Life is good for the corporate right with Maddow and Dowd around: Remember how sticks and stones can break their bones? But names can never hurt them?
We recalled that schoolyard wisdom as we read the hapless new column by one of our dumbest “journalists.”
Maureen Dowd had absolutely nothing to offer to the months-long debate about the debt limit. On July 10, she wrote a column about Liz and Dick’s torrid love affair. Three days later, her addled column concerned “Hitler’s Talking Dogs.”
But like her colleague Joe Nocera, Maureen Dowd is all fired up now that the moment has passed! Now that the debt debate is done, she responds with her only known tool—she does a whole lot of name-calling. This is part of the garbage she churns today from deep down in a very dark well. If you want to know why your country’s political discourse is broken, this column helps explain it quite well:
DOWD (8/3/11): Tea Party budget-slashers didn't sport the black capes with blood-red lining beloved by the campy Vincent Price or wield the tinglers deployed by [director] William Castle. But in their feral attack on Washington, in their talent for raising goose bumps from Wall Street to Westminster, this strange, compelling and uncompromising new force epitomized ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers'' and evoked comparisons to our most mythic creatures of the night.
They were like cannibals, eating their own party and leaders alive. They were like vampires, draining the country's reputation, credit rating and compassion. They were like zombies, relentlessly and mindlessly coming back again and again to assault their unnerved victims, Boehner and President Obama. They were like the metallic beasts in ''Alien'' flashing mouths of teeth inside other mouths of teeth, bursting out of Boehner's stomach every time he came to a bouquet of microphones.
[...]
The influential horror writer H. P. Lovecraft knew better than to be too literal in his description of monsters.
In the short story ''The Outsider,'' Lovecraft's narrator offers a description that matches how some alarmed Democrats view Tea Partiers: ''I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity and desolation; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation; the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world.''
The Pulitzer-winner with nothing to say is all of a sudden all mouth! And as usual, it’s hard to get dumber. In that deeply ridiculous passage, she manages to slip in a disclaimer, making it seem that she’s merely channeling what “some alarmed Democrats” are saying. Before long, though, we’re allowed to learn more about the crackpot herself:
DOWD: I didn't think I had anything in common with Lady Gaga until I read in a magazine profile of her that she likes to fall asleep watching horror movies. Growing up, my brothers were obsessed with Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman and the Mummy. (There was no model of the Invisible Man.) I have an old picture of my brother Kevin and me as children sitting rapt on a bed in our underwear watching ''Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.''
Kevin spent his free time meticulously building and painting models of monsters, which he still keeps in a spare bedroom, half a century later. For their second date, he took the woman who would become his wife to a triple feature of horror movies.
Tales about her crackpot family are never far away when Dowd types a column like this one. For sheer dumbness, though, we would recommend this puzzling passage:
DOWD: As Jason Zinoman writes in his new book on horror films, ''Shock Value,'' ''The monster has traditionally been a stand-in for some anxiety, political, social, or cultural.'' The monsters of '70s films channeled grievances similar to the Tea Party's about, as Zinoman wrote, ''government power and mocking nihilism.'' Audiences sometimes sympathized with the monsters, as Marilyn Monroe did in ''The Seven Year Itch'' with the Creature from the Black Lagoon, who, she said, ''just craved a little affection.''
In the current instance, Dowd is the one who is conjuring monsters. Doesn’t that mean that she is using her florid descriptions as “a stand-in for some anxiety” she is too inept to express?
Nocera said nothing in real time, then started with the name-calling (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 8/2/11). Dowd takes the same low-IQ route today, jacking the name-calling up a bit. This is the way we “liberals” lose, as fools like these engage in this conduct.
By the way: Twelve years ago, it was President Clinton, then Candidate Gore, who this idiot reinvented as monsters. Crackpot then, crackpot today.
Then too, there is the fool Maddow, back at her station last night after the kind of vacation permitted by millions in salary. Might we ask one small indulgence? Now that the GOP has kicked our side’s ass, might this pitiful child finally drop her low-IQ theme about John Boehner being so bad at his job? Incredibly, she was at it again three weeks ago, re-reciting her monstrously pointless “examples.” This was only part of her foolish, comfort-food nonsense:
MADDOW (7/13/11): This is the House speaker who forgot to swear in two of his new members of Congress on the first day he was in charge of the House.
This is the House speaker who allowed two different members of his caucus to give a rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union Address and they didn’t agree with each other. This is the House speaker who made a big self-important photo-op out of reading the Constitution on the floor of the House to start the legislative year, and then he left some parts of the Constitution out and had to do them later.
This is the House speaker who made another big, self-important show of imposing new rules for the House, that every time they’d propose spending, they would have to propose cutting something to offset that spending. He makes a big deal out of this big, new, responsible rule and then with the very first bill he introduces, he violates his own rule.
This is the House speaker who does photo ops like this one.
BOEHNER (videotape): When we say we’re going to cut spending, read my lips: We’re going to cut spending. Thanks.
MADDOW: After saying "read my lips," Mr. Boehner then walks offstage and was heard saying to himself as he walked offstage right there, quote, "I can’t believe I just said."
It’s his own press conference! Nobody said, “Mr. Speaker, can we read your lips on this?” No, he just brought it up, repeating the most famous Republican screw-up line of the last 30 years. Unforced error, own goal, again.
Here he is on Fox News last night talking about the biggest political fight in the country right now, the need to raise the debt ceiling.
(begin video clip)
BRET BAIER: So, what is next? What if you don’t get a deal?
BOEHNER: I don’t know.
(end video clip)
MADDOW: Third in line to the presidency, Speaker of the House : “Dunno!”
Whether or not you agree with John Boehner on policy, whether or not you think John Boehner on policy is right or wrong, whether or not you want him to succeed politically or you don’t want him to succeed politically, John Boehner is not good at his job. John Boehner is not succeeding. Whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I think it’s factually evident he’s not good at being Speaker of the House.
Can we talk? Maddow is so dumb it squeaks, despite all the propaganda about this glorious child being Our Own Rhodes Scholar.
We’d suggest that you look at the tape of this utterly pitiful segment. But for some reason, the tape of this segment doesn’t exist at the Maddow Show site. (We would have chosen to lose that tape too. To read the full transcript, click this.)
Having said that, might we also say this?
Boehner kicked your side’s keister in the past week. Might we make one minor request? Could Maddow possibly drop the theme about how bad he is at his job?
Maureen Dowd is a Pulitzer winner. Maddow is Our Own Rhodes Scholar. Life is sweet for the corporate right with monsters like these around.
Special report: The discourse you rode in on!
PART 1—THE TWO DISCUSSIONS (permalink): By Sunday morning, the outlines of the debt limit deal were fairly clear. Within that context, a fascinating exchange took place between George Will and Paul Krugman.
The exchange occurred on ABC’s This Week. Let’s start with the things Krugman said.
Krugman spoke to the merits, or to the demerits, of the pending deal. On the merits, Krugman basically said the deal was no good. In this slightly snarky chunk, he explained the problems:
KRUGMAN (7/31/11): You know, from, from the perspective of a rational person—in other words, a progressive on this stuff—we shouldn't be even talking about spending cuts at all now. We have 9 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. And if you have a situation in which you're going to permanently raise the unemployment rate, which is what this is going to do, that's actually going to reduce future revenues.
So this, this thing, these spending cuts are even going to hurt the long-run fiscal position, let alone cause lots of misery. And then on top of that, we've got these budget cuts, which are entirely— Basically, the Republicans said, “We'll blow up the world economy unless you give us exactly what we want,” and the president said, “Okay.” That's what happened.
According to Krugman, the spending cuts in the new budget deal will make unemployment worse. In that way, the cuts will reduce future revenues, thus worsening the long-run fiscal picture.
To anyone who has followed Krugman, this (somewhat truncated) analysis wasn’t surprising. He has long said that we should engage in more stimulus spending now, that we shouldn’t address the long-term deficit problem until the economy is stronger. On Sunday, Christiane Amanpour cited this long-standing view, and Krugman spoke again:
AMANPOUR (continuing directly): You know, you've been consistent about this, saying that there should be no cuts at a time of recession and weak recovery. What is your scenario, though, once this goes through and there are significant spending cuts and no revenues?
KRUGMAN: We're looking— I mean, we used to talk about the Japanese and their lost decade. We're going to look to them as a role model. They did better than we're doing. We're, this is going to go on— I have nobody I know who thinks that the unemployment rate is going to be below 8 percent at the end of next year. With these spending cuts, it might well be above 9 percent at the end of next year. There is no light at the end of this tunnel.
And all the— We're having a debate in Washington which is all about, “Gee, we're going to make this economy worse, but are we going to make it worse on 90 percent of the Republicans' terms or 100 percent of the Republicans' terms?” And the answer is 100 percent.
Krugman opposed this new budget deal. In his view, the terms of this new budget deal will only “make this economy worse.” Moments later, he added a point. He has been consistent in these gloomy views, he now said:
KRUGMAN: One important point is to make that, is that people like me said in advance this wasn't remotely big enough. It's not an after-the-fact. It's not coming back afterwards. Right from the beginning, we looked, I looked at the numbers, people like me looked at the numbers, said we have, we're going to have huge cutbacks at the state and local level. You've got a federal increase which is going to be barely enough to limit those cutbacks. There is going to be no net fiscal stimulus, if you look at government as a whole, which is what happened.
So here we are.
The stimulus was never remotely big enough, Krugman said. Quite correctly, he also noted that he had said the same thing in real time. There is no doubt that this latter statement is accurate. In the first few weeks of Obama’s reign, Krugman was saying that the proposed stimulus package wouldn’t be large enough. Obviously, there’s no way to prove what would have happened with a larger stimulus plan.
In these exchanges, Krugman spoke to the merits, or to the demerits, of the new budget deal. In his Monday column, Krugman offered the same gloomy analysis. “[T]he deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster,” he wrote. “It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America's long-run deficit problem worse, not better.”
Such predictions are hard to check, of course, especially given the comic-book discourse which rules our political culture. That in mind, it’s worth noting the way George Will responded to Krugman’s analysis on Sunday’s program. Krugman had addressed the merits of the deal, arguing that this is the wrong time to cut federal spending. After a brief attempt to argue the merits (see below), Will substituted a different order of reasoning. This is the full exchange which ended this discussion:
KRUGMAN: Can I just say, in advance— One important point is to make that, is that people like me said in advance this wasn't remotely big enough. It's not an after-the-fact. It's not coming back afterwards. Right from the beginning, we looked, I looked at the numbers, people like me looked at the numbers, said we have, we're going to have huge cutbacks at the state and local level. You've got a federal increase which is going to be barely enough to limit those cutbacks. There is going to be no net fiscal stimulus, if you look at government as a whole, which is what happened.
So here we are.
WILL: It would be good to go to the election, electorate and have a Krugman election this time, saying, “Resolved, the government is too frugal. Let's vote.”
That was Will’s full rebuttal. Amanpour made no attempt to referee this dispute; at this point, she simply moved to a different question. In effect, Will abandoned any attempt to argue this matter on the merits. Instead, he basically said the following:
The voters wouldn’t agree with Krugman. If we built an election around these claims, Krugman’s side would lose.
Krugman had argued the merits of the deal; Will responded with a claim about the politics. He didn’t say Krugman was wrong on the merits. He simply said the voters would judge that Krugman was wrong.
A person might claim that Will was being cynical. He made little attempt to dispute Krugman’s substantive claims; he simply said the voters would disagree. In fairness, though, we must say the following:
It certainly isn’t clear that Will’s assertion is wrong.
Krugman was presenting some very basic economics. It can’t be proven that his claims are right, but his claims are quite basic. And yet, within the gong-show discourse churned by America’s political press corps, Krugman may as well have been speaking from Mars, in the Martian language.
Krugman was making some very basic points. But you live in a country which enjoys a banana republic discourse. Krugman’s very famous newspaper is an obvious, rather large part of the problem. This helps explain an unfortunate fact:
Like Krugman, Will was probably right in the things he said.
Tomorrow—part 2: That CNN poll
Will on the merits: Will made a brief, very modest attempt to argue the case on the merits. In this passage, you see what he said after Krugman cited Japan:
KRUGMAN: We used to talk about the Japanese and their lost decade. We're going to look to them as a role model. They did better than we're doing. We're, this is going to go on— I have nobody I know who thinks that the unemployment rate is going to be below 8 percent at the end of next year. With these spending cuts, it might well be above 9 percent at the end of next year. There is no light at the end of this tunnel.
And all the— We're having a debate in Washington which is all about, “Gee, we're going to make this economy worse, but are we going to make it worse on 90 percent of the Republicans' terms or 100 percent of the Republicans' terms?” And the answer is 100 percent.
WILL: Paul's right. We are a third of the way through a lost decade, but we're a third of the way after TARP, the stimulus, Cash for Clunkers, dollars for dishwashers, cash for caulkers, the entire range of stimulus, the Keynesian approach, which by its own evidence simply hasn't worked. Now Paul says double down.
It was at this point that Krugman noted an accurate fact—he always said the stimulus would be too small. At this point, Will abandoned the merits, arguing—correctly, we’d have to guess—that the voters wouldn’t agree with Krugman’s viewpoint.
What do the voters currently think? On to that topic tomorrow.