No's Diving With Carlos Danger

 

Pretty much everyone you know probably agrees that economy sucks and the middle class is being dragged to the corpse cart whether they're dead or not.

But when it comes to what is to blame for this and what is to be done about it, if you listen carefully you'll hear

...what? 

From, those whose career incentive structure is geared to is offending no one and sucking up to everyone, you get one answer. From The Daily Beast:

Yet, neither party seems terribly disturbed by this trajectory, as the president and the Democrats hike payroll taxes on American workers and threaten to means-test government benefits to the detriment of the middle class. And we might also ask: Where’s the 21st-century equivalent of the Civilian Conservation Corps? Where’s the contemporary updating of the Tennessee Valley Authority? Where’s the American Democratic president who cares about the broad middle of the country? Sorry, but Solyndra just doesn’t cut it.

However, if you talk to America's millions of Crazy Uncle Liberties, you'll hear a list of Fox News talking points vomiting out of them --

IRS --Trayvon was a thug who had it coming -- Black are the real racists -- Benghaaazi! -- IRS -- 

-- on an endless loop.

And if you are in the contempt-inducing business of stating observed reality as it exists running around naked right before your eyes, you get still another answer.  From New York Magazine:

...Congress has to pass some kind of farm bill—failure to do so would, through a bizarre legislative quirk, cause the law to revert to where it stood in 1949, which would wreak all sorts of havoc at supermarkets. Congress will also have to pass bills to keep the government running, or else shut it down. And then it will have to lift the debt ceiling again. House Republicans have ignored constant pleas by Senate Democrats to sit down and negotiate their differing budgets. Instead, they plan to hold off any budget talks until late fall, when we will likely hit the debt ceiling, at which point, they believe, they can force Obama to accept their ransom demands.

Earlier this month, House Republicans issued those demands. They are staggeringly grandiose. If Obama wants to lift the debt ceiling for the rest of his term, they announced, all he has to do is … agree to sign on to Ryan’s plan to cut and privatize Medicare. If that’s too much for him, Republicans have generously offered the choice of letting Obama accept a package of deep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in return for a shorter debt-ceiling extension. Of course, if he chooses that route, he’ll have to come back again later and offer up further concessions.

The list is utterly deranged—Obama has sworn he won’t bargain over the debt ceiling again at all, and his entire administration would resign before he could agree to anything remotely like these demands. It’s not clear whether Republicans actually expect the president to succumb to their Bond-villain hostage scheme. But it is significant that Republicans are demanding even more from Obama than they demanded during previous debt-ceiling ransoms and will decry the inevitable failure to achieve it as yet another betrayal.

...

Somewhere in the background you will also hear the very white noise of a contingent who complain that all of this is irrelevant -- merely proof of a deep conspiracy to pretend there are other important stories in the world besides (pick two: Benghaaaazi, drones, IRS, Scenes from a Moscow Transit Area) ... stories which can only be properly reported when interleaved into paragraphs denouncing Barack Obama as a the most bloody-minded monster in American history.  Since this is flatly stated as axiomatic, no room is left at their table to discuss anything but what they deduce must be a vast and coordinated campaign to distract the public from the fact that (pick two: lazy, depraved, incompetent, tyrannical) comma (pick one: radical Communist, brutal fascist) Barack Obama cares nothing for this country but has instead suckered what's left of the Liberals movement into becoming brainwashed, morally-bankrupt tools in the service of his real masters, (pick two: Teh Gay, George Soros, international bankers, Abortion Incorporated, Satan, the Illuminati, the Muslim Brotherhood.)

Finally, there are those for whom runaway blonds, the drug habits of celebrities and this is what the "news" look like:

UPDATE: ‘I’m Deeply Flawed’: Anthony Weiner, AKA ‘Carlos Danger,’ Now Admits Still Sexting

by Noah Rothman | 12:55 pm, July 23rd, 2013

“Exclusive: Anthony Weiner is a sexual predator luring his victims,” blares the inflammatory headline at the gossip website, TheDirty.com. A new set of images from a chat session in which Weiner engaged in sexually explicit conversations with another woman from last summer threaten to derail Weiner’s campaign for mayor of New York City. In a statement responding to the allegations, Weiner admitted that the chat records were authentic. However, he said that he and his wife are now focused on moving forward with their lives.

“My source is solid,” the bombshell post at TheDirty.com begins. “She really thought Anthony Weiner and her were in love, they spoke on the phone daily multiple times a day for 6 months. Anthony Weiner played with her emotions and mind. Most calls were phone sex.”

“He promised her many things including a condo in Chicago (1235 S. Prairie Ave) where they were planning to meet up to have sex,” the post continues. “Anthony Weiner has a shoe fetish, particularly heels.”

The images taken from Facebook and the social network Formspring are blurred but are alleged to be Weiner going by the handle “Carlos Danger.”
...

Whether or not you or I like it, the collision between these tectonic plates is where our national narrative lives.  And the challenge to anyone who sincerely wants to get anything positive done in our mean, dumb, crippled democracy is finding a way to slog through that reality instead of gliding dirigibley above it all, pretending it does not exist.