Sunday Morning Comin' Down

"Size Matters" edition.

This weekend at the Mouse Circus" "Meet the Press" tried to quantify just exactly how hopelessly stupid the average GOP voter is.

GOP stooge Ed "Ratzo" Gillespie opined

that the "The Uppity Negro Called White America 'Lazy' Lie" that Rick Perry is pouring money into isn't really a lie because the Uppity Negro actually used the word "lazy" in a sentence.

Meanwhile, slightly more moderate GOP sock puppet Mike Murphy was on to say that he while he could not defend this particular lie, when you pile all the lies into a big heap they magically transform into some kind of overall sensibility that makes Barack Obama looks like Jimmy "Malaise" Carter.

So while Newt Gingrich is a hateful "political sociopath" (h/t Dee Dee Myers) whose decades of lies form a trail as long and bright as the tail Halley's comet, his surge is perfectly predictable. After all, he does use big words, sneers constantly and calls the press "Liberals" and the president a Commie, and what more is required among the Pig People?

Later, David Gregory once again riffed on corrupt insiderism behind the fact that New Gingrich was hugely well-paid to shill for the housing industry...and once again failed to mention that his own wife was also a very well-paid executive in that industry at the same time (from Blue Gal at Crooks & Liars):

...

Thursday night on Last Word, David Gregory was invited on to promote his web-only show "Pass with David Gregory." I guess the "pass" is, "I'll pass on mentioning, in all my Freddie / Fannie investigations, that my wife, Beth Wilkinson, was one of the four top executives in Fannie Mae who resigned as the federal government took it into receivership in 2008."

I'm not accusing Beth Wilkinson of corruption or vice. She's clearly an accomplished attorney, and she joined Fannie as Dodd-Frank was being passed. I have no access to what she did or did not do as a Fannie Mae VP.

But then David Gregory comes on a television show and says (at the 2:22 mark)

The background's important: Frannie Mae and Freddie Mac are quasi-public/private agencies -- they survived, and they made a great deal of money, because they worked the Hill. But they went way beyond working the Hill -- they had the Hill by the throat. This is Republicans, this is Democrats, both sides of the aisle, made a lot of money through these companies! So, that's the backdrop...

Okay, David, but where in the "backdrop" is the fact that your wife was executive vice-president and general counsel of Fannie Mae when they stopped being "quasi-private" and got bailed out by the taxpayer?

The Georgetown cocktail circuit that lets this kind of no-transparency BS stand for watchdog media is, ahem,99 percent of the problem. They come from a world where David Gregory's wife's planned purchase of Jimmy Choo's for spring got splashed on the pages of Washingtonian Magazine, at exactly the same time that Newt collected 30K a month from Freddie Mac for history lessons. And the GE-owned "liberal network" doesn't see fit to mention it?

...

I'm so old, I actually remember when our Debauched Media Overlords could whip themselves into self-righteous frenzies using nothing but the words "even the appearance of impropriety" as their flail.

But of course that was long ago, when Presidential Penises walked the Earth.

But the slightly larger story was Paul Krugman's appearance on "This Week...". After breaking Villager rule Number One by once again savaging his New York Times colleagues in print (sans names, but if you can't figure out the players in Professor Krugman's roman-a-club, you're not really trying) the good people at ABC decided to even the odds by stacking three of their most reliable Conservative tacking dummies -- the sodden Peggy Noonan, the vinegary George Will and the cipherish ""Insert Conservative Here" Matthew Dowd -- up against him.

It still wasn't much of a contest.

Most memorable was probably the sight of Noonan using a paving truck to lay on of her long, incoherent nostalgia about America's longing for a 5 cent Clark bar or some such. She started droppin' her "g"s and usin' contractions ("gonna") to folksy it up, but she made both of the points she had been brough out of cold storage hired to make: Newt ain't such a bad guy, and the failure of the Congressional Supercommitte is all the fault of the leader of the Executive branch.

Matthew Dowd: Both sides do it! Both sides do it!

However, what really caught my attention was nature of the medium-sized firestorm Dr. Krugman kicked off, because what pushed him to the front of the conversation was not that he told the truth using clear language (which he does on a regular basis), but that he used his NYT Space-based Weapons Platform to fire on his own colleagues at the Times.

From Salon:

The New York Times columnist demolishes familiar arguments made by unnamed hacks

The New York Times opinion section, like the Senate, has this rule where you aren’t allowed to call out a colleague by name when you think he or she is full of shit. As in the Senate, this rule is silly and anachronistic and enforces a strained phony cordiality at the expense of honesty. It doesn’t ever stop Paul Krugman, though, who simply responds to his columnist peers’ dumb arguments without ever referring to them by name.

For example: David Brooks, whose most annoying schtick is to write something that sounds reasonable until you realize what he’s actually arguing (like, for example, “people often don’t intervene when they see something horrible happening” is a very interesting point, unless your real point is that this is because of hippies and the terrible ’60s), wrote earlier this month that American income equality is overstated, and that the real income gap worth examining is that between the college-educated upper middle class, who are doing well, and those with only a high school education, who have been left behind by our post-industrial economy. (In this case Brooks’ “actual” point is that “Blue inequality” is merely the resentment of educated liberals who hate success while “Red states” have the real authentic American inequality.)

Krugman, in a column published three days later, wrote:

Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

Hah, I wonder who those “pundits” are, don’t you? He went on:

In response, the usual suspects have rolled out some familiar arguments: the data are flawed (they aren’t); the rich are an ever-changing group (not so); and so on. The most popular argument right now seems, however, to be the claim that we may not be a middle-class society, but we’re still an upper-middle-class society, in which a broad class of highly educated workers, who have the skills to compete in the modern world, is doing very well.

It’s a nice story, and a lot less disturbing than the picture of a nation in which a much smaller group of rich people is becoming increasingly dominant. But it’s not true.

Oh, those usual suspects!

...

Why is this important?

Because Dr. Krugman is telling the same unhappy truths about the same giant assholes that the Dirty Hippies have been writing about for years. And since I am very lazy and have easy access to my own archives, consider this blog as a test case.

Here was is a snip from the very first, full-length "David Brooks" column I ever wrote. It is regarding Mr. Brooks' 04.09.05 column in which:

...Bobo looks incrementally past his grotty navel and notices he has a couple of stinky little feet at the end of his legs. Article has been trimmed a bit, and helpful translations have been added for You The Customer.

The Republican Party is running into a problem: the conservatism of the American people. Over the past decade, the Republicans have set themselves up as the transformational party...

[But the American people] have a taste for order and a distrust of those who want too much change on too many fronts too quickly...

Translation: They are scared shitless that the Crazier’n a Shithouse Rat Theocrats that the Evil Liberals have always warned them about might actuall exist and have the keys to the car. Oh and all the Mapquest Route Planners they left behind as clues have a place called “Armageddonville” circled in big, red Crayon.

It's become increasingly clear that the Republicans are bumping into some limits...

Translation: limits like...gravity, evolution, arithmetic, international law, economics. Why does reality hate Republicans?

Being conservative, most Americans believe that decisions should be made at the local level, where people understand the texture of the case. Even many evangelicals, who otherwise embrace the culture of life, grow queasy when politicians in Washington start imposing solutions from afar, based on abstract principles rather than concrete particulars.

Translation: Even in the middle of my faux critique of my own Overlords ... must... regurgitate... ”culture of life” meme...every...six...minutes. Hope no one notices what a trained seal I have become.

...Then there is Social Security reform. Republicans set forth with a plan to give people some control over their own retirement accounts. Here, too, Republicans have been surprised by the tepid public support. Americans understand that there is a big problem, but right now most oppose personal accounts invested in the markets. According to a Wall Street Journal poll this week, a third of Republicans currently oppose them.

Translation: We were all shocked when the public didn’t think letting Thurston Howell’s idiot son bulldoze Mom’s retirement money onto the craps table was a spiffy notion. We were stunned when our Soviet Style “spontaneous” crowds of carefully screened zombies came across like a Pravda Puppet Show.
...

Why bring it up?

Because, to make my point it is necessary for me to immodestly point out that I have done close to 400 such columns on the subject of New York Times columnist over the last seven years.

On the subject of the obscene and abused farce that is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman?

Slightly over 170.

David Gregory?

Over 120.

On the topic of the Andrew Sullivan?

Around 150 columns. Here is a snip from an early 2006 effort:

...

This Sunday, for example, on the Chris Matthews Show, the Wall O’ Pundits flipped through one Republican corruption and treason after another like a deck flash cards in the service of a conversation mocking and sniping...at Democrats!

Scandal after Republican scandal. Failure after Republican failure. And buttlicking drivel like this from Andrew Sullivan -- “The only opposition is coming from the Conservatives. Democrats are nothing but whiners and spectators.” – went unrebutted and unquestioned.

Hey, cocknoggin'! Isn’t carving into the people that are actually destroying this country, actually lying to the public, actually bleeding our Democracy dry sorta Your Fucking Job?!

Oh, it was quite the gigglefest until Cynthia Tucker threw a sharp elbow into the throat of Matthews’ "Ain’t the Dems a buncha bumblefucks" party by letting the phrase "Southern Strategy" pass her lips. Then she actually fleshed out the ugly, racist-pandering history of the modern GOP; reminding the panel of the true face of who it is they actually serve as Matthew’s fum-fuhed around, trying to find the escape hatch.

Then…silence. Crickets. Nothing.

Instant right-handed circle-jerk buzzkill. Hit Sullivan so hard that it almost knocked Bush’s dick out of his mouth.

In the end, the simple truth that people like Sullivan fight almost hysterically to deny is that you have to choose -- and your choices will always be imperfect -- but when you intellectually geld yourself in a desperate attempt to pretend that the midpoint between the proud, upright magnificence of the Enlightenment and the slinking, slouching sponsors of a new Dark Ages is a reasonable place to stand…you choose to side with the Pat Robertsons of this world.

...

The Sunday Morning roundup? On that topic I'm getting up towards 350, or roughly one a week, 52 weeks a year for seven years. Give or take. And if I took another few hours, I'm quite sure I could easily compose such a list made up of the efforts of a dozen other excellent bloggers and groups, so my points are these.

1. Having Dr. Krugman on the side of the Dirty Fucking Angels is a good thing. Unreservedly.

2. Having a Space-based Weapons Platform makes a huge difference. Often it makes all the difference.

3. To be a Dirty Hippie is to be an outsider, fighting against long odd and constant disappointment. To be a Dirty Hippie Outsider means that you can clearly see exactly how weak and hollow and ridiculous the goons on the Right and their Centrist enablers have become. It means that you have probably been slogging it out for a good long time and logged enough experience to believe-- with damn good reason -- that if we just had a few more gallons of gasoline...

And so, to all the bloggers out there who sometimes get tied up in knots because something they have been cultivating for a long-ass time suddenly becomes a flavor-of-the-month in the big restaurant across town -- the one with the dress code, the Moroccan-leather-bound menus and the bouncer who never lets you in -- relax. Be true to your flag (as my wife reminds me when I get frustrated) and be of good cheer: the reason Dr. Krugman's shells fall with such satisfyingly devastating effect is because they have been forged in the Dirty Hippie armory and packed with Dirty Hippie vocabulary.

Congratulations, Dr. Krugman.

You did us proud.


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