being overstated, and that the only way to curb the nation's debt problem is to reduce its legal ability to borrow. (As a senator, Mr. Obama voted against raising the limit himself.) But economists say the dangers of default are real, with ramifications ranging from slowing the economy to making mortgages and car loans more expensive. But analysts say that freezing the debt ceiling would have little immediate effect on debt levels. ''While debates surrounding the debt limit may raise awareness about the federal government's current debt trajectory and may also provide Congress with an opportunity to debate the fiscal policy decisions driving that trajectory, the ability to have an immediate effect on debt levels is limited,'' the Government Accountability Office reported. ''This is because the debt reflects previously enacted tax and spending policies.''
We’ve highlighted the most striking part of the rambling, barely coherent “answer” to that peculiar opening question.
If Congress refused to raise the debt limit, would that cut the deficit? “No,” the Timespeople oddly reply. “It will simply make it impossible to borrow the money that the government needs to pay for” existing obligations. But if the federal government can’t borrow the money to pay for those obligations, would that not eliminate the deficit? It would also create a social disaster as basic government functions were suddenly halted. But by definition, if you can’t borrow any money, how can you run up a deficit?
If Congress refused to raise the debt limit, the government could only spend the money it was receiving through normal taxation. This would produce a social disaster. But that’s pretty much the definition of what it is to have no deficit, unless you’re reading a broken-down former newspaper like the New York Times.
For what it’s worth, last Thursday’s “crash course on all things debt ceiling” was an intellectual mess throughout; Cooper and Story were overmatched by the many overlooked questions they tried to tackle in their last-minute all-nighter. But the New York Times has long since ceased to function as a newspaper at all, let alone as a competent paper. In this case, the Times kept refusing, month after month, to discuss the most obvious aspects of this giant unfolding mess. A modern nation simply can’t function when its most famous “newspaper” works in this bizarre way.
That is especially true if the liberal world is too inept to notice.
This brings us back to Joe Nocera, who is very angry today—except for the obvious fact that he isn’t. Nocera is loudly calling names, accusing jihadists of waging a war. Nocera’s name-calling is quite skillful. But alas! Over the course of the past four months, he has shown that he, like the enterprise he rides in on, is good for little else.
Tomorrow—part 1: Krugman v. Will
A fine place to say you will: Cooperstown is a very nice place for a wedding, especially one with such all-star participants. Each party said that he or she will. Finest bride we ever witnessed!
Otsego Lake has never looked wetter. Locals admit that it’s not a Great Lake. All the same, it’s a very good lake, and we heard no one say different.
Much earlier, these acts occurred. History takes a long time, though things can go down very fast.
Special report: The discourse you rode in on!
PRELUDE—SITTING IT OUT (permalink): Joe Nocera feels very strongly about the debt limit deal.
Except for the fact that he doesn’t.
Four months ago, on April 2, Nocera published his first column as a twice-weekly New York Times op-ed writer. (Before that, he had been writing a Saturday column in the Business/Financial Desk section.) Today, the gentleman blows a gasket about the debt limit deal.
As you can see, Nocera is very angry. Except for the fact that he isn’t:
NOCERA (8/2/11): The Tea Party's War On America
You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.
These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America's most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn't care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that's what it took.
As he closes, he does a bit more name-calling. “For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests,” he angrily proclaims. “But rest assured: They'll have them on again soon enough. After all, they've gotten so much encouragement.”
You can tell Nocera is very angry from all this exquisite name-calling. He refers to a recent “war on America”—a “jihad” conducted by a group of terrorists in suicide vests who were trying to blow up the country.
“Much of the country has watched in horror” as this jihad has been waged, Nocera reports. He neglects to say that he himself wasn’t one of those people.
How can you tell that Nocera wasn’t consumed by horror? Here’s how: According to the Nexis archives, this is just the second time he has ever used the term “debt limit” or “debt ceiling” in a New York Times column. His previous usage occurred last Tuesday, in a column which didn’t concern the debt limit debacle—a column which dealt with an action the Federal Reserve had taken against Wells Fargo. And not only that! This is the first time Nocera has ever used the term “Tea Party” in a Times column!
Weird, isn’t it? Writing two columns a week for four months, he failed to mention the fact that a group of jihadists were conducting a “war on America!”
Nocera is in a state of high fury—today. But as this ridiculous episode unfolded, Nocera had nothing to say about it—zilch, rien, nada, squat. He made no attempt—none at all—to explain or clarify any of the points he finally discusses today. And today, when Nocera finally speaks, he speaks in a loud and stupid name-calling rage, the kind of fury the other side uses to show the world how dumb your side is.
Nocera is very late to the party. And when the gentleman finally arrives, he’s very loud, possibly drunk
. Don’t get us wrong: As Nocera continues, he describes the problems with the debt limit deal in ways we assume to be accurate. (“America's real crisis is not a debt crisis. It's an unemployment crisis. Yet this agreement not only doesn't address unemployment, it's guaranteed to make it worse...The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.”) But this description is very brief, and it shows up many months too late. As such, Nocera’s pretend-to-be-angry column captures the astonishing failure of the social club known as New York Times to deal with this months-long episode.
Has any “newspaper” ever refused to discuss a major topic in quite the way the New York Times has? Consider the performance of this famous “newspaper” in just the past six days:
First, let’s take a guess. By Saturday morning, many citizens were quite concerned about the possibility that no debt limit deal would be reached. Presumably, some of these citizens opened copies of the Times hoping for crumbs of insight. But when they turned to the op-ed page, they found four columns, none of which dealt with the debt limit matter! The Times had commissioned two columns by guest contributors; one piece dealt with the TVA, the other with Israel’s response to the Arab Spring. Among regular New York Times columnists, Charles Blow at least seemed to feel he should explain why he wasn’t discussing the crisis:
BLOW (7/30/11): My grandfather spoke to me this week. That would've been unremarkable if not for the fact that he died four years ago.
I had ducked into a movie theater to escape the maddening debt-limit debacle. I chose ''Captain America: The First Avenger.'' Surely that would reset the patriotic optimism.
But as I watched the scenes of a fictitious integrated American Army fighting in Europe at the end of World War II, I became unsettled. Yes, I know that racial revisionism has become so common in film that it's almost customary, so much so that moviegoers rarely balk or even blink. And even I try not to think too deeply about shallow fare. Escapism by its nature must bend away from reality. But this time I was forced to bend it back. It was personal.
As the Times continues to move past self-parody, Blow at least felt he should explain why he was “escaping” this fairly obvious topic. He went on to explain that the U.S. army wasn’t integrated during World War II. Never mind what that new movie says!
The fourth column on Saturday’s op-ed page was written Nocera himself. Nocera is very angry—today. But last Saturday, he wrote a piece assuring us that one of the Bernie Madoff trustees would be dealt with fairly, or something.
Amazing, isn’t it? A war was being waged on your country (we’re now told) and that’s what this big numb-nut wrote about? Do you believe Nocera is angry?
Sorry, but no—we do not.
We found Saturday’s lack of discussion astounding. That said, the “Sunday Review” section wasn’t much better, although a number of familiar players (including the Silly Twins, Bruni and Dowd) pretended to offer relevant discussions. On page 1, the Times led the section in typical fashion—with a sweeping historical overview of a tendency it has abjectly refused to cover in its current manifestation. (Headline: “Jefferson’s Tea Party Moment.” And yes, that’s Thomas Jefferson.) To marvel at the Times’ upper-class fatuity, we’ll direct you to pages 3 and 4 of the section, where you could peruse these pieces:
* A lengthy “news analysis” by a science reporter about the way Obama’s face has aged. (Headline: “What’s in a face at fifty?” No, we’re not making this up.)
* An “opinion” piece on a perennial feel-good topic: Should executions be televised?
* An “opinion” piece about the marvelous way the Dutch ride their bikes all around and shop for fresh bread every day.
As a war was being waged on your country, those were the topics the Times was exploring! And by the way: Just as Blow did at the start of his Saturday piece, Sam Tanenhaus started his historical overview with another bit of unintended institutional self-parody:
TANENHAUS (7/31/11): Whatever the outcome of the debate on the debt ceiling, everyone seems to agree that it has been one of the most alienating spectacles in recent political history—a peculiarly Beltway form of theater, with much of the public still confused about what exactly is at stake.
Too funny! We can’t imagine why “much of the public” might have “still been confused” about this topic!
This morning, Nocera is in a very loud rage, complaining about an ugly war he previously failed to mention. But why is “much of the public” confused? Presumably, many Times readers are still confused because they’ve been reading the New York Times—including the columns by Nocera, the columns which never mentioned the war he now says was waged on this nation.
The New York Times, an upper-class former newspaper, is thick with noblesse oblige—with upper-class indolence trading off with fury aimed at “those people.” And make no mistake: When an indolent upper-class cohort takes control of an enterprise, the intelligence with which that enterprise is run drops to basement levels. Consider:
Last Thursday, the Times staged an earlier move past self-parody (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/28/11). Finally, the paper devoted an entire page to a series of questions about the debt limit—obvious questions the former newspaper had ignored for months.
“Perhaps the time has finally come for a crash course in all things debt ceiling,” the hapless former newspaper wrote, with no apparent sense of irony or embarrassment. (Unintentionally comical headline: “As 11th Hour Nears, a Look at the Debt Ceiling.” Should the paper perhaps have taken “a look” at this topic before the 11th hour? Mercifully, this ridiculous headline has been dropped from the on-line version of this piece.) But good God! If you want to understand the dilemma in which we’re all mired, just read through the hapless work the Times performed on that page! This was the very first Q-and-A by the former newspaper’s crash course tandem, Professors Cooper and Story:
COOPER/STORY (7/28/11): Q. Republicans and Democrats alike keep talking about the need to reduce the federal deficit. Won't refusing to raise the debt limit cut the deficit?
A. No. The debt limit, or ceiling, which is the amount that the nation is allowed to borrow, must be raised if the United States is to pay for all the things that Congress has already bought: the spending in the budget bills it has already passed, the Social Security checks promised to retirees, the payments due to private companies with federal contracts and the interest on bonds it has sold. Washington has long spent more money than it takes in, and planned to make up the difference with borrowing. Both parties agree that this cannot go on forever. But if the debt limit is not raised, it will not cut the nation's deficit or allow the government to get out of its existing obligations. It will simply make it impossible to borrow the money that the government needs to pay for them.
Some Republicans argue that the dangers of a default are being overstated, and that the only way to curb the nation's debt problem is to reduce its legal ability to borrow. (As a senator, Mr. Obama voted against raising the limit himself.) But economists say the dangers of default are real, with ramifications ranging from slowing the economy to making mortgages and car loans more expensive. But analysts say that freezing the debt ceiling would have little immediate effect on debt levels. ''While debates surrounding the debt limit may raise awareness about the federal government's current debt trajectory and may also provide Congress with an opportunity to debate the fiscal policy decisions driving that trajectory, the ability to have an immediate effect on debt levels is limited,'' the Government Accountability Office reported. ''This is because the debt reflects previously enacted tax and spending policies.''
We’ve highlighted the most striking part of the rambling, barely coherent “answer” to that peculiar opening question.
If Congress refused to raise the debt limit, would that cut the deficit? “No,” the Timespeople oddly reply. “It will simply make it impossible to borrow the money that the government needs to pay for” existing obligations. But if the federal government can’t borrow the money to pay for those obligations, would that not eliminate the deficit? It would also create a social disaster as basic government functions were suddenly halted. But by definition, if you can’t borrow any money, how can you run up a deficit?
If Congress refused to raise the debt limit, the government could only spend the money it was receiving through normal taxation. This would produce a social disaster. But that’s pretty much the definition of what it is to have no deficit, unless you’re reading a broken-down former newspaper like the New York Times.
For what it’s worth, last Thursday’s “crash course on all things debt ceiling” was an intellectual mess throughout; Cooper and Story were overmatched by the many overlooked questions they tried to tackle in their last-minute all-nighter. But the New York Times has long since ceased to function as a newspaper at all, let alone as a competent paper. In this case, the Times kept refusing, month after month, to discuss the most obvious aspects of this giant unfolding mess. A modern nation simply can’t function when its most famous “newspaper” works in this bizarre way.
That is especially true if the liberal world is too inept to notice.
This brings us back to Joe Nocera, who is very angry today—except for the obvious fact that he isn’t. Nocera is loudly calling names, accusing jihadists of waging a war. Nocera’s name-calling is quite skillful. But alas! Over the course of the past four months, he has shown that he, like the enterprise he rides in on, is good for little else.
Tomorrow—part 1: Krugman v. Will
A DISCUSSION YOU’VE NEVER HEARD! In a discussion you’ve never heard, Bruce Bartlett seconded Krugman:
FRIDAY, JULY 29, 2011
UPDATE/MONDAY, AUGUST 1: Assuming Congress keeps the rail lines open, we will be returning to full service on Tuesday, August 2.
It’s not a bad time to be pooling resources: We’re off on a mission of national import. Actually, we’re attending a wedding tomorrow. It’s not a bad time to be pooling resources! If the highways are still open, we’ll be back at the start of the week.
A DISCUSSION YOU’VE NEVER HEARD: How foolish is your national discourse?
This foolish:
The Washington Post is one of our most important “newspapers.” Yesterday, on its op-ed page, this ludicrous statement appeared:
PHILLIPS (7/28/11): As the founder of Tea Party Nation, I feel confident in saying that the Tea Party understands what so many in Washington seem to have forgotten: We do not have a debt crisis. We have a spending crisis. There is only one way you get to a debt crisis—you spend too much money.
That highlighted statement is dumb-beyond-stupid. The statement is utterly stupid. If you have tapioca in place of a brain, you can see that it makes no damn sense.
That statement is lame-beyond-gong show. And yet, it lies in the sweet spot of your nation’s clown-inspired political culture. We’ve been a low-IQ culture for decades now, with the career liberal world playing an active, well-compensated role in the process.
The sheer stupidity of that statement makes it familiar within our culture. But its point of view is also iconic: Our political culture is all about the denigration of taxes. The conservative and corporate worlds have built a multiverse of anti-tax theoretics, much of which is aggressively stupid. By way of contrast, the liberal world calls people racists and occasionally says it’s pro-choice.
After that, we nap.
The drumbeat of anti-tax dogmatics is familiar to every American ear. The liberal world has been loo lazy, too feckless, not quite poor enough to create an alternate story. But in the past week, we have seen two major players express views on taxation we found quite surprising. Their views are part of a discussion you have never heard.
The first such person is Paul Krugman. Last Friday, he appeared on the Charlie Rose show. As we noted a few days ago, he made the following statement:
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.
Krugman said we should dump the Bush tax cuts—and he said that we will need even more revenue after that! Regarding the need to dump all the Bush tax rates, we’ve seen that view expressed on-line—by Jonathan Chait, for instance. But we don’t think we’ve ever seen it discussed in a major news org. We’ve never seen that view debated or analyzed by a major newspaper or on a major news program.
Does Krugman’s prescription make sense? We don’t know. We’ve never seen it discussed! By way of contrast, we’ve heard every fool thing a mammal can say about the need to lower taxes. Judson Phillips stepped up in that column to remind us of this fact: There is no anti-tax statement so balls-out stupid that it won’t be afforded a prominent spot in our nation’s discourse.
Krugman says we need lots more revenue. But then, someone made a similar statement on Thursday evening’s Hardball. Chris Matthews was faking away as he always does—usually, with Joan doing cartwheels, splits and flips to tell us how great he is. On this occasion, Matthews’ guest was Bruce Bartlett, “former deputy assistant treasury secretary under the first George Bush and a policy adviser to Ronald Reagan.” Before long, Bartlett also endorsed a return to the Clinton tax rates:
MATTHEWS (7/27/11): It gets back to the numbers. A $14 trillion debt, half of it is from Bush, and almost half of that is from the tax cut. Another portion is from the prescription drug bill. And the whole rest of that really is from a lousy economy under Bush and these two wars he came up with.
BARTLETT: Well, that’s right. We—the Republicans keep saying that tax cuts are the key to prosperity. Well, the 2000s is evidence that that’s not true. And also we raised taxes in 1982. They said it would be a recession. We raised taxes again in 1993. They said it would be a recession. We had booming economies in the 1980s and 1990s. I think if we went back to the taxes we had the 80s and 90s, we’d be a lot better off.
MATTHEWS: What is the argument against the kind of tax policy— Well, let’s just say it again. It seems to me we had a heck of a great economy in the 90s, with a tax rate for people in the higher brackets of about 39.6, as opposed to 35, right?
BARTLETT: Right.
MATTHEWS: And that is the one that the rich bitch about, to use a crude term. And yet that didn’t hurt the economy and it helped balance the budget.
BARTLETT: Well, that’s right. And don’t forget also that Ronald Reagan raised the capital gains tax rate to 28 percent in 1986 and now it’s only 15 percent. And of course, the wealthier you are, the more of your income comes from capital gains.
MATTHEWS: Yes. Last night, we showed the 400 richest people in the country, whose average income is $270 million a year, pay about the same as a poor person pays. They pay about 18 percent.
BARTLETT: That’s right, of income taxes, that’s right.
MATTHEWS: Whereas the middle class and the upper middle class, who think they are the majority of the country, and they actually are, they’re paying a higher rate.
BARTLETT: That’s right. I don’t think there is any question that we would have positive economic effects if we went back to the Clinton-era tax rates.
Six days after Krugman endorsed the Clinton tax rates, Bartlett did the same. To watch the whole segment, click here.
(In fact, Matthews’ discussion the previous night seemed to concern all federal taxes, not just federal income tax. On each program—no surprise here!—he was too clueless to say.)
Is Bartlett right? Would it make sense to return to the Clinton tax rates? We’ll say it again: We don’t know. We’ve never seen it debated! You currently live in a country where every damn-fool statement about lowering taxes is rushed into our greatest newspapers—where the very idea of raising taxes is treated like Ross Perot’s crazy aunt, the one he keeps down in the basement.
Two more points, then we’re off:
In what way was Matthews faking (as always)? This is what this massive phony said as he continued:
MATTHEWS (continuing directly): Why don’t economists say this that you’re just saying? How come I need to drag you on the show?
Matthews has hosted Hardball for thirteen years. Until this week, he has never discussed such topics, as of course he knows. Neatly repurposed by MSNBC, he now pretends that he’s puzzled by this issue’s very low visibility.
This man is a consummate fraud. He knows why this general outlook has enjoyed a low visibility. He and his corporate owners helped keep it out of view for years—the corporate owners who made him rich as he worked to send George Bush to the White House. In 1999 and 2000, no broadcaster came close to Matthews as a criminally aggressive Bush hack.
One final note:
Joan will be out there doing back-flips about the greatness of Chris. “Gimme a C,” she’ll convincingly cry. “Gimme an H! Gimme an R-I-S!”
People like Walsh have also agreed to keep such naughty views smothered. And by the way, please recall what happened this week when Teresa Tritch made that long-overdue statement.
In Sunday’s New York Times, Teresa Tritch came out and said it! We will post her statement again. Her statement is very important, unless you want to live in a world defined by the world’s dumbest claims:
TRITCH (7/24/11): 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.
Say what? If the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule, “future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels?” If Tritch is right, our current “crisis” would end on the very day the Bush tax cuts expired!
Thanks to the work of the career liberal world, no one in this sprawling country has ever heard anyone say this.
As Andrew Leonard noted this week, a string of liberals jumped Tritch’s bones on Monday, pimping a slightly ill-advised graphic all around town. We liberals made her queen for a day. After that, things went quiet.
We liberals love it quiet.
But even when we were having our fun, what did none of our tribunes do? As far as we saw, none of them bothered to ask if Tritch was right in what she said! Just two weeks ago, after all, David Leonhardt published a claim that seemed to be quite different. But in the low-IQ world of the “career liberal,” shit like this don’t count:
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.
Who has it right, Leonhardt or Tritch? We can’t tell you, for obvious reasons. Instead, we offer this point:
You live in a defiantly low-IQ world. You live in a very dumb political culture; you have for many years. This world features aggressive players like Phillips, for whom no statement is too goddamned stupid. It also features fiery “career liberals;” they’re generally cast as the Washington Generals. They’re too lazy and feckless to care about much. Attention spans won’t be impressive.
People like Phillips push hard every day. The same is true of reviled Grover Norquist.
People like Phillips push hard every day. On your side?
Not so much.
UPDATE/MONDAY, AUGUST 1: Assuming Congress keeps the rail lines open, we will be returning to full service on Tuesday, August 2.
It’s not a bad time to be pooling resources: We’re off on a mission of national import. Actually, we’re attending a wedding tomorrow. It’s not a bad time to be pooling resources! If the highways are still open, we’ll be back at the start of the week.
A DISCUSSION YOU’VE NEVER HEARD: How foolish is your national discourse?
This foolish:
The Washington Post is one of our most important “newspapers.” Yesterday, on its op-ed page, this ludicrous statement appeared:
PHILLIPS (7/28/11): As the founder of Tea Party Nation, I feel confident in saying that the Tea Party understands what so many in Washington seem to have forgotten: We do not have a debt crisis. We have a spending crisis. There is only one way you get to a debt crisis—you spend too much money.
That highlighted statement is dumb-beyond-stupid. The statement is utterly stupid. If you have tapioca in place of a brain, you can see that it makes no damn sense.
That statement is lame-beyond-gong show. And yet, it lies in the sweet spot of your nation’s clown-inspired political culture. We’ve been a low-IQ culture for decades now, with the career liberal world playing an active, well-compensated role in the process.
The sheer stupidity of that statement makes it familiar within our culture. But its point of view is also iconic: Our political culture is all about the denigration of taxes. The conservative and corporate worlds have built a multiverse of anti-tax theoretics, much of which is aggressively stupid. By way of contrast, the liberal world calls people racists and occasionally says it’s pro-choice.
After that, we nap.
The drumbeat of anti-tax dogmatics is familiar to every American ear. The liberal world has been loo lazy, too feckless, not quite poor enough to create an alternate story. But in the past week, we have seen two major players express views on taxation we found quite surprising. Their views are part of a discussion you have never heard.
The first such person is Paul Krugman. Last Friday, he appeared on the Charlie Rose show. As we noted a few days ago, he made the following statement:
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.
Krugman said we should dump the Bush tax cuts—and he said that we will need even more revenue after that! Regarding the need to dump all the Bush tax rates, we’ve seen that view expressed on-line—by Jonathan Chait, for instance. But we don’t think we’ve ever seen it discussed in a major news org. We’ve never seen that view debated or analyzed by a major newspaper or on a major news program.
Does Krugman’s prescription make sense? We don’t know. We’ve never seen it discussed! By way of contrast, we’ve heard every fool thing a mammal can say about the need to lower taxes. Judson Phillips stepped up in that column to remind us of this fact: There is no anti-tax statement so balls-out stupid that it won’t be afforded a prominent spot in our nation’s discourse.
Krugman says we need lots more revenue. But then, someone made a similar statement on Thursday evening’s Hardball. Chris Matthews was faking away as he always does—usually, with Joan doing cartwheels, splits and flips to tell us how great he is. On this occasion, Matthews’ guest was Bruce Bartlett, “former deputy assistant treasury secretary under the first George Bush and a policy adviser to Ronald Reagan.” Before long, Bartlett also endorsed a return to the Clinton tax rates:
MATTHEWS (7/27/11): It gets back to the numbers. A $14 trillion debt, half of it is from Bush, and almost half of that is from the tax cut. Another portion is from the prescription drug bill. And the whole rest of that really is from a lousy economy under Bush and these two wars he came up with.
BARTLETT: Well, that’s right. We—the Republicans keep saying that tax cuts are the key to prosperity. Well, the 2000s is evidence that that’s not true. And also we raised taxes in 1982. They said it would be a recession. We raised taxes again in 1993. They said it would be a recession. We had booming economies in the 1980s and 1990s. I think if we went back to the taxes we had the 80s and 90s, we’d be a lot better off.
MATTHEWS: What is the argument against the kind of tax policy— Well, let’s just say it again. It seems to me we had a heck of a great economy in the 90s, with a tax rate for people in the higher brackets of about 39.6, as opposed to 35, right?
BARTLETT: Right.
MATTHEWS: And that is the one that the rich bitch about, to use a crude term. And yet that didn’t hurt the economy and it helped balance the budget.
BARTLETT: Well, that’s right. And don’t forget also that Ronald Reagan raised the capital gains tax rate to 28 percent in 1986 and now it’s only 15 percent. And of course, the wealthier you are, the more of your income comes from capital gains.
MATTHEWS: Yes. Last night, we showed the 400 richest people in the country, whose average income is $270 million a year, pay about the same as a poor person pays. They pay about 18 percent.
BARTLETT: That’s right, of income taxes, that’s right.
MATTHEWS: Whereas the middle class and the upper middle class, who think they are the majority of the country, and they actually are, they’re paying a higher rate.
BARTLETT: That’s right. I don’t think there is any question that we would have positive economic effects if we went back to the Clinton-era tax rates.
Six days after Krugman endorsed the Clinton tax rates, Bartlett did the same. To watch the whole segment, click here.
(In fact, Matthews’ discussion the previous night seemed to concern all federal taxes, not just federal income tax. On each program—no surprise here!—he was too clueless to say.)
Is Bartlett right? Would it make sense to return to the Clinton tax rates? We’ll say it again: We don’t know. We’ve never seen it debated! You currently live in a country where every damn-fool statement about lowering taxes is rushed into our greatest newspapers—where the very idea of raising taxes is treated like Ross Perot’s crazy aunt, the one he keeps down in the basement.
Two more points, then we’re off:
In what way was Matthews faking (as always)? This is what this massive phony said as he continued:
MATTHEWS (continuing directly): Why don’t economists say this that you’re just saying? How come I need to drag you on the show?
Matthews has hosted Hardball for thirteen years. Until this week, he has never discussed such topics, as of course he knows. Neatly repurposed by MSNBC, he now pretends that he’s puzzled by this issue’s very low visibility.
This man is a consummate fraud. He knows why this general outlook has enjoyed a low visibility. He and his corporate owners helped keep it out of view for years—the corporate owners who made him rich as he worked to send George Bush to the White House. In 1999 and 2000, no broadcaster came close to Matthews as a criminally aggressive Bush hack.
One final note:
Joan will be out there doing back-flips about the greatness of Chris. “Gimme a C,” she’ll convincingly cry. “Gimme an H! Gimme an R-I-S!”
People like Walsh have also agreed to keep such naughty views smothered. And by the way, please recall what happened this week when Teresa Tritch made that long-overdue statement.
In Sunday’s New York Times, Teresa Tritch came out and said it! We will post her statement again. Her statement is very important, unless you want to live in a world defined by the world’s dumbest claims:
TRITCH (7/24/11): 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.
Say what? If the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule, “future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels?” If Tritch is right, our current “crisis” would end on the very day the Bush tax cuts expired!
Thanks to the work of the career liberal world, no one in this sprawling country has ever heard anyone say this.
As Andrew Leonard noted this week, a string of liberals jumped Tritch’s bones on Monday, pimping a slightly ill-advised graphic all around town. We liberals made her queen for a day. After that, things went quiet.
We liberals love it quiet.
But even when we were having our fun, what did none of our tribunes do? As far as we saw, none of them bothered to ask if Tritch was right in what she said! Just two weeks ago, after all, David Leonhardt published a claim that seemed to be quite different. But in the low-IQ world of the “career liberal,” shit like this don’t count:
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.
Who has it right, Leonhardt or Tritch? We can’t tell you, for obvious reasons. Instead, we offer this point:
You live in a defiantly low-IQ world. You live in a very dumb political culture; you have for many years. This world features aggressive players like Phillips, for whom no statement is too goddamned stupid. It also features fiery “career liberals;” they’re generally cast as the Washington Generals. They’re too lazy and feckless to care about much. Attention spans won’t be impressive.
People like Phillips push hard every day. The same is true of reviled Grover Norquist.
People like Phillips push hard every day. On your side?
Not so much.
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