As Pericles noted so long ago, "Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." For anyone who thinks American politics is a spectator sport, a reality show with winners and losers and a new round of contestants every 10 to 15 years, well guess what: It's not a show, and all these fucking lunatics are masturbating furiously at the thought of being able to dictate YOUR sex life to YOU.
Way more than half the problem is that Republican/Conservative policies and beliefs are so far out there that it's impossible to convince the average citizen that those policies and beliefs are real. "Oh, they'd never [eliminate Social Security/Medicaid/Medicare/SNAP/housing assistance/LIHEAP. etc.]. That would be crazy!!!" Yet, you show that person the GOP's published platform that says in black-and-white that they have vowed to eliminate all of those things and you get "Oh, that can't be real."
So keep on ignoring politics. Keep on treating it like a reality show you're just not into. Soon enough you'll find that Republicans' dreams have come true, leaving you and everyone else in a waking nightmare.
One slight correction. Both Clinton and Obama looked hungrily at SS and did really want to at least partially privatize it, but were unable to because the Republicans wouldn't do anything that Obama wanted, and Ms. Lewinsky made it imperative that Bill keep all his friends no matter how leftist they may have been.
Eh. I'm not so sure they looked at changing SS because it was something they wanted to do. Both of them were being pressured by the media because Republicans kept screeching about how SS was going broke and needed to be privatized and media kept pounding both of them with "Well, what's YOUR plan?!?!"
Indeed, that nonsense kept going right up until Nancy Pelosi, asked by a reporter "When are Democrats going to come up with a plan to reform Social Security?" replied "Never. How does never work for you?"
So, not so much "looked hungrily" as "looked stupidly," I think.
I'm good with that theory. Also that they thought of it as the concession they would give Republicans in return for something else that they wanted, in that diseased "centrist" or Friedmanian style of thinking that gave us Clinton's welfare "reform" (we'll give all the power to the states as GOP wants and then they'll totally do all these lovely things we want them to do because that's how compromise always works).
I will not give either of them the benefit of the doubt and suggest that they were just stupid rather than evil. Although, I am willing to go with both stupid and evil.
Among other things, the phrase "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" is permanently broken, and as usual it's Republicans who broke it.
The biggest advantage of setting up the Simpson-Bowles Commission, of course, was that it kept Simpson and Bowles and all their little nutbar privatization hounds out of Obama's hair for months. Then he could go to a hearing, put on his serious Presidenting expression, and circular-file the stupid report into the first recycling bin he saw. Clinton might have huffed enough Goldman-Sachs glue to go for it, but after the tech bubble collapse and 2008...of course, the GOP isn't dumb enough to fall for that trick again. No more experts! No more trial runs! Back to the gold standard! Fuck the poors! We want rich guys to own everything and run everything because we can't figure out how to have a king, so we'll just find the biggest rich asshole we can!
I literally wrote that up in 2012! http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-real-world-looks-lot-like-simpson.html: "There's something about the Bowles-Simpson Commission, by the way, that hardly anybody left or right has seemed to understand very clearly: it was certain to fail from the outset, as certain as if the president had planned it that way. If the president did plan it that way, I would not be in the least shocked; indeed, I kind of hope he did, since that would tend to suggest that he knows what he's doing."
<If this were a real binary conflict and I had to choose, I’d go with Trump, too>
Fortunately though, for David French, he's conferred upon himself the freedom to fly his non-binary freak flag.
Restraint would be evil, after all - if it prevented him from sharing his bed (his very very highbrow-intellectual bed) with both Sohrab Ahmari and Donald Trump. Plus any gun-nuts, forced-birthers, theocrats, flat-taxers, thuggish lib-baiters, and fascist-adjacent punctuation-challenged all-caps rage-tweeters that take his fancy.
I think Cowen understands a small set of economics perfectly well: there's a good living to be made by telling fantastically wealthy libertarian douchebags that their shit doesn't stink.
Yes, the concept of compromise is utterly alien to conservatives, which is why Joe Biden is being utterly delusional and asking Democrats to be nice to Republicans. If Biden talked like this to Mitch McConnell he'd tear his head off (metaphorically, of course). The GOP are all dead-enders in that respect.
Thanks for this. I hate the many pseudo-debates on the right that are somehow seen by our side as actual intellectual discourse rather than stupid kayfabe. We are trying way too hard to give them the benefit of the doubt, which they really don't deserve.
Roy, who's giving you grief for covering the insane right-wing nuttery that Trump/FOX/TalkRadio has poisoned the country with?
Right now, just up the block from me in Commie New York City, there's an older couple who have commandeered an entire street corner for a bevy of placards, a picnic umbrella, and a table with "literature". The giant posters read "DEFEND TRUMP!", "JAIL MUELLER", "RUSSIA DIDN'T HACK THE DNC!", "WHO REALLY INTERFERED IN 2016? THE BRITISH EMPIRE!" Okay, I didn't get that last one either until further investigation revealed that these two are Lyndon LaRouche Loons, a species I hadn't come across in years and who I thought would have died out along with their loony leader this past year. But here's the thing: back in the 70's and 80's, LaRouche was the fringiest of über-right-wing cranks, a rabid conspiranoid who attracted only the most certifiable of followers. But now, his insane movement has been lapped by Fox News, talk-radio, and all the whackjobs that Roy covers. It's no surprise that the most fanatical and idiotic movements of past days are now spouting the same Trump-shite as mainstream channels on my TV. And that's why Roy's beat is actually important. In years past, his service was prophylactic, now it's a last ditch curative, or maybe triage as we bleed out. Either way, sign me up for another year!
Re: David French. It is a real binary choice and everyone who has chosen Trump or would choose Trump over anything short of Hitler/Stalin/Pol Pot/Genghis Khan/ Vlad the Impaler has deposited their moral conscience somewhere beneath the Tau Tona Gold Mine.
As with the law, so it is with the Canons of Civility: there must be those whom it binds but doesn't protect, and those whom it protects but doesn't bind.
“... the rutting life of the sexual revolution, where restraint is evil, physical experience is king, and people are simply sentient mammals trying to get the best out of life”
I'm starting to think that Republicans actually enjoy gun violence and wish it would spread. The hysterical garbage that their media (and that's most of it) spreads seems to have one motive - to make their base angrier and crazier, and that Werner Herzog's quote "Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches" is constantly on their seething minds.
Conserva-nirvana: In Which David French Turns His Wife's Electronic Chastity Belt Into A Real One, For All American And Non-American Women
As Pericles noted so long ago, "Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you." For anyone who thinks American politics is a spectator sport, a reality show with winners and losers and a new round of contestants every 10 to 15 years, well guess what: It's not a show, and all these fucking lunatics are masturbating furiously at the thought of being able to dictate YOUR sex life to YOU.
Way more than half the problem is that Republican/Conservative policies and beliefs are so far out there that it's impossible to convince the average citizen that those policies and beliefs are real. "Oh, they'd never [eliminate Social Security/Medicaid/Medicare/SNAP/housing assistance/LIHEAP. etc.]. That would be crazy!!!" Yet, you show that person the GOP's published platform that says in black-and-white that they have vowed to eliminate all of those things and you get "Oh, that can't be real."
So keep on ignoring politics. Keep on treating it like a reality show you're just not into. Soon enough you'll find that Republicans' dreams have come true, leaving you and everyone else in a waking nightmare.
One slight correction. Both Clinton and Obama looked hungrily at SS and did really want to at least partially privatize it, but were unable to because the Republicans wouldn't do anything that Obama wanted, and Ms. Lewinsky made it imperative that Bill keep all his friends no matter how leftist they may have been.
Eh. I'm not so sure they looked at changing SS because it was something they wanted to do. Both of them were being pressured by the media because Republicans kept screeching about how SS was going broke and needed to be privatized and media kept pounding both of them with "Well, what's YOUR plan?!?!"
Indeed, that nonsense kept going right up until Nancy Pelosi, asked by a reporter "When are Democrats going to come up with a plan to reform Social Security?" replied "Never. How does never work for you?"
So, not so much "looked hungrily" as "looked stupidly," I think.
I'm good with that theory. Also that they thought of it as the concession they would give Republicans in return for something else that they wanted, in that diseased "centrist" or Friedmanian style of thinking that gave us Clinton's welfare "reform" (we'll give all the power to the states as GOP wants and then they'll totally do all these lovely things we want them to do because that's how compromise always works).
I will not give either of them the benefit of the doubt and suggest that they were just stupid rather than evil. Although, I am willing to go with both stupid and evil.
Among other things, the phrase "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" is permanently broken, and as usual it's Republicans who broke it.
The biggest advantage of setting up the Simpson-Bowles Commission, of course, was that it kept Simpson and Bowles and all their little nutbar privatization hounds out of Obama's hair for months. Then he could go to a hearing, put on his serious Presidenting expression, and circular-file the stupid report into the first recycling bin he saw. Clinton might have huffed enough Goldman-Sachs glue to go for it, but after the tech bubble collapse and 2008...of course, the GOP isn't dumb enough to fall for that trick again. No more experts! No more trial runs! Back to the gold standard! Fuck the poors! We want rich guys to own everything and run everything because we can't figure out how to have a king, so we'll just find the biggest rich asshole we can!
I literally wrote that up in 2012! http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-real-world-looks-lot-like-simpson.html: "There's something about the Bowles-Simpson Commission, by the way, that hardly anybody left or right has seemed to understand very clearly: it was certain to fail from the outset, as certain as if the president had planned it that way. If the president did plan it that way, I would not be in the least shocked; indeed, I kind of hope he did, since that would tend to suggest that he knows what he's doing."
<If this were a real binary conflict and I had to choose, I’d go with Trump, too>
Fortunately though, for David French, he's conferred upon himself the freedom to fly his non-binary freak flag.
Restraint would be evil, after all - if it prevented him from sharing his bed (his very very highbrow-intellectual bed) with both Sohrab Ahmari and Donald Trump. Plus any gun-nuts, forced-birthers, theocrats, flat-taxers, thuggish lib-baiters, and fascist-adjacent punctuation-challenged all-caps rage-tweeters that take his fancy.
That Cowen line is so precious, keyed to one of those state laws requiring doctors to tell lies to their patients https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/counseling-and-waiting-periods-abortion "So now you think consumers don't deserve to be informed?" as if he'd ever accepted an informed-consumer regulation in his life.
to be fair, Cowen doesn't understand economics and has a PhD in it, so misunderstanding pretty much everything is right down his alley
I think Cowen understands a small set of economics perfectly well: there's a good living to be made by telling fantastically wealthy libertarian douchebags that their shit doesn't stink.
Yes, the concept of compromise is utterly alien to conservatives, which is why Joe Biden is being utterly delusional and asking Democrats to be nice to Republicans. If Biden talked like this to Mitch McConnell he'd tear his head off (metaphorically, of course). The GOP are all dead-enders in that respect.
Thanks for this. I hate the many pseudo-debates on the right that are somehow seen by our side as actual intellectual discourse rather than stupid kayfabe. We are trying way too hard to give them the benefit of the doubt, which they really don't deserve.
Roy, who's giving you grief for covering the insane right-wing nuttery that Trump/FOX/TalkRadio has poisoned the country with?
Right now, just up the block from me in Commie New York City, there's an older couple who have commandeered an entire street corner for a bevy of placards, a picnic umbrella, and a table with "literature". The giant posters read "DEFEND TRUMP!", "JAIL MUELLER", "RUSSIA DIDN'T HACK THE DNC!", "WHO REALLY INTERFERED IN 2016? THE BRITISH EMPIRE!" Okay, I didn't get that last one either until further investigation revealed that these two are Lyndon LaRouche Loons, a species I hadn't come across in years and who I thought would have died out along with their loony leader this past year. But here's the thing: back in the 70's and 80's, LaRouche was the fringiest of über-right-wing cranks, a rabid conspiranoid who attracted only the most certifiable of followers. But now, his insane movement has been lapped by Fox News, talk-radio, and all the whackjobs that Roy covers. It's no surprise that the most fanatical and idiotic movements of past days are now spouting the same Trump-shite as mainstream channels on my TV. And that's why Roy's beat is actually important. In years past, his service was prophylactic, now it's a last ditch curative, or maybe triage as we bleed out. Either way, sign me up for another year!
Very few people realize there is a massive mental health problem underlying the so-called
"pro-life" movement.
Re: David French. It is a real binary choice and everyone who has chosen Trump or would choose Trump over anything short of Hitler/Stalin/Pol Pot/Genghis Khan/ Vlad the Impaler has deposited their moral conscience somewhere beneath the Tau Tona Gold Mine.
As with the law, so it is with the Canons of Civility: there must be those whom it binds but doesn't protect, and those whom it protects but doesn't bind.
“... the rutting life of the sexual revolution, where restraint is evil, physical experience is king, and people are simply sentient mammals trying to get the best out of life”
Jings, where can I join?!
I'm starting to think that Republicans actually enjoy gun violence and wish it would spread. The hysterical garbage that their media (and that's most of it) spreads seems to have one motive - to make their base angrier and crazier, and that Werner Herzog's quote "Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches" is constantly on their seething minds.