brainiac conspiracy

They've Had Lots of Help

One of the biggest reasons why the crazy people continue to say and do crazier and crazier things with each passing year is that the shrewdest among them know that no matter how insane and destructive their governing style is, there will be some serious persons in the Washington media establishment who will chalk it all up to the usual Beltway Blame Game because both sides do it. Because, just, because.

Snark aside, it's always been a source of wonderment how so many Washington journalists convince themselves that there must be equivalent degrees of polarity driving our two major political parties. One, I think, is that most of the people who write and report the news for the big outlets nowadays are overwhelmingly in their 30s and 40s, i.e., they grew up and/or came of age during the administration of the Greatest President Ever, hence many of them likely view him as an ideological benchmark by which they can accurately gauge mainstream Republicanism---even though, in their own time, Ronnie and his crew held some genuinely strange beliefs. Also too, the persistence of the bullshit Tip 'n' Ronnie myth, where two old adversaries ironed out all their differences over shots of Ol' Granddad, and if only we had leaders like them on both sides of the aisle today. Whatever the reason, though, they've certainly helped to fan the flames of the crisis we're staring at now

---Baron V

Guns 'R' Us

At the risk of sounding like a heartless bastard, I have to admit I can't work up much empathy for people who leave loaded guns lying around in places where children can get to them. I feel horribly for the kids who die needlessly in gun-related accidents, of course---I mean, a six-year old boy who unintentionally guns down his four-year-old brother is going to be traumatized for the rest of his life---but parents have to got to know that their kids will eventually "act out" whatever they see Mom and Dad doing, and if that includes playing with firearms, well, guess what, stuff happens, and this is the price you pay for your liberty, that the right of your toddler to accidentally shoot himself in the head shall not be infringed. Like the old saying goes, be careful what you ask for, people.

---Baron V

Silver Linings

There aren't many to take away from our insane era, but it does appear, based on the rhetoric, that the President has come to the realization---finally!---that it's been foolish to try to negotiate with the crazy people, and that his repeated attempts at it have been the signature tactical failures of his administration. The zanies deserved to be steamrolled from Day 1, and they deserve to be steamrolled now. Too bad we'll have to shut down the government to prove the point, but four years of concessions only ensured that this day would be inevitable. Who knows, maybe we'll get lucky and win back the House and restore adult supervision next year, but hold your breath on it.

---Baron V

Mint The Stupid Coin Already

The crazy people are going to shut down the government for awhile---at least until their constituents start bitching for their mail and their Social Security checks---and there's likely nothing to be done about it, so enjoy the unpaid vacation! But the phony debt-ceiling crisis can be disarmed whenever the administration wants, and the only thing they really have to lose by doing it is an impeachment vote. But that's coming eventually, no matter what they do, so they might as well get it over with.

(As an aside, if they really wanted to help, they'd mint several trillion-dollar coins and use the proceeds to mail a check---or direct deposit---to every household in America for, oh, I dunno, let's say ten grand. Okay, I know they can't do it legally the way our laws are currently written, but it would be smart policy since it would boost demand for labor, which lowers unemployment and drives up wages. Win-win! But only unserious persons are allowed to propose such policies---even if those policies have been proven to work---because, well, because. Such is the nonsensical world we live in.)

---Baron V

Got an Easy Answer For That

It wouldn't have worked because they would have been ridiculed.

Because the nation was a much different place, and nowhere more so than with our media. Most people still got their news from newspapers in the '60s, in part because the three major networks only devoted a half hour a day to the news. (It was only 15 minutes until the Kennedy assassination.) Most newspapermen in those days had grown up during the Depression, and most hailed from working-class backgrounds. They had seen first-hand how toxic right-wing politics were in the McCarthy era; some had friends or colleagues who had been blacklisted, and most had learned the lesson that despite all the crazy people's bluster, there was little political price to pay (outside the Bible Belt) for calling them out on their bullshit the way Ed Murrow did. Put succinctly, the crazy people were treated by our media watchdogs as though they were, well, crazy, and that attitude filtered down to the public at large. Watch the video, you'll see what I mean.

Like I said, it was a different country. People who said ridiculous things were ridiculed and laughed at, not treated as sane and rational members of society. Since the crazy people now have a multimillion-dollar media machine to broadcast their bullshit, there's probably no turning back to the 1960s, but that doesn't excuse all of the usual suspects from treating the crazy people as though they're mainstream thinkers advancing informed opinions.

---Baron V

Got an Easy Answer For That

No.

Because what liberals (as opposed to Washington neoliberals) want is:

1. A job for everyone who wants/needs one.
2. A guaranteed annual income if no jobs are available.
3. Single-payer health care. Abolition of for-profit health insurance.
4. Free post-secondary education, or an Oregon-style "pay forward" system.
5. Breakups of the largest banks. Prosecutions of their senior executives.
6. Mortgage cramdown and/or debt-forgiveness legislation.
7. Double the size of Social Security payments.
8. An end, once and for all, to the War on Drugs.
9. Two trillion dollars for infrastructure spending.
10. Stop seeking advice from people who are wrong about everything.

And these are just off the top of my head. There are doubtless many others. Now, we liberals will work with the President whenever it's practicable because, like it or not, he's about the only thing standing between us and the Confederate States of Bedlam. But I don't think very many of us dedicated lefties are under any impression now that the President is "one of us" because, ideologically, he just isn't. He's a classic neoliberal interventionist in the tradition of Bill Clinton---which wouldn't be so objectionable if the neoliberal interventionists hadn't shown a nagging tendency to be, like, wrong about virtually everything. So when we're at loggerheads with the President over, say, Larry Summers or Syria or whatever, we're not locking horns with him because he's somehow "betrayed" us, it's because we'd like to prevent him from being wrong about everything. Every family needs an "intervention" from time to time, and Team Democrat is no different in this regard.

---Baron V

Don't Bet on It

Seems like just about every year, someone in the establishment commentariat predicts the imminent demise of the crazy people, and yet it never seems to happen. Sure, there may be some dust-up at present between the House crazies and the Senate crazies, or between the Speaker of the House and his crazies, but in the end, it doesn't matter. If the Speaker gets out of line, they'll primary him, and replace him with another crazy person. They've been doing this, incrementally, for decades. Two reasons for this: (1) An unlimited supply of free money for them, and (2) a credulous D.C. media apparatus that mistakes their delirious rants for informed opinion. Also too, because there are still a lot of white people.

What will eventually spell their demise, of course, are changing demographics and rejection by voters. Not just once, but in several successive cycles. The only question is whether we will have a liberal democracy worth saving from them by the time this happens, or whether we'll have run out of time to be delivered from the felicities of strongman government. Right now, I'd say it's a toss-up.

---Baron V

Malaise Era 2 Misanthropic Boogaloo

At the risk of sounding like an Old Fart, something that's changed noticeably---or seems to---in this country since your humble blogger was a wee sprout has been an attitudinal shift in the minds of many Americans: A coarsening of the psyche and an antisocial meanness that I don't honestly recall encountering that often a generation ago. Mostly, it manifests itself in the perception that our Republic is not really a multi-celled organism of interconnected parts but just a piece of real estate inhabited by 300 million individuals who have no obligations to each other for absolutely anything ever: And beyond that, an active hostility, bordering on violence, against other Americans who have been victims of misfortune and who are dependent upon others for assistance. I suppose there are a number of reasons how the Angering of America---and we're really taking about white America, mostly---came to pass, and persons more knowledgeable than I are best left to explain it . . . but there's a real sickness that's infected the minds of many Americans over the last 30 years or so. Just check out the comments thread for any Yahoo! news article and you'll see what I mean. One thing that might---repeat, might---help quarantine, if not cure, the ailment would be for the people who are charged with guiding our political discourse to stop allowing the carriers of the disease to keep spreading it unchecked.

---Baron V

Guess It's Not Really a Crisis

If our American media people don't say it's a crisis, but still:

High radiation levels are spreading at the ruined Fukushima nuclear plant, its operator said on Monday, and the Japanese government prepared to offer more funding and oversight to try to contain the crisis.

Don't know what's odder about this story: The relative incuriosity our American news media outlets have shown for it, or the fact that the Japanese utility company is still trying to jury-rig a fix when it's fairly obvious they can't hack it alone. I mean, if there was ever an example of an environmental crisis that demanded an all-hands-on-deck emergency call, this would seem to fit the bill. Yeah, the Japanese probably don't want to lose face over this, but at this point, it's an international crisis that's begging for an international response. Last I heard, there was this group called the IAEA that had some expertise in these matters. Perhaps someone should give them a call.

---Baron V

Too Hot to Blog

Weather's really brutal in the Marxist dystopia today. Heck, even the Intertubes seem to be melting (slow page-loading times, videos not streaming, etc.), so if posting is light this afternoon, it's likely because I'm soaking in a bathtub full of cold water and counting down the minutes to Happy Hour.

---Baron V

Stop Giving Them Money

If the Real Americans refuse to set up their own health-insurance exchanges, well then, just let them do nothing. Then start levying fines against their governors for noncompliance, just as we would do for failure to abide by, say, EPA mandates; to my way of thinking, the amount would be equivalent to the combined penalties that all of their states' uninsured residents would have to pay for lack of coverage. If they still refused to pay, impound their share of federal budget appropriations. Then pour that money back into states like California, which is setting up its own exchange (and spending a lot of money to do it), which we could use to, you know, make health care more affordable for our residents via subsidies, tax credits, etc. Too bad for Texas, but win-win for us!

Yes, I realize this will likely never happen, and it would trigger all sorts of court challenges if it did, but basically, it's like this: if the majority of voters in Texas want to keep electing people who don't give a shit whether they live or die, that's their prerogative---but it's not one the rest of us should feel obliged to support anymore. Enough with the "skin in the game" rap---if they don't want to be helped, stop trying to help them, and try lending a little more assistance to those of us who do. In other words, if they want to "secede" from our national health-care system, fine---just let them suffer the consequences of it.

---Baron V

Chemical Weapons

They're awful things, obviously, and they should be forever banned. But while denouncing the people who deploy them in warfare, we shouldn't overlook the people who deploy them in peacetime and who even have the gall to tell us that they're an integral part of a smart and sensible "all-of-the-above" strategy to achieve energy independence. Because, put in perspective, the chemical weapons of peace are a much bigger threat to humanity than the chemical weapons of war will ever be. Just a thought.

---Baron V

You Only Need One Reason

Because they're insane.

I mean, it's hard to see how they make any moves toward compromise after baying at the moon for the last four years about death panels and roads to serfdom and shariah law and Hitler Hitler Hitler, especially now when it's obvious that there's no chance of derailing the Goldberg Act. (On the other hand, the grown-ups have done a pretty good job of that on their own.) So yes, I am wagering that they will shut down the government, and they may even refuse to raise the debt ceiling. It's yet another reason why the White House should announce preemptively that no matter what happens, they're minting the coin, so forget about defaulting because it ain't gonna happen. It might not stem the crazy, but it would be disempowering them, and that would be a good thing for the citizenry as a whole.

---Baron V

Mint The Coin Already

Maybe it's because I'm not a ninja master of 11-Dimensional Mouse Trap, but for the life of me I can't understand why the administration doesn't simply announce that they're going to mint a coin and park it at the Fed if/when the crazy people threaten to crash the federal government next month, so they might as well forget about doing it and get back to repealing the Goldberg Act every week because there's not going to be any defaulting on the debt ever, period. Seems to me like a good way to preempt the possibility of another bad "sequester" bargain, not to mention providing a measure of certainty to the financial markets and so forth. So why not do this? Yes, the crazy people will shout OMG HITLER WORSE THAN BENGHAZI #IMPEACH!, but that's their pathology and it won't change by trying to make nice and forge another crappy compromise with them; if anything, it'll only enable further craziness. So the only reasons why the administration isn't doing this, as best as I can figure, is because (a) they still think they can use bipartisan fairy dust to turn jackasses into unicorns, or (b) they're perfectly happy to use the debt ceiling as a fig leaf for another Grand Bargain which, like all the other Grand Bargains, will cut a few more holes in the social safety net. But whichever it is, they can do a lot better!

---Baron V

Up to Their Old Tricks

This is not, repeat not, from The Onion:

It's fairly easy to judge which development is worse for promoting rational discourse in this country: Not that this racist cretin is entertaining the possibility of running for the Presidency, but that a major metropolitan newspaper with the ability to reach millions of households either takes his rantings seriously enough to give him a cover treatment on its weekly lifestyle mag, or feels compelled to do so in the interest of presenting the arguments of "both sides," even if one of the competing "sides" happens to be, like, insane. Have mentioned this before, but things weren't always this way, and some people on the Post's management team should take a look at some back issues of their own damn paper:

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist"---out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest.

---Baron V

The Animal Kingdom

One thing we've learned about it is that if a particular species of critter comes to dominate a given ecosystem, and it has no known predators to control its numbers, it will reproduce to a point where it literally eats its way out of its habitat, which will trigger a mass die-off due to starvation and disease, and this condition will persist until the critter's population can again be sustained by its habitat. Nature self-corrects, in other words, and we're about to see once again how this scientific principle works in actual practice---this time, with us.

---Baron V

Got an Easy Answer For That

Of course not.

Because it's all just a numbers game. What they actually say doesn't matter.

---Baron V

Why They Act Crazy

Because chumps like Paul Farhi---and his bosses in the Post's newsroom--take them seriously as credible news sources, and reward them for their craziness with above-the-fold coverage of stories that aren't important and that nobody who isn't crazy cares about:

The rumblings began after the widely read Drudge Report linked to a rather innocuous account of the news-media tour from the Web site FishBowlDC, which described the building’s features.

Soon, the blog- and Twitter-ospheres were percolating with denunciations of the building’s cost and alleged excesses.

“They build a ‘News Palace’ and they still need taxpayer dollars?!?” tweeted Jim Farley, vice president of news for WTOP, the all-news radio station in Washington.

A blogger known as the Lonely Conservative sniped, “Who wouldn’t be jealous of working in such a lavish space, especially when one’s tax dollars help to fund” it?

And Michael Savage, the fire-breathing conservative radio host, took to his microphone to rail against the “incomprehensible” nature of NPR’s new digs. “They just opened a new building, NPR,” sneered Savage on his syndicated show. “A new building they’re showing off how wonderful it is in Washington, D.C. You will not believe the edifice they built for themselves. It’s astounding. You cannot believe what they gave themselves at NPR. . . . How much money did that cost to build?”

Drudge really does rule their world, now, doesn't he?

But it was not always thus. Perhaps the Post's editors should read some back issues of their own paper:

It used to be different. You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to "debunk" claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president's program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn't adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of "conservative claims" to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as "extremist"---out of bounds.

The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America's flora. Only now, it's being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest.

And it's hard to see how a liberal democracy can long endure when our nation's policy establishment continues nurturing psychotics who are bent on destroying it. But they make for great copy!

---Baron V

Environmentalism is For Suckers

It's an effective marketing device for Team Democrat, and it's great for getting the rubes to cough up lots of campaign cash, but when it comes to actually governing . . . nah, they don't believe in it:

In one of the signature moments of his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama vowed that if Congress failed to act on energy and climate change, he would use his executive powers to do so.

Yet even as he was making this pledge, the White House was blocking several Department of Energy regulations to require that appliances, lighting and buildings use less energy and create less global-warming pollution.

The White House has bypassed a 1993 executive order that in most instances demands that it act on proposed regulations within 90 days and has spent as long as two years reviewing some of the energy efficiency rules.

---Baron V

Got an Easy Answer For That

Gee, dunno. Let's pretend!

What's really amazing about posts like this is how incredibly lengthy, detailed and precise they are---with names, places, times, and locations that play out like a documentary, even though there's not a whisper of reality in any of their "facts". Not to mention the multiple calumnies---it can't simply be coke-snorting, but hanging out with male strippers, with some buttfucking thrown in, too---on the night of America's Greatest Tragedy Ever. But posts like this do serve a purpose, though, because they remind us that, as mentioned earlier, a nation that loses its grip on its history may fall under the sway of psychotics and sociopaths who make it up on the fly. When that happens, things generally don't end well.

---Baron V