Sunday Morning Comin’ Down: Part One

A short primer on how Newt Gingrich lies to America.

Sometime later, assuming the Tullemore Dew holds out, I’ll have a “Part Two…” post up, followed by a “What did 2010 mean to Liberals?” piece.

For now, lets us consider briefly the case of Newt “Serial adulterer, pathological liar and disgraced former-Speaker-of-the-House-who-hasn’t-held-office-since-Bryant-Gumbel-was-hosting-‘The Today Show’" Gingrich, who, on Fox News Sunday, continued the longest, least-interesting and most-cringeworthy presidential candidacy striptease in modern American history.

Not that he won’t be successful -- after all, whoever Rupert Murdoch wants as the Republican nominee, Rupert will get -- but watching one of Roger Ailes’ employees talk to another of Roger Ailes’ employees about the electoral viability of himself and all the other little wooden dummies in Big Daddy Rupert’s ventriloquist act was at once hilarious and –- when you realize how many millions of idiots in this country take this farce as gospel –- horrifying.

He's almost certain he'll run, but he really wants to pray over it with his blowup-sex-doll third wife.

Or something.

Newt “Obama is ruled by the ghost of Luo Tribesmen” Gingrich also dutifully repeated the GOP Talking Point of the Day –- the same one obediently repeated virtually verbatim by Mike Murphy, David Gregory and President Mitch McConnell on “Meet the Press”: that Liberal ideology has been defeated forever, so the Kenyan Usurper needs to abandon the crazy Liberal base and move to the Center!

Right now!

Good times.

However, one particular piece of perfidious claptrap offered up by Newt “Muslims are Nazis” Gingrich was about job training programs. Specifically, Newt is very angry that unemployment insurance is offered to just anyone who is unemployed, and not directly tied quid-pro-quo-style to a job-training program.

So that, in Newt’s words, “You don't get money for doing nothing.”

This kind of head-fake is a textbook example of the classic “Gingrich is a Genius” dodge:

Step 1: On a friendly talk show, between various lies and slanders, toss out some third-tier, wingnut notion that sounds plausible and think-y as long as you don't examine it in any way.

Step 2: Pack the words “basically” and “fundamentally” around it a hundred times.

Step 3: Sit back as the Villagers oh-and-ah at your daring genius.

Step 4: Rinse and repeat forever

Well, obviously Newt does know something about never missing a meal or a payday in good times and bad. But since not all of us can get rich destroying America by wrapping ourselves in 9/11 and using the fading glory of our former office to pimp our latest racist conspiracy theory on the GOP propaganda network or our latest godawful hack book to the wingnut “Hate of the Month Club”…the rest of us have to deal with life and work in the Real World.

And out here in that Real World, several, specific festeringly mendacious aspects of Gingrich’s bold “Fuck the Unemployed” strategy caught my eye.

Fair warning: This is one off those times when -- since I have no editors -- I am free to get my wonk on as hard and freaky as I like. If that isn't your cup of coffee, feel free to skip on past it. Believe me, I am can go on for days about this sort of stuff, but out of common courtesy will let my inner geek run wild for just a few column inches.

So, first, the unemployment insurance (UI) bit:

1. UI is not available to just anyone: you only qualify by losing your job in under very specific circumstances.

2. Unemployment insurance is just that: insurance. A typical worker has spent decades paying into it precisely so he or she can collect it when they need it.

3. To receive UI, you can’t “do nothing”. You have to look for work. Every week. And prove it. Every week.

4. UI pays a pittance. A bare survival stipend to keep food on the table. That is all.

5. Contrary to the age-old “welfare queen”-baiting racism and “Poor = Lazy/ Rich = Virtuous” class warfare meme of the Right, the average unemployed worker wants to work. Typically, he or she is out there every fucking day knocking on doors and being told “no”, applying online to companies from which they never hear back, working their ever-fraying network of friends and former colleagues, sending out hundreds of resumes. They fail because…

6. There are no fucking jobs.

Also too...

7. If you are over 45 there is a terrifyingly high probability that our economy will never produce another substantive job for you again.

Good times...

Second, the job training bit :

1. From the Trade Adjustment Act to the Workforce Investment Act, there already are lots of job-training programs funded by the government with most of the money going to the recently unemployed.

2. U.S. job-training programs have traditionally been massively under-funded, and have never had enough staff or money to help even a fraction of those who needed it.

3. Under the Bush Administration, these already-inadequate programs were repeatedly cut and restrictions on them were repeatedly increased.

4. Under the Bush Administration, these programs aggressively shifted from the previous model (which emphasized exactly the sort of training that Gingrich now touts) to a “work first” model, that permitted training only as a last resort.

5. Under the Obama Stimulus Package (which the Right keeps insisting has inflicted more horrors on America than six Hitlers) money for job-training programs for the unemployed went way, way up.

Guess what happened?

• Local governments had to hire a ton of new staff to handle the expected influx of clients, to make sure the training programs weren’t scams, to track the outcomes, and generally to manage an already-complex system that had just gotten 50% bigger overnight.

• The newly-expanded programs filled up with unemployed people almost immediately.

• The unemployed people flocked into training in huge numbers.

Then guess what happened next?

• Because the funding was only temporary, within a year local governments had to fire many of the new staff they’d hired. Which effectively doubled the workload on those remaining behind.

• Because local governments are broke, they had to fire even more staff. Which – when you add in other budget-balancing tricks like mandatory overtime and unpaid furlough days -- effectively re-doubled the workload on those whose survived the layoff.

• Meanwhile, those record numbers of unemployed Americans who were sent off to training (using one-time-only dough for which they can now never qualify again) started to graduate, and the now-decimated local government staff became responsible for finding them jobs. And not just any jobs…

• The rules say that if you don’t find those people jobs that pay (on average) at least 85% of what they were making before -- and if those people don’t keep those jobs for at least six months -- your program is considered to have failed.

Guess what happened next?

• A whole lot of those unemployed people – maybe most of them -- have become stranded in the system: staying unemployed, or taking crappy jobs well below their previous salaries and which, like as not, have nothing to do with the training they just received courtesy of the American taxpayer..

Why?

Is it because they are lazy?

Don't want to work?

Are ineducable?

Want to just loaf and live large off the couple of hundred bucks they get a week?

No.

They are still unemployed because there are still no fucking jobs.

C'mon people, try to keep up.

Now there are any number of other dorkish dimensions to this that I could bore you with, but for now it is sufficient to understand that Newt Gingrich fully well knows everything I have just outlined above, but the credulous boobs who get their Reality from Fox almost certainly do not.

Which is why – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – the rubes on the Right continue to believe that the same old class warfare swill that Newt "It doesn't matter what I do” Gingrich is constantly ladling out

somehow marks him as is a Deep Thinker.

Coming in Part Two: Is there – please God -- a Theoretical Upper Limit to how fucking unspeakably bad “Meet The Press" can get?