The Dowager Pundit

The brilliance of Charlie Pierce:

It's past time for her friends, her family, or the spirit of JP The Deuce to descend on Our Lady Of The Dolphins and stage an intervention. Apparently, she believes that the president has a cauldron bubbling in the East Room from which he has loosed upon the land magic Kenyan Muslim Alinskyist spells that have stolen the souls of the American people. Either that, or it once again was two-for-one Harvey Wallbangers during Happy Hour at the Dowager Pundit's Club.

Further evidence of Charlie's brilliance is his link to No More Mister Nice Blog:

But that's not why I'm talking about Noonan. I'm talking about her because, in addition to believing that nonsense, she also believes that people aren't spending money in America at discount superstores because their animal spirits have been depleted by the evil Obama. I'm used to hearing right-wingers (and centrists) advance the (nonsensical) idea thatbusinesses aren't expanding because the confidence of CEOs has been undermined by "uncertainty" (there was Tom Freidman saying that again over the weekend, and here's David Brooks saying it again today) -- but now we're supposed to believe that poor and middle-class and lower-middle-class people aren't opening their wallets because of ... the national mood?

As opposed to not opening their wallets because, y'know, they're flat broke?

The Krugman's Graphs

A recession happens when Demand is low.  Krugman's been shouting in the wilderness for a long time that while the Deficit and the Debt are important - and will get to be moreso in time - we have to focus on continuing to boost Demand if we expect ever to get a chance to tackle any other problems.  

And BTW: the deficit is down significantly.  

And BTW also too: if you fix the Demand problem, then the Deficit problem kinda fixes itself; and once the Deficit problem is fixed, then the Debt problem practically evaporates before your very eyes.

The Krugman Speaks

From Krugman's blog at NYT:

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

I don’t know about the divines bit, but the little statesmen thing is completely accurate. Suppose George Osborne were to admit that austerity isn’t working. What, then, would be left of his claim to be qualified to do, well, anything? He has to stick it out until something turns up,no matter how many lives it destroys.

Pretty much the same thing is going on among pundits now stuck in what Jonathan Chait memorably calls the “fever swamp of the center”. Suppose that some pundit who has spent his whole career calling for bipartisanship, a compromise between the extremes of left and right, were to admit the plain fact that Obama is very much a centrist, who is in particular proposing deficit reduction through exactly the kind of mix of tax hikes and spending cuts “centrist” pundits demand — and that the GOP, by contrast, is an extremist organization whose extremism is almost solely responsible for the bitterness of the partisan divide. A pundit making that admission would in effect be saying that everything he has said and done for the past several years was not just useless but harmful, actively misleading readers about the state of the debate. He just can’t do it.

The point he makes on careerism is kinda what the whole thing ends up being about.  Once you've made it more important to maintain your position of power or influence within "the system", you've made the collapse of that system inevitable.  It can take lotsa time, but these things have an unerring mechanism for self-correction.

Re-read your Ayn Rand - Contradiction exists, but it cannot prevail.

The Winners Write The History Books

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Can't wait to see what the "conservatives" wanna do about the "dirty, Librul, 'Murica-hating leftists" because of this, from Smithsonian.com:

Bailyn has not painted a pretty picture. Little wonder he calls it The Barbarous Years and spares us no details of the terror, desperation, degradation and widespread torture—do you really know what being “flayed alive” means? (The skin is torn from the face and head and the prisoner is disemboweled while still alive.) And yet somehow amid the merciless massacres were elements that gave birth to the rudiments of civilization—or in Bailyn’s evocative phrase, the fragile “integument of civility”—that would evolve 100 years later into a virtual Renaissance culture, a bustling string of self-governing, self-sufficient, defiantly expansionist colonies alive with an increasingly sophisticated and literate political and intellectual culture that would coalesce into the rationale for the birth of American independence. All the while shaping, and sometimes misshaping, the American character. It’s a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called “the blood-dimmed tide,” the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call “genocidal,” the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.

 --and--

“Yes,” he agrees. “Look at the ‘peaceful’ Pilgrims. Our William Bradford. He goes to see the Pequot War battlefield and he is appalled. He said, ‘The stink’ [of heaps of dead bodies] was too much.”

Bailyn is speaking of one of the early and bloodiest encounters, between our peaceful pumpkin pie-eating Pilgrims and the original inhabitants of the land they wanted to seize, the Pequots. But for Bailyn, the mercenary motive is less salient than the theological.

“The ferocity of that little war is just unbelievable,” Bailyn says. “The butchering that went on cannot be explained by trying to get hold of a piece of land. They were really struggling with this central issue for them, of the advent of the Antichrist.”

Suddenly, I felt a chill from the wintry New England air outside enter into the warmth of his study.

The Antichrist. The haunting figure presaging the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation plays an important part in Bailyn’s explanation of the European settlers’ descent into unrestrained savagery. The key passage on this question comes late in his new book when Bailyn makes explicit a connection I had not seen before: between the physical savagery the radical dissenting Protestant settlers of America wreaked on the original inhabitants, and the intellectual savagery of their polemical attacks on the church and state authorities they fled from in Europe—and the savagery of vicious insult and vile denunciation they wreaked upon each other as well.

“The savagery of the [theological] struggle, the bitterness of the main contenders and the deep stain it left on the region’s collective memory” were driven by “elemental fears peculiar to what was experienced as a barbarous environment—fears of what could happen to civilized people in an unimaginable wilderness...in which God’s children [as they thought of themselves] were fated to struggle with pitiless agents of Satan, pagan Antichrists swarming in the world around them. The two [kinds of struggle, physical and metaphysical] were one: threats from within [to the soul] merged with threats from without to form a heated atmosphere of apocalyptic danger.”

Any of that last part ring any bells?  Is it possible to substitute Iraqis or Afghanis for the American Aboriginals?  How about Muslims? Or Immigrants?  And can I imagine myself being seen as one of those 'pitiless agents of Satan' in the eyes of the American Taliban?  Sad questions with potentially very sad answers.

Parade Of Stoopid

So this has been making the rounds lately:

Jennifer Olsen is a GOP Chair at the County level in Montana, so the first thing is that  we can't make any real assumptions that her IQ is any higher than her SUV's gas mileage.  And since we can't make that assumption, we really can't say with any confidence that she meant this as a subtle and ironic dig at her constituents' prejudices, thinking she'd gently chide them blah blah blah.

Actually, whether or not they believe it themselves, they put out this kinda shit because they know there's a constituency for it. (if there's any attempt at damage control, the explanation is likely to be a lot of fun)

The truly sad part is that I think this really is a fair indicator of the intellectual horsepower of the local GOP rank-and-file right now.

Absurdity Today

From a while back.

Another One Bites The Dust

Y'know how the Wingnuts are always slamming Obama because he's so anti-Israel that he's at best borderline anti-semitic?  Yeah, well - maybe not.

From CNN:

When President Barack Obama visits Israel next month, he'll be awarded the Presidential Medal of Distinction, Israeli President Shimon Peres' office announced Monday.

Obama, the first sitting U.S. president to receive the recognition, will be awarded the medal for making "a unique and significant contribution to strengthening the State of Israel and the security of its citizens," according to a release announcing the news.

There's always the very high probability that the Israelis are trying to play Obama (like they try to do with every Prez) in an effort to make him look less even-handed in the eyes of the Palestinians, which of course serves to put up a united front, with the US and Israel standing together against the whatever.

On one other hand, Obama handed a Medal of Freedom to Peres not long ago, so maybe it's quid pro quo - but seeing as how none of this shit happens by accident, we'll have to wait to see what gives, and try to figure it out after whatever happens happens, because there's just no fuckin' way we'll be getting any kind of meaningful analysis out of the Press Poodles on this.

My Hero

Charlie Pierce is pretty amazing, talking about the GOP problem.

If you want to know where the abandoned wrath is going to focus in the next election, this is the issue -- and there's nothing Marco Rubio can do to stop it, in case you were wondering. It is now past cliche to note that the Republican party, and the conservative movement that gives it most of its money and all of its intellectual energy, is presently reaping what it sowed, that the chickens have returned clamorously to the roost, and that crows doth sit upon the capitol. However, for that dynamic to have a material focus on the 2014 midterms, it needs a focus. Now, you might think that would be guns, but the party and most of its elected members are on roughly the same page as the NRA as nearly as I can tell. However, the Republicans have looked at the demographics of the last election and they have made a concerted -- and very public -- effort to reform themselves on this issue because they would rather not become the Whigs of the 21st Century. As is obvious from the highlighted excerpt above, guns have their salience as an intraparty issue only when they can be connected to the issue of illegal immigration, not the other way around. In this formulation, you will note, the right to bear arms is yet another "free government benefit" that the "illiterate invaders" want.

Just fucking brilliant is all that is.

Djesus Uncrossed

Today's Animation

A golden oldie: