Steve Benen has posited that Republicans are likely to try to sabotage the economy over the next couple years to increase their chances of winning the White House in 2012. This caused former Bush speech writer Michael Gerson (don’t worry, this is just a link to Benen’s reply) to condemn him as an unserious partisan.
There is a lot of precedent for this type of sabotage, from Bill Kristol’s anti-HCR letter in 1994 to the recent New Black Panther Party nontroversy being pimped by Bush appointees. But the real reason, as Benen points out, that Republicans will try to sabotage the economy is that they will gain by doing so and suffer few if any repercussions:
Historically, lawmakers from both parties have resisted any kind of temptations along these lines for one simple reason: they didn’t think they’d get away with it. If members of Congress set out to undermine the strength of the country, deliberately, just to weaken an elected president, they risked a brutal backlash — the media would excoriate them, and the punishment from voters would be severe.
But I get the sense Republicans no longer have any such fears. The media tends to avoid holding congressional parties accountable, and voters aren’t really paying attention anyway. The Boehner/McConnell GOP appears willing to gamble: if they can hold the country back, voters will just blame the president in the end. And that’s quite possibly a safe assumption.
There’s a general unwillingness in establishment media to consider the ramifications of living in a post-reality media world. But right now, Republicans could do almost anything and be defended to the hilt by Fox News. Then Bobo would come in with “I don’t agree with Michelle Bachmann’s decision to shoot Joe Biden in the face, but it is part of a federalist tradition of principled Burkean action that is justified by Niebuhr’s theories of just wars”, then we’d get the Charles Lane piece comparing Bachmann to John Brown, then the Gerson piece about how this pales in comparison to the excesses of liberalism, then the Glenn Beck story about how Biden deserved it for tinkering with the Consumer Price Index, then the Sarah Palin Facebook post about how this made Bachmann more of a mama grizzly, then some Chunky Bobo about how if Biden didn’t want to get shot, he shouldn’t have supported reproductive rights (and on a smaller, less-read scale, League of Ordinary Gentlemen, Outside the Beltway, and Reason would simply worry that now libruls would come for their guns, the same way they came for Four Loko and free market trash collection).
Republicans would be crazy not to do everything in their power to prolong the recession. I’m not sure they’ll be able to do much, but they’d be nuts not to try.
cathyx
I thought they already were sabotaging the economy by being so concerned about the deficit. They will just be so concerned about it over the next two years that the tax cuts for the rich will become permanent, unemployment benefits will not be extended, and social security will be cut. It’s practically a done deal.
Svensker
Just a minor kreckshun.
Amir_Khalid
And what do you think they have been doing up to now?
Hawes
Also feeding into it is the fact that we don’t even have an agreed upon economic language. They can’t even agree on the basic equation of demand in macroeconomics.
Demand=Consumer spending+Government spending+Business investment+(Exports-Imports)
Since they can’t even agree on that, they can do whatever they want. They can plausibly argue in the media that tax cuts for rich fucks will create demand, because the media isn’t smart enough to call them on the absurdity. So they can screw everything up, and Krugman will be screaming about how they’re screwing everything up and every objective economist will talk about how they’re screwing everything up.
And we will get a “both sides have their viewpoints” story.
Benjamin Cisco
Svensker beat me to it.
lawnorder
Assuming they have no decency..
Ok, pick yourself from the floor, laughing like that doesn’t become you.
I keep hoping something would be too low for them to stoop to. :(
WyldPirate
Jesus H. Christ on toasted rye, DougJ. This has been going on for damn near a decade at least.
I hope that was just a rhetorical slip.
Jim, Once
martha
Back in the flyover, where I belong. My father’s now moved from crazy republican to a closet teabagger. Good times. Oh, and I’m just telling y’all, when he’s tossed in jail for not paying his taxes, I’m not posting bail. He really is (was?) smarter than that.
Dennis SGMM
They don’t need to try very hard and they’ll trumpet their austerity measures (Except for the rich and the corporations) as “Just the dose of strong medicine that America needs.” Inasmuch as the media has yet to mount any substantive challenge to the idea that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are a Good Thing, or that repealing the Estate Tax in toto is a bad one, so will it lay supine as the Republicans roll out their nihilistic agenda.
Odie Hugh Manatee
This country is really fucked if what we have today is the best we can do. People have always joked about how politicians can never answer a question, preferring to divert to some other subject in their answer. Now we have politicians who have no problem dropping baldfaced lies to the media and getting away with it when the media treats the lie as something that could be fact. Our press is pretty much worthless. Pundits are everywhere and the real news people are long gone.
Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and it smells. Our press is full of nothing but assholes, all venting and malodorous, almost all a poison to our nation. Corporate media is killing us.
The rich own the USA, we just rent it from them.
Mike in NC
It’s just what they know best. How else did they earn the name “The Wrecking Crew”?
Superluminar
Those guys should appoint an ombudsman or something.
cathyx
@martha: Dementia hits many old people.
Suck It Up!
@Jim, Once:
word.
Cat Lady
Republicans are traitors. The media is a collaborator. We’re fucked.
debit
@Superluminar:
If only we knew someone like that.
Tim
There are countless ways the Dems could fight back, with efficient and coordinated, relentless and brutally frank messaging in the media, from Obama on down, but for reasons unknown to me, THEY SIMPLY WILL NOT DO IT.
DougJ, your constant attempts to paint the Dems as oh so helpless in the face of the republicans and media have grown…sad.
The rare occasions when Obama gets down and dirty are usually to call out the left. Fuck him.
Svensker
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
More like sharecropping.
alwhite
You of course neglect to mention that they will not make it any better after they again have total control of the government. We are well and truly fucked.
AhabTRuler
DougJ appears to be intent on starting an illegal war of aggression with the libertarian axis of evil. They must have rhetorical WMD.
gene108
@Dennis SGMM: Since most of the national media benefit from those tax cuts, why should they be honest brokers about the actual impact of letting the Bush, Jr. tax cuts expire for people in their income bracket?
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Tim:
I think the Dems are helpless. The Republicans are where they are today because of their need to keep winning. Democrats had to have been successful to some degree to have helped to drive the Repubs off the cliff. They got crazy for a reason and that reason is power and control. That is all they are after, total control, and they will do anything to get it. I think too many Dems just don’t know how to cut through the crazy, or maybe they are afraid of the consequences of doing so.
Regardless, IMO they just can’t deal with the constant lies and endless media collusion in the Republican insanity. The media is already predisposed to favor the Repubs so cutting through that bullshit is nearly impossible for the Dems unless the story is juicy enough for some in the press to get into it. Even then the results almost always seem to favor the Repubs. I think things are going to have to get Great Depression bad and then some before we stand a chance of cleaning up the mess we are in.
danimal
@debit: I nominate DougJ to be the Ordinary Gentleman ombudsman.
Now THAT would be a fun turn.
aimai
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
This has it exactly backwards. When you are standing in a howling wind, you have to howl to be heard over it. That’s just the physics of the entire thing. The Democrats as a party have simply not been able to, and we have to argue not been willing to, fight hard enough for their actual policies and programs. The stronger and more vocal and organized the Republicans became the stronger and more vocal and organized the Democrats needed to be. And they have funked it, time and again.
aimai
Bill Murray
@aimai: partially this happens because a relatively high proportion of the democratic caucus and major funders agree with the Republican economic ideas
KCinDC
At least the Republican sabotage makes sense logically, if you assume they care nothing about any consideration other than winning the next election. What’s more maddening is the way conservative Democrats cooperated in the sabotage, even though that (predictably) resulted in electoral defeat for them. I still can’t comprehend their motivation.
burnspbesq
I’ll be interested to see what spin the wing nuts put on this piece of outstanding work by the FBI.
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2010/11/fbi_thwarts_terrorist_bombing.html
It was a little eerie to read this while sitting in a hotel room a block away from the intended target. A big bomb detonated during the tree-lighting ceremony would have killed or injured a couple of thousand people.
NobodySpecial
@burnspbesq: Treating it like it was a crime instead of an act of war? Totally appeasing and clueless. What they should have done was a bombing run on the little A-Rab’s house, followed by an occupation of the downtown area with advisers.
Dennis SGMM
@KCinDC:
The cynic in me says that when you strip away the rhetoric the two parties aren’t that far apart because they both represent the money party. The lack of will to substantively regulate the financial services industry and to break up those TBTF parts of it that are still holding a gun to our heads, to me, validates my cynicism. The Fed’s ongoing and unchecked shoveling of money to the banks at 0% interest and then burdening the rest of us with paying them 3% interest on the treasuries that they buy with that free money suggests something beyond collusion.
Before anyone says “Well, the Dems passed finreg,” I would remind you that the actuality of the regulation is dependent on some 600 rule makings, the outcome of which is anyone’s guess.
SIA
@Cat Lady: __
I’m afraid it really is that simple.
Dennis SGMM
@burnspbesq:
Not that the FBI would ever identify a 19 year old idiot with jihadi ambitions that he otherwise had no chance to fulfill and then egg him on to the point where he’d deliver the “weapon” with which they’d provided him.
General Stuck
@KCinDC:
Reminds me of a quote that Bill Moyers likes to make, that if you think elected officials are crazy, you should see their constituents. Or, nutty wingnuts, and their republican lite dem colleagues do not appear in a vacuum. They are on your teevee set for the simple reason that a majority of voters in their districts agree with them. This fact gets lost in the discussion over why blue dogs, and sometimes even mainstream dems say and do conservative stuff. They are simply reflecting the mindsets of a lot of their own voters.
Voters who either firmly believe in the crazy, or at least are temporarily swayed by it. And in the case of the recent defeated conservadems, even their pandering to the right wing blather couldn’t save them in the face of a white folk revolt and a desire to vote for the real thing.
The revolt was based on bullshit memes, ie death panels, government messing with medicare, and a Kenyan usuper in the WH, as a few examples. People choose to believe shit not based on rational examination, because they want to believe these things, for all sorts of reasons other than plausibility and it makes not much sense to get in a shouting match with idiots over the existence of “death panels” and the like. Voiced worst fears tend to sink into peoples heads who are looking for an excuse to support their tribes. Especially when it’s hard econ times.
jcricket
I think you’re slightly off here Doug. There may be a few actually willing to sabotage the economy, but I think Occam’s razor applies.
Most Republicans believe their own bullshit. They’ve invested enough time and energy into revisionist history that they think tax cuts increase government revenues, government healthcare costs more/works worse, regulation stifles innovation and is anti-capitalist and even that FDR’s New Deal policies caused the Depression. They also believe stuff like global warming is a hoax. So the policies they are pursuing directly reflect those beliefs. And when they were in the minority, their opposition reflected their opposition to the Democratic agenda + a “sensible” (politically) opposition of the Democratic party.
That these Republican policies will destroy the economy for all but the top 1% is sort of something they don’t think will happen (look at what happened when Reagan won and enacted his massive tax cuts – the deficit exploded. It took the Dems and the remaining sensible Republicans to get it under control with tax hikes). And if the economy does implode (again), the GOP will find a way to blame Democrats, and as an added bonus, it’ll make Obama look bad.
I think that’s why this meme isn’t going to take off. The better/simpler explanation is Republicans are attempting to roll back the clock on everything that made this country great. They want to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, worker protections and environmental regulations. Yeah, yeah, personal accounts + vouchers, those aren’t, per se, elimination – but we shouldn’t quibble so much – that’s our problem.
AliceBlue
Slightly OT, but on Thanksgiving I heard my brother, sister-in-law and cousins (all reliably Republican) talking about how much they like Sarah Palin, but that she wasn’t qualified to be president. I’m thinking, okay, that’s one baby step in the right direction. Then someone pipes up and says “you know who’d be a great president? Michelle Bachmann!” Other voices chime in “Yeah!” “Yeah, I really like her!” Understand that these are not mouthbreathing rednecks talking. These are educated people. My mind just can’t comprehend this. They look at her and see presidential material. I look at her and see batshit crazy.
BR
I guess the only thing we can hope for is a vicious internal battle for the GOP nomination to highlight their craziness while also splitting the conservative media into factions.
Drive By Wisdom
Already setting up the failure that the last two years of the Obamas presidency will be. Next you will be blaming the Republicans for a war in Korea while we have a president who cannot even win a street game against mexicans.
Nick
@Tim:
Oh yeah, if only they start yelling and screaming, I’m sure Fox and CNN will be right there to report every bit of it.
Nick
@aimai:
When you’re standing in a howling wind, you’re first priority is to not get blown away.
Howl over it? The human voice can only get so loud.
burnspbesq
@Dennis SGMM:
If they did what you allege (for which you have not one shred of admissible evidence), then the defendant has a shot at proving entrapment, and if he can prove entrapment, he walks.
Based solely on what is in the Oregonian and NYT stories, I think the FBI stayed on the right side of the line. And there are a couple of thousand people, including hundreds of little kids, who are walking around this morning instead of being in a hospital or morgue. I think I’ll take that outcome.
The other interesting question is how the FBI found out about this kid. One presumes that NSA picked up on his emails to Pakistan. Which brings some issues about the scope of NSA monitoring activities back into view.
Suck It Up!
@AliceBlue:
Its easy to fall for michelle bachmann. She’s attractive, articulate, somewhat soft spoken, and sounds like she’s telling the truth even if its a bold face lie. Do you think your family would like her if she looked like and sounded like Orly Taitz?
burnspbesq
@Drive By Wisdom:
That is a candidate for the Balloon Juice Moronic Comment Hall of Fame.
HRA
I swear my head spins reading all this angst about the one party not doing anything to stop the other party in politics.
What seems to be lost in the fray is the brotherhood/sisterhood of the participants. The majority of those in Congress are lawyers. Hang around in the corridors of any court and you will get a sense of what I mean is happening. One party does next to nothing or nothing because it agrees with what the other party is doing. More succintly, it’s all theater.
FlipYrWhig
@Tim:
Democrats don’t do “efficient and coordinated.” They represent too many different views, from right of center to left, and they don’t actually agree on very many things. And some of them have learned that they get attention, money, and votes by seeing what the rest of the Democrats seem to want and then grandstanding against it.
It’s especially true with Obama in the White House, but it was also true for Clinton. (It was probably true for Carter too, but I was too young to follow it.)
Some of that is the dynamics of professional Democrats: they backbite and backstab and spill the beans. Democratic politicians and staffers _enjoy_ carping at and backseat-driving their presidents. They like to run to the media and give them anonymous quotes about their flaws and failings. I don’t know it’s that way, but it is, consistently.
Then there’s ideology. In essence, Democrats abide heterodoxy, while Republicans abhor it. Republicans want all their people to talk the same way and believe the same things. Democrats couldn’t do that if they tried, and they don’t even really try anymore.
So, sure, they _could_ be relentless and consistent in “messaging”… if they had a single agreed-upon message and agreed in principle with the idea of coordinating it. That’s not what we have to deal with. Democrats as a group do not have “party discipline,” can’t fake it, and couldn’t enforce it if they tried.
Basilisc
@jcricket:
This is certainly Gerson’s argument, ie that according to their ideology it’s not sabotage – they really believe this stuff works.
But as I pointed out in a comment at Benen’s place, there’s really a very easy way to disprove this: when Republicans faced a choice between doing something conforming to their ideology, and doing something for political advantage, which did they choose?
Answer: politics, every time. Some examples:
– They attacked HCR for cutting some (actually, any) Medicare payments. Wait, I thought you guys opposed federal spending. Oh, that’s right, your 2010 (& beyond) political strategy rests entirely on scaring seniors.
– They attacked the Fed for QE. Which is pure Friedmanite monetarism (cf Krugman & DeLong for the cites). Oh, and central bank independence used to be a core conservative position.
– They blocked a bill that gave tax cuts to small businesses, without increasing the deficit. Yep, they really did that.
– They took credit for stimulus spending in their states & districts. Wait a sec, I thought the stimulus is a disaster for the economy – why would you be so proud of it?
So Occam’s razor would really go the other way – ie everything Republicans have supported is politically expedient, though not everything conforms to their ideology. And similarly, it’s more plausible to think that they oppose fiscal or monetary stimulus, oppose a sensible foreign policy, etc etc for reasons of sabotage, than that they take these positions because of an ideology that they themselves are happy to drop at a moment’s notice.
AhabTRuler
@burnspbesq: If we aren’t to presume that the FBI is engaged is provocative behavior in this case, perhaps we shouldn’t presume that the NSA was helpfully intrusive either.
danimal
@Basilisc: I wish every Democrat, every BJ reader and every Beltway journalist would read and understand your point.
Or, in the local parlance, THIS.
They don’t believe their own bs.
sherifffruitfly
“But I get the sense Republicans no longer have any such fears.”
Well duh. White voters have clearly declared that the only thing they care about is Scary Brown People (Latinos, Muslims, and Obama). All else is just a smokescreen.
And “true progressives” have clearly declared that they hate Obama every bit as much as republicans. Hence republicans have free reign to break as much shit as they can, and simply blame Obama for it. White voters will support this.
jwb
@jcricket: “That these Republican policies will destroy the economy for all but the top 1% is sort of something they don’t think will happen”—actually, unless they can replace the market they are destroying here with a market elsewhere, it will destroy the economy for that top 1% as well, though many may be able to escape before it happens. If this congress proves to be as dysfunctional as they appear and the states are forced to cut massively as it appears they will, massive corporate bankruptcies won’t be far behind.
burnspbesq
@AhabTRuler:
The facts as currently known don’t support an allegation that the FBI engaged in “provocative behavior.” The defendant had the intent long before the FBI got involved. As near as one can tell from publicly available information, the FBI did this exactly right. And if they didn’t, it will come out at trial, because entrapment is the defendant’s only chance at beating the charges.
Dennis SGMM
@burnspbesq:
Nope; no admissible evidence. Just being already an adult during the heyday of COINTELPRO.
AhabTRuler
@burnspbesq: I don’t dispute that, but from what you said in the same comment, it doesn’t seem that we have any reason to believe that the NSA was instrumental, either. Really, I haven’t looked into this, I am just going by yours and DennisSGMM’s comments.
I would also point out that much in the way that the legal system does not establish ‘truth’, admissibility isn’t the standard with which we judge things in the public sphere.
RalfW
They’re doin’ it to the New START – another chance ot ’embarrass’ Obama. The GOP doesn’t care about actual security of the nation/world, only the security of their jobs and their boss’s tax cuts. It’s vile and a decent society would have a press corps that gave a shit.
lucslawyer
But on the other hand, business could try to start hiring again just to make the recent repub success look good….
Bob
Chunky Bobo? As if Bobo (the original) wasn’t chunky enough.
All this is too too obvious. The Republicans engage in pure extortion on every piece of legislation (you wanna see those unemployment benefits – well hand over those permanent tax cuts; you wanna see a little stimulus, well, hand over those tax cut goodies, etc). And business sits on their giant cash hoard, keeping that unempoyment up, they’re making plenty of money right now, they just have to hold out a couple of years until they get someone in the White House they can work with. And the Democrats do not acquit themselves all that well (“Oh please don’t make me pass that tax cut that will save me $50,000 and keep my Wall Street dollars coming and assure me my cush job as a lobbyist when I “retire”).
schrodinger's cat
@danimal: You could, but DougJ is not ordinary!
elmo
Wait, why go through all the rationalizations, explanations, and equivocations when simple denial will do?
It wouldn’t be “Biden deserved it.” It would be “Biden was never shot, that’s a lie by the liberal MSM.” Haven’t you been paying attention? They don’t even bother to explain or rationalize anymore — they just deny.
In about six months I fully expect Fox News to come out with a shocking documentary proving that John McCain actually won in 2008, and that he has since died and been succeeded by Sarah Palin, the 45th President of the United States.
NR
@sherifffruitfly:
Examples? Or are you just making shit up?
jcricket
@Basilisc: OK – in a way the most recent actions counteract my thesis. Opposing the START treaty, etc. But I think this is not, again, an active “lets sabotage the Dems” but an internalization of the mentality that the most important thing is to contrast with the opposition – so no matter what idea Dems present, they will oppose it. No matter how far to the right Dems move, the Republicans will move more rightward.
I wish the Dems would internalize this fact, ignore the hypocrisy or political sabotage angle and simply focus on stating a positive agenda for America. People in America are effin stupid, but it seems being “confident” matters far more than being right. We do “confident” for shit.
jcricket
@jwb: Yeah – I didn’t post about it. But they’re going to destroy the top 1% in a very simple way. 75% of the economy is dependent on consumer spending. 98% of consumers make less than $250k/year. With additional loans/debt harder to gain access too and real wages falling (long-term trend), who exactly is going to be fueling the revenues of the companies owned by our Galtian overlords?
You can only cut staff to increase your stock price for so long before you’ve run out of headroom that way and need real revenue growth from additional sales.
My idiot brother-in-law (a rich person) doesn’t get this, and I suspect most Republicans are too dumb to get it to. It doesn’t take a banking panic to cause economic downturns. With Republicans in charge, another stimulus + unemployment surely doomed, and potentially (if Dems roll over) other spending cuts, we’re surely headed into double-dip territory. States are cutting budgets left and right, and the austerity will only prolong the downturn. If the feds get in on the Hooverism too, hellloooo Greece-style economic downward spiral.
dopey-o
okay, since most of us here are dems, i’ll explain this with small words and no capital letters.
some people say that the republicans want to run america into the toilet, knowing that obama will take the blame in 2012 and usher a republican president into the white house. other people say that isn’t true.
it doesn’t matter if it’s literally true! it’s almost as good a game-changing meme as “death panels”, “kenyan jihadists in the white house” and “obama is a racist who plans to enslave white people”.
in the knife fight that will be the 2012 campaign, the republicans have already shown that they carry guns and will use them. the real question is, will the democrats bring a knife to this fight, or a handful of beans and a soda straw?
the republicans pay no price for circulating lies that win elections. perhaps they will rethink their strategy when they have to defend themselves from equally effective lies.
…… naw, ain’t gonna happen ….
Cain
@Dennis SGMM:
Yeah, that’s one dumb ass. On the other hand, it is sad that you have these teenagers who even have these kind of thoughts. Clearly, they don’t seem to understand what kind of oppression his parents have fled when they left Somalia.
It bugs the shit out of me when I see teens act this way. If you want to make a change then you organize and protest or something not try to bomb innocent people. But then radicals are always fucked in the head.
When I was in India these past weeks, I would read what seemed like every other day about Shiites getting their asses bombed coming out of a mosque by some Sunni suicide bomber. Now, someone explain to me how this mother fucker thinks he’s going to get into heaven killing his fellow muslims who have just came out of a mosque? Religion makes no sense to me. Really, there should be a religion whose only goal is to meditate and hopefully you’ll get lucky or something.
cain
mclaren
@Tim:
And when anyone points this out, that person gets called a “firebagger,” “mentally ill,” “insane,” “in need of a hooker,” “a psycho,” “demented,” and someone who cannot be taken seriously.
Obama could’ve made recess appointments. Obama could’ve passed health care with a 50% vote by reconciliation. Obama could’ve held Repubs’ favorite military spending programs hostage unless they caved on some progressive legislation.
But no, instead Obama gibbered and whimpered about “post-partisan politics.” Meanwhile, the Republicans ripped the head off America and proceeded to shit down its collective neck.
mclaren
@jcricket:
The 80% of the population of the world that doesn’t live in America will be fueling the revenues of the companies owned by our Galtian overlords.
You people really don’t get it. The superrich in America don’t care about America because they’re not part of it. As Chicago Dyke pointed out, they live in Gstaad and Antigua and only occasionally visit their mansion in America. Our Galtian overlords make money from corporations which do 90% of their business outside the USA and as a result America’s superrich care nothing about this country. If unemployment in America rises to 50%, that’s great…because it’ll force even more brutal wage concessions from the remaining 50% of the American workforce. Meanwhile, our Galtian overlords will continue to see widgets made in China and India to the populations of Brazil and Russia and Taiwan and Thailand and they’ll become very very very rich.
Just read Adam Smith to realize how completely fucked the American people are by modern globalized economics. Here’s The Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter 2:
Notice how Adam Smith assumed that an American laborer would promote the general welfare by “preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry.” But no one prefers to support domestic producers to foreign producers today. Look on ebay. Take the example of a USB computer mouse — you look at American-made USB computer mice, you’ll pay $10. You look at a USB computer mouse made in China, you’ll pay $2.50 for it…including shipping.
Americans stampede to Wal-Mart to buy Chinese-made consumer goods. Americans shun American-made consumer goods…because the American-made stuff is four times as expensive.
Our Galtian overlords own those Chinese factories producing those $2.50 USB computer mice.
We’re fucked. Game over.
L
@AliceBlue:
If there’s one thing I learned in college, it’s that “educated” and “qualified to tell your ass from a hole in the ground” are two very different things.*
One of the people I met there graduated with a degree in national security studies and aspires to be an intelligence analyst, yet had no idea that we hadn’t found WMDs in Iraq until I told her, post-graduation. When she was told, she came up on the spot with the bubble gum wrapper theory that “then he must have hidden them in Syria!” which is now her default position.
I rest my case that being educated doesn’t seem to do much good for some people.
*In theory, that’s supposed to be the whole basis for GOP anti-intellectualism. Course, that never applies to them.
@mclaren:
Try this (http://pajamasmedia.com/ejectejecteject/2009/04/06/a-message-to-the-rich/) product of post-2008 daze;
Some of them happily admit that they don’t give a fuck about their country unless its people agree to throw themselves at the mercy of the rich. Wonder if this’ll ever become the official party line, and not just something for obscure bloggers reveling in their elitism.