Month: February 2009

In some ways I am impressed by George Will. He has written an altogether enjoyable book about our national pastime. He keeps his discourse on the Buckley/Safire level as opposed to slogging around in the sewer, ankle-deep in human waste, like his fellow conservatives on Talk Radio. But most of all I am impressed by how thoroughly and for how long he has successfully perpetrated a masterful illusion, convincing the media and public that he is an intelligent person whose intellectual power gives weight to his opinions. As most of what he says is in fact quite retarded, he creates the illusion of brilliance with diction, demeanor, vocabulary, posture, and tie selection.

O RLY, KRUGMN?

Sure, he's far brighter than the Glenn Becks of the world, but this fact does not place him in select company. Like Formula One is the highbrow NASCAR and the Council of Conservative Citizens is the Klan for the cocktail party set, Will is little more than Sean Hannity after a year or two in finishing school. His writing is a proofread, erudite version of the same old horseshit delivered by everyone else in his neck of the political woods. Will is a way for bourgeois Republicans – bankers, lawyers, etc. – to get their fix without surrendering their pride and feelings of intellectual superiority. Let's be honest: well-educated people have to feel ashamed of themselves reading Pajamas or listening to Michael Savage. Listening to Will makes getting the GOP talking points feel like going to church or sitting in on a particularly interesting class at Georgetown. That's why he exists.

His fellow pundits treat him with incredible deference, no doubt because Mr. Will is a friendly and gracious person. His charm must be great, for it prevents anyone from disagreeing with him. Ever. Until Paul Krugman came along. Now that he's regularly matched up against Krugman he no longer shares the camera solely with people who will unquestioningly swallow anything delivered in a condescending baritone and with politely folded hands. Krugman makes him look, well, like a pundit. Krugman doles out facts while Will, for all his polish, is exposed as just another guy on TV saying what he thinks and acting like his opinion is fact. Will's only accomplishment is spewing made-up crap about global warming and slamming "the unions" without making listeners feel like they are being lectured by their drunken Uncle Larry after being cornered at Thanksgiving. That's more than we can say about the rest of the GOP punditry, but…

Infomercial scam artists learned many years ago that a lot of mouthbreathers will believe anything as long as it comes from a man in a white lab coat. How could a man who looks like a doctor be lying? George must have been taking notes. He has made a 30-year career out of repeating things other, dumber pundits say in a way that doesn't insult upper middle class intelligence – provided one focuses solely on the delivery and disregards the substance.

In politics, like in anything else, there are good risks and bad ones. It often is difficult to evaluate political risks until many years after the fact. Nevertheless I think it is safe to say that when betting one's immediate future on a movement, it is a good idea to make sure said movement exists.

This is not a joke

Having impolitely and poorly faked their way through about 15 days' worth of bipartisanship, the mask has fallen off of Congressional Republicans and they've lapsed into a faithful re-enactment of the Clinton Years. They're throwing down the gauntlet and making their opposition to everything the President has to say loud, clear, and obnoxious. Republican Governors from dogpatch states like Louisiana are vowing to reject Federal money their piss-poor constituents could probably use. This is quite a gamble. The number of people without jobs and at the end of their financial ropes is high. But the GOP is banking on massive, grassroots opposition to the President's quasi-Marxist legislation which is apparently looting Joe Six Pack's wallet. (I thought the package was 40% tax cuts, but…bah! Details.)

One problem: it doesn't exist. The President is popular right now. The Congressional GOP is slightly – and I emphasize slightly – more popular than dick cancer. The pricey stimulus legislation is going over well too. The Democrats are literally twice as trusted to handle the crisis as their opponents.
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The massive movement opposing the legislation is nothing more than the same 20% of the people who give George W.

Bush a thumbs-up, the same people who would bitch and moan if Obama shit six tons of platinum and cured cancer.

The pontificating and bloviating by Richard Shelby, Bobby Jindal, and the rest isn't convincing Americans to oppose the administration. It's a minstrel show, a song-and-dance to entertain the stale crowd of rubes, militiamen, fundies, and chickenhawks who make up their base. That said crowd predictably barks and slaps its flippers together in approval is beyond irrelevant.

Of course these levels of popular support for Obama and the Democrats will change quickly if the legislation fails and the economy remains in the toilet. But here's the thing, the big question that no one in the GOP seems smart enough to have considered: what happens if the stimulus works? Do they have any idea how fucked they're going to be if the country does not collapse into a rubble heap as they're all desperately and selfishly hoping it will?

The foolishness runs even deeper. It's the nature of our economic system to experience ups and downs. Politically, whoever is in office is saddled with (often undeserved) responsibility. A thinking man would gamble that the current recession is going to be followed by a recovery, a recovery which will probably manifest itself in 2010, 2011, and 2012. Who do the GOP think is going to get credit for that? Even if the stimulus does absolutely nothing, Obama is going to look like a hero if things get better on his watch. Having opposed him tooth-and-nail, having told the entire country that he's a communist who will destroy America, having made clear that only the Republican alternative could ever pull the country out of its malaise, how is the GOP going to respond when the economy inevitably turns around? How will Rush, even with his vast and wild imagination, dream up a way for the GOP to take credit for it?

Had the party offered at least token support for the legislation they could have hedged their bets. It would have provided an insurance policy, a way to say "All the good parts were our idea.
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" It was obvious that the legislation would pass, so why not throw 30% of the House Republicans on board just in case? Instead they put on a meaningless show to entertain and get a round of applause from people who already vote Republican all the time, every time, no matter what. They have gone all in, betting everything that not only will the stimulus fail but the economy will not improve. That has all the wisdom of waiting until dark and then betting the farm that the sun will never rise again.

Matthew Kaminski has a half-decent piece at the WSJ on California's dire budgetary straits. Although the author can't help himself from lapsing into Journal boilerplate in a few places (it's always "the unions" and "spending") he does identify the crux of the problem. Californians, like all American voters, have an emphatic answer when asked if they want more government services or lower taxes: they want both.

As one of the lawmakers states in the article,

The people say they want all these programs, then there's nothing they want to pay for," says Hector De La Torre, a Democratic assemblyman. "The schizophrenia in the legislature reflects the peoples'.

In other words, the Sacramento is giving voters exactly what they want – extensive government programs and a tax burden nowhere near large enough to cover the costs.

This could easily turn into Exhibit #1001 in support of the broadly recognized fact that Americans are idiots. While I find no fault with that conclusion, the phenomenon of American stupidity is not a sufficient explanation in this situation. The real culprit, fittingly enough, has California roots.

Americans are not so dumb that they cannot understand that state services cost money and that the state's income, primarily from taxes, must be sufficient to pay the bill. It used to be that voters were required to face this reality, to recognize that if they wanted Social Security and a gleaming fleet of aircraft carriers it would be paid for with appropriate levels of taxation. Then, circa 1975, a telegenic California Governor came along and told Americans that basic logic and reality no longer applied.

The message was simple: government can do expensive things and cut your taxes at the same time! How? By eliminating "waste." Note the key rhetorical distinction. Tax cuts would not be justified with reduced spending – they'd be paid for by cutting only the "bad" spending. Many a Republican, including the current Governator, took office with the naive impression that he'd look at the budget and see items like "One billion dollars for ivory backscratchers!" which could be prudently excised until the budget was balanced.

That was the trick. That's all there is or ever was to Reaganism.
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It's the idea that there is this huge, amorphous, readily identifiable mass of waste in every government budget which, once eliminated, enables giving people tax breaks while still meeting their basic demands for old age programs, a War on Drugs, the military, and so on.
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Just cut out the waste and everything will balance.

That idea might actually have worked if governments really did have the huge, unquestionably wasteful mounds of garbage in their budgets. In practice, of course, "waste" was defined by each individual voter as any spending that did not benefit him or her directly. Farmers considered their subsidies absolutely essential. Social programs aimed at inner cities are pure waste, though! The other lasting legacy of Reaganism – scapegoating "welfare queens" and urban blacks who apparently consumed 75% of the GDP – was nothing but an effort to provide people with an Other who could be assailed as the recipient of all the wasteful spending that white, conservative America was certain existed.

The impending bankruptcy of the State of California is the logical result of the kind of delusional and selfish thinking that portions of the GOP have encouraged for thirty years. The message isn't "cut spending", i.e. all spending. It's "Cut waste." Cut everything that doesn't benefit Me. When I benefit it's a public service. When you benefit it's welfare. So California's (and the nation's) economic problems have little to do with a collective failure to understand that the state cannot spend more than it takes in. The intractability is rooted in the widespread belief that we can protect what is Ours in the budget and still get huge tax breaks by eliminating that which benefits You.