Sunday, August 14, 2011
Special report: Still amazed after all these years! - Part 3 continues from the key board of the incomprable Bob Somersby and his mordant chuckling staff of elven prophets
PART 3—QUICKLY, YOU BAIL (permalink): For unknown reasons, the editors of the New York Times were “amazed” by the composition of the recent debt limit deal.
We know—it’s just a figure of speech. But the editors used it two separate times, saying how amazed they were by the fact that the debt limit deal included nothing but spending cuts. Beyond that, they seemed amazed by an obvious fact—“rationality” ain’t in command:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (8/7/11): 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.
The next round of deficit reduction can’t be restricted to spending cuts, the editors quite sensibly said. Soon, they even noted an oft-ignored fact about the way we got here:
“Asserting that deficits can be tamed with spending cuts alone ignores that the Bush tax cuts—costing $1.8 trillion from 2002 to 2009—are a big reason we got into this deep hole.”
On its news pages, the New York Times has made little attempt to explain the role played by the Bush tax cuts in creating the current deficits. In fairness, current federal deficits approach that $1.8 trillion figure on an annual basis; the Bush tax cuts, all by themselves, did not create this mess. But in a world where few things ever get explained, we’re willing to settle for dollops.
The editors were quite correct when they called attention to our current tax regimen. And land o Goshen! As they continued, they engaged in some shocking conduct.
First, they cited a basic fact—a basic fact which is rarely cited. Then, the editors seemed to make a highly shocking proposal. They seemed to make their shocking proposal in big bold-faced capital letters:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL: Here is the bottom line. There is no economically sensible or politically honest way to address the deficit without also increasing revenues and reforming the tax code. The major challenges are these:
LET THE BUSH CUTS EXPIRE Mr. Obama vowed to let the high-end tax cuts (for people making more than $250,000) expire in 2010. But in a preview of the debt fight, he agreed to extend the cuts for two more years when Republicans held unemployment benefits and other measures hostage.
Letting all of the cuts expire at the end of 2012 would save $3.8 trillion over the next decade. Letting the tax cuts expire for those making more than $250,000 would save $700 billion. That would make a real dent in the $2.4 trillion in total deficit reduction envisioned in the debt limit deal.
A sensible and fair approach would be to let the high-end tax cuts expire as scheduled, but keep the other tax cuts for another year. That would keep more cash in the hands of people most likely to spend it and prop up consumer demand while the economy is weak.
Good lord! Did it really happen? The editors cited a basic fact, a basic fact which is rarely cited: Letting all the Bush tax cuts expire would save $3.8 trillion over the next decade! They shrank from stating a second fact. All by itself, this would approach the $4 trillion in deficit cuts which has become our nation’s Holy Grail!
That’s right: If we returned to the Clinton tax rates, the current debt crisis would pretty much end! The editors shrank from stating this basic fact. But in bold caps, they seemed to make a daring proposal: LET THE BUSH TAX CUTS EXPIRE.
Let the Bush tax cuts expire, the fiery editors seemed to say. In a more detailed manner, they went on to say the following: “A sensible and fair approach would be to let the high-end tax cuts expire as scheduled, but keep the other tax cuts for another year.”
Good lord! Had they really said it? Had the editors really proposed that all the Bush tax cuts should expire? It certainly looked like they had done so! Once again, just take a look at those big bold capital letters!
But actually no, the editors hadn’t made that daring proposal. Instantly, they bailed on their own apparent proposal; just like that, they took it back, as you can see if you simply read the rest of their editorial. Those big bold caps were big and bold—but the editors at the New York Times aren’t. No sooner had they proposed their idea than they started speed-walking it back.
Would it be a good idea to return to the Clinton tax rates? We’re not sure; like you, we’ve rarely seen this notion debated. But if you want to understand why spending cuts keep winning out in our budget debates—if you want to understand why the editors shouldn’t be so “amazed” by such outcomes—we’ll suggest that you come back tomorrow, when we’ll sadly walk you through the next things the editors said.
Should the editors be amazed when spending cuts rule our budget debates? Why would anyone be amazed? For the past forty years, that result has been built into the DNA of our national pseudo-debate.
We thought that fact was made quite clear in the rest of the eds’ editorial.
Tomorrow: Taking it back
QUICKLY, YOU BAIL! The editors made a daring proposal. Then, they took it back:
THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, 2011
Krugman finds a fail/We’ve seen rivers: Brother Krugman was right on the money, using one of the most intriguing phrases we’ve run across in some time.
Yesterday, in this blog post, Krugman went over familiar ground, describing the breakdown of the world’s economists in the face of recent disasters. “[P]olicy makers almost everywhere have failed dismally, and seem determined not to take on board the lessons of experience, either historical or what we’ve learned the past few years,” the Nobel prize winner gloomily wrote. At the end of his gloomy post, he coined an intriguing phrase:
KRUGMAN (8/10/11): I’m still trying to make sense of this global intellectual failure. But the results are not in question: we are making a total mess of a solvable problem, with consequences that will haunt us for decades to come.
We have suffered a “global intellectual failure,” Krugman gloomily judged. We’re inclined to believe him. Here’s why:
When it comes to economics, we aren’t equipped to judge that claim. But as we’ve noted, we’ve observed this same type of failure among our “educational experts” for decades. Let’s revisit one example, one we’ve discussed in the past:
Uniformly, the nation’s “educational experts” cite the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the NAEP) as the “gold standard” in educational testing. And there’s more! With great regularity, educational experts apply a rule of thumb to scores on the NAEP’s standard scale: A gain of ten points roughly equals one academic year.
But uh-oh! If we apply that rule of thumb to NAEP results of the past forty years, we see that black kids and Hispanic kids have made remarkable progress in both reading and math. That’s also true if we apply that rule of thumb to results since the mid-1990s. In a dimly rational world, this would seem like good news.
But that’s where the global intellectual failure comes in! We have never seen an “educational expert” note these rather obvious facts in a major news org. Instead of that, as if by rote, our “educational experts” keep reciting a standard narrative in which our schools have grotesquely failed. Even liberals, who stand to gain by debunking that narrative, are too caught up in the giant intellectual failure to call attention to those NAEP scores—the scores our “experts” all endorse, even as they refuse to tell the world what those test scores say.
Go ahead! Explain that conduct from a gang of “educational experts!” For ourselves, we’d summarize the matter this way: We’re still trying to make sense of this global intellectual failure.
(For the record: Those “educational experts” have also been caught by surprise by a wide range of cheating scandals, on both the state and local levels. They never seem able to spot these problems as they develop, even after many others have done so. And they only acknowledge these scandals to the extent that they’re forced. They’re still hiding the fact that a statewide scandal was revealed in the state of New York last year.)
For decades, we have observed a global intellectual failure from our “educational experts.” When Krugman describes the same type of failure from the world’s economists, we are inclined to assume he is right. We’ve seen such global failure before! Or, as we have tended to put it: Our “educational experts” aren’t.
How to explain such global failure? You might as well not even try; it’s virtually impossible to get other folk to believe in such manifestations. It’s counterintuitive to be told that the world’s most famous experts aren’t—that they are, in effect, a gang of Potemkins who have been cast in a role. Trust us: Krugman will never get the world to believe that he’s seeing this matter correctly. Denial rises all around, insisting this can’t be the case.
It’s the old tale of the emperor’s clothes. Your world will never see that its authority figures are frauds. As proof of that, consider the fact that Thomas L. Friedman and Maureen Dowd still type at the New York Times.
Yesterday, Thomas L. Friedman wrote a column for the ages. He only failed to imagine root beer coming from water faucets (Will Durst) and ten-dollar bills raining down from the sky. Question: Did the nation’s largest blowhard spend ten minutes on this column—or was it perhaps fifteen?
Thomas L. Friedman keeps crying for help. And yet, the wider world will never be able to see that he has become a parody.
Which brings us to yesterday’s column by the hapless Dowd. Dowd has actually gone to Des Moines, the better to cite the Butter Cow at the Iowa State Fair in her opening paragraph. For ourselves, we were struck by this paragraph in her generally useless column—by that one highlighted word:
DOWD (8/10/11): Obama’s response on Monday to Friday’s Standard & Poor’s downgrade and to the 22 Navy Seal commandos and 8 other soldiers killed by a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan was once more too little, too late. It was just like his belated, ineffectual response on the BP oil spill and his reaction to the would-be Christmas Day bomber; it took him three days on vacation in Hawaii to speak about the terrorist incident when the country was scared about national security, and then he spent the next week callously shuttling from the podium to the golf course.
“Callously?”
Go ahead—read that paragraph carefully! In Dowd’s view, it was “callous” when Obama played golf in the week after “the would-be Christmas Day bomber” struck—or rather, after he failed to strike.
No one was killed and no one was injured. But it was “callous” to play golf in the following week!
This new view moves beyond Dowd’s real-time judgments, which were also typically fatuous. “When he failed to immediately step up to the microphones in Hawaii after the Christmas terror and thank the passengers for bravely foiling the plot that his intelligence community had failed to see, President Cool reached the limits of cool,” this global intellectual failure wrote on January 10, 2010. “No Drama Obama is reticent about displays of emotion. The Spock in him needs to exert mental and emotional control...But it's not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.”
In real time, it “wasn’t OK”—and Dowd was throwing her nicknames around. By now, the conduct has become “callous.” Then, as now, you lived in a world which couldn’t spot what has always been clear:
Maureen Dowd is a world-class fool. And yet, she remains in a post of high journalistic authority.
We’ll assume that Krugman is right—but the world will never follow him there. By the way: Your culture’s journalistic conventions are built to produce these global fails. If you doubt that, read this post by Jonathan Chait.
On yesterday’s Diane Rehm program, a “guest expert” said a very dumb thing. But Chait didn’t say who the “guest expert” was! By the rules of DC “intellectual elites,” fellows like Chait never will.
From such seeds, mighty oaks tend to grow. Krugman has coined a new name for such trees: “global intellectual failure.”
Will the real guest expert please stand up: Out of curiosity, we went to the Rehm site, hoping to see who the guest expert was. We’ll bet on Rothenberg, though it could be Ornstein—or even for that matter Fallows.
We’d say that Morgenson could have been named. But who knows? It could also be her.
Special report: Still amazed after all these years!
Somersby continues to sound the clarion call - will any one choose to listen? Does any one hear?
PART 2—NOT THAT MANY NEW TAXES (permalink): The editors are still amazed—still amazed after all these years. On Sunday, they authored these puzzling thoughts about the debt limit deal:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (8/6/11): The Truth About Taxes
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.
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 just a figure of speech. But given the arc of American politics, why would the editors be “amazed” when spending cuts win, and tax hikes lose, in a pivotal budget fight? Why would anyone be surprised by that sort of outcome?
For decades, one side has fought an aggressive messaging war about the need for no new taxes—ever, in any circumstance. In “response,” the other side has endlessly fiddled and diddled. What messaging stands in opposition to that famous old battle cry, “No new taxes?” Have you ever heard the messages which were designed to counter this cry?
In fairness, the editors seem to know about the power of that hoary old anti-tax message—the messaging which has driven our politics over the past thirty years. Sure enough! In their next paragraph, they alluded to same—and they pandered a bit to us rubes:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (continuing directly): Standard & Poor’s made its judgment about both the political standoff and the all-cuts, no-new-revenues deal on Friday when it lowered the country’s long-term debt rating one notch, down from AAA. And while “no new taxes” pledges are almost always big political winners, Americans are also figuring out that the country cannot keep on this way. According to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll, 63 percent support raising taxes on households that earn more than $250,000 a year to help address the deficit.
“No new taxes” pledges are almost always big political winners! Why then were the eds amazed when this messaging won out again?
Before they were done with this editorial, the editors would recommend a large tax increase—before they panicked and took it all back. But why is it so hard to talk about tax hikes in this country?
Why is it hard to talk about taxes? Just look at the paragraph in which the eds applaud us, the American people, for starting to figure it out.
“No new taxes” is almost always a winner, the editors say. But after that, they praise us rubes, saying this:
“Americans are also figuring out that the country cannot keep on this way. According to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll, 63 percent support raising taxes on households that earn more than $250,000 a year to help address the deficit.”
They praise us for supporting tax hikes—on upper-end earners only! But do you remember what Brother Krugman told Charlie a few weeks ago?
KRUGMAN (7/22/11): What the long-run solution to the U.S. budget problem is, is controlling health-care costs. It means more of the kinds of things that were already in the Affordable Care Act. A lot of serious, serious efforts to bring the rate of growth of health-care costs down, bending the curve—horrible metaphor, but bending the curve, which we know can be done because other countries do it. And then we need revenue. In the end, we’re going to need three, four percent of GDP in additional revenue. You can get some of that by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, but we’re going to need more than that.
So in fact I have a prediction. If David [Brooks] and I are still around here 25 years from now, I predict that we will have a much more controlled health-care system that sort of matches the cost performance of other countries, and we’ll have something like a value-added tax to increase revenue. And that is how America will be solvent in the end.
Say what? Given the poverty of our “discourse,” it’s no longer clear what someone means when he discusses “the Bush tax cuts.” Given the power of liberal avoidance, the phrase is often used, at this point, to refer to the upper-end tax cuts only. That said, Krugman seemed to be saying that we will need a lot more revenue in the future. Of course, that’s what Bruce Bartlett said on Hardball just a few days later:
BARTLETT (7/27/11): 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.
[...]
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.
Rather clearly, Bartlett was talking about all the Clinton-era tax rates, not just those on high earners.
Do we need to return to the Clinton-era tax rates? Here at THE HOWLER, we don’t really know; like everyone else in this brain-drained land, we’ve rarely seen the question discussed. We live within a political culture which is built around the avoidance of serious tax debate. No one is willing to conduct frank discussions—least of all the New York Times editors, who found themselves “amazed” last week when spending cuts won out again.
Those editors! They praised us rubes for the way we’re willing to restore the Clinton tax rates on high earners only. But would that restoration be enough? Krugman and Bartlett don’t seem to think so—and the editors seem to get weak in the knees whenever they think about anything else.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at the way the editors bailed when they made their own tax increase proposal. “Not that many new taxes!” So the editors seemed to cry.
Why be amazed when spending cuts win if that is the other side’s message?
Tomorrow: An instant retraction
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (8/6/11): The Truth About Taxes
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.
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 just a figure of speech. But given the arc of American politics, why would the editors be “amazed” when spending cuts win, and tax hikes lose, in a pivotal budget fight? Why would anyone be surprised by that sort of outcome?
For decades, one side has fought an aggressive messaging war about the need for no new taxes—ever, in any circumstance. In “response,” the other side has endlessly fiddled and diddled. What messaging stands in opposition to that famous old battle cry, “No new taxes?” Have you ever heard the messages which were designed to counter this cry?
In fairness, the editors seem to know about the power of that hoary old anti-tax message—the messaging which has driven our politics over the past thirty years. Sure enough! In their next paragraph, they alluded to same—and they pandered a bit to us rubes:
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (continuing directly): Standard & Poor’s made its judgment about both the political standoff and the all-cuts, no-new-revenues deal on Friday when it lowered the country’s long-term debt rating one notch, down from AAA. And while “no new taxes” pledges are almost always big political winners, Americans are also figuring out that the country cannot keep on this way. According to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll, 63 percent support raising taxes on households that earn more than $250,000 a year to help address the deficit.
“No new taxes” pledges are almost always big political winners! Why then were the eds amazed when this messaging won out again?
Before they were done with this editorial, the editors would recommend a large tax increase—before they panicked and took it all back. But why is it so hard to talk about tax hikes in this country?
Why is it hard to talk about taxes? Just look at the paragraph in which the eds applaud us, the American people, for starting to figure it out.
“No new taxes” is almost always a winner, the editors say. But after that, they praise us rubes, saying this:
“Americans are also figuring out that the country cannot keep on this way. According to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll, 63 percent support raising taxes on households that earn more than $250,000 a year to help address the deficit.”
They praise us for supporting tax hikes—on upper-end earners only! But do you remember what Brother Krugman told Charlie a few weeks ago?
KRUGMAN (7/22/11): What the long-run solution to the U.S. budget problem is, is controlling health-care costs. It means more of the kinds of things that were already in the Affordable Care Act. A lot of serious, serious efforts to bring the rate of growth of health-care costs down, bending the curve—horrible metaphor, but bending the curve, which we know can be done because other countries do it. And then we need revenue. In the end, we’re going to need three, four percent of GDP in additional revenue. You can get some of that by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, but we’re going to need more than that.
So in fact I have a prediction. If David [Brooks] and I are still around here 25 years from now, I predict that we will have a much more controlled health-care system that sort of matches the cost performance of other countries, and we’ll have something like a value-added tax to increase revenue. And that is how America will be solvent in the end.
Say what? Given the poverty of our “discourse,” it’s no longer clear what someone means when he discusses “the Bush tax cuts.” Given the power of liberal avoidance, the phrase is often used, at this point, to refer to the upper-end tax cuts only. That said, Krugman seemed to be saying that we will need a lot more revenue in the future. Of course, that’s what Bruce Bartlett said on Hardball just a few days later:
BARTLETT (7/27/11): 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.
[...]
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.
Rather clearly, Bartlett was talking about all the Clinton-era tax rates, not just those on high earners.
Do we need to return to the Clinton-era tax rates? Here at THE HOWLER, we don’t really know; like everyone else in this brain-drained land, we’ve rarely seen the question discussed. We live within a political culture which is built around the avoidance of serious tax debate. No one is willing to conduct frank discussions—least of all the New York Times editors, who found themselves “amazed” last week when spending cuts won out again.
Those editors! They praised us rubes for the way we’re willing to restore the Clinton tax rates on high earners only. But would that restoration be enough? Krugman and Bartlett don’t seem to think so—and the editors seem to get weak in the knees whenever they think about anything else.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at the way the editors bailed when they made their own tax increase proposal. “Not that many new taxes!” So the editors seemed to cry.
Why be amazed when spending cuts win if that is the other side’s message?
Tomorrow: An instant retraction
NOT THAT MANY NEW TAXES! Fearful editors praised us rubes, then bailed on their own tax plan:
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10, 2011
The pitiful state of expertise/Deflated reputation edition: The state of expertise in your country is extremely poor.
No, we’re not talking about the pitiful column Thomas L. Friedman phoned in last night. (Self-parody plainly rules at the Times.) We’re not talking about the way Standard & Poor’s is saying it shouldn’t have to report all its computational errors. (“S.&P., Accused of Faulty Math, Fights Error Disclosure Rule.” For a comical time, click here. )
Please forget about Thomas L. Friedman. Instead, consider what happened when a different Pulitzer winner tried to fact-check a pair of familiar claims.
The Pulitzer winner to whom we refer is Politifact, the prize-winning web site. In this pitiful and undated post, P-fact attempted to check a pair of claims by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK). Coburn had spoken on Meet the Press. These are the things he said:
COBURN (7/24/11): David, everybody's talking about the symptoms of our problem instead of the real disease. The government's twice the size it was ten years ago. It's 30 percent bigger than it was when President Obama became president.
The problem is, is we're spending way too much money, and it's not hard to cut it without hurting entitlement benefits. But we don't have anybody that wants to do that without getting a tax increase.
“The government's twice the size it was ten years ago. It's 30 percent bigger than it was when President Obama became president.” At present, these are very familiar talking-points (see below). They are used to spread panic about an alleged mammoth increase in federal spending.
On that Meet the Press program, David Gregory let these claims go. For better or worse, Politifact decided to fact-check Coburn’s statements.
Alas! In its pitiful first post, Politifact said this: “Coburn is entirely right about federal outlays doubling over 10 years.” But uh-oh! Soon, the site was retracting its judgment. Incredibly, this was the start of its explanation:
“UPDATE: After we posted this story, a number of readers wrote or tweeted us to point out that we hadn’t adjusted federal outlays either for inflation or for the size of the economy.”
They hadn’t adjusted for inflation! The state of expertise in this country is extremely poor.
After adjusting for inflation, Politifact offered a new assessment. They bumped Coburn’s claims back to “half-true,” for reasons they explain in their second post. (We think they’re still being generous.) But good God! What does it mean when a Pulitzer-winning fact-check site doesn’t know enough to adjust for inflation before getting tweeted by readers?
It means you have a Potemkin press corps, manned by Potemkin journalists.
Sorry, but no: You can’t sensibly compare such amounts over time without adjusting for inflation. Would you compare the temperature in Moscow to the temperature in Dallas without adjusting for Celsius v. Fahrenheit?
In some cases, you might even want to adjust for population growth as you compare spending over time. And a full assessment of Coburn’s claims would involve a wide range of factors. But who would make a ten-year spending comparison without making that most basic adjustment? What does it mean when our brightest “news orgs” conduct their business this way?
At this site, we have sometimes noted how much trouble our “journalists” have with that basic concept—inflation. The inability to handle this basic factor lay at the heart of a topic which helped launched this site—the press corps’ groaning failure, in the mid-1990s, to deal with the brain-dead, two-year debate about GOP Medicare cuts. Inflation’s a very basic factor—and yet, it seems to confound the “press corps” on a regular basis. It caught Politifact by surprise in just the past few weeks.
(We’d be more precise, but the fact-checking site doesn’t traffic in dates.)
Has federal spending risen by thirty percent since Obama took office? At present, the claim is very familiar; it’s used to spread the idea that wild-eyed spending has occurred since Obama took office. It isn’t just Coburn making that claim! Just last weekend, the Washington Post published this letter from a corporatist spin-tank:
LETTER TO THE WASHINGTON POST (8/6/11): Richard Cohen fretted that Tea Party activists have "shrunk the government." He need not worry. Federal spending has gone from $2.9 trillion in 2008 to $3.8 trillion in 2011. Thirty percent spending growth in three years is hardly shrinkage. Even under the Boehner plan, federal spending will continue to increase every year for at least the next decade.
[...]
Ryan Young, Washington
The writer is a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute
Should the Post have published that letter? We’re not sure! Should the Post mix Fahrenheit temps with Celsius? But then, the New York Times went the Post one better last month, publishing this op-ed column by Grover Norquist:
NORQUIST (7/22/11): Read My Lips: No New Taxes
The Taxpayer Protection Pledge has received increased attention as the Aug. 2 deadline for raising the debt ceiling approaches. My organization, Americans for Tax Reform, created the pledge in 1986 as a simple, written commitment by a candidate or elected official that he or she will oppose, and vote against, tax increases. Over the years many candidates and elected officials have signed the pledge, including 236 current members of the House of Representatives and 41 current senators.
[...]
The problem to be solved is not the deficit; it is overspending. Federal spending in the 2008 fiscal year was $2.9 trillion, and Washington will now spend $3.8 trillion in the fiscal year that ends on Sept. 30. Raising taxes is what politicians do instead of reforming and reducing the cost of government. Advocates of larger government prefer to talk about deficits rather than spending. Why? Because there are two solutions to a deficit problem: spend less or raise taxes. The issue, in other words, isn't the pledge; it's Washington's inability to deal with its own overspending. There is only one fix for a spending problem: spend less.
Should the Times have published that piece? We’re not sure. Is it a good thing when a newspaper’s readers are misled and thus confused?
These claims are technically accurate—and they’re highly misleading. But then, such claims rule all aspects of our public discourse, in much the way Al Gore explained among the Aspens last week (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/9/11). It’s easy to play the public for fools when the state of expertise is so poor. This has been the reliable norm for a very long time.
This practice doesn’t work out real well. If you doubt that, take a good look around.
Special report: Still amazed after all these years!
Thank the Gods - Somersby starts a new series - enough of this discoursed undiscoursed thang!
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
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
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
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