Jonathan Bernstein asks of the debate audience:
And, in many cases, reality — do these folks really believe that the biggest economic problem today is runaway inflation? That Americans are desperate to rid themselves of Social Security? That policies enacted by Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2009 (whatever you think of those policies) caused a recession that began in 2007? That “exceptionalism” is the beginning and end of foreign policy?
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. It’s not that complicated.
Soon enough, his colleagues at Kaplan will be explaining why these beliefs are the sign of a finely-tuned Real Murkin mind, an ideal blend of Burkean restraint and Jack Daniels grill glaze that hippies like me could never understand.
Mike in NC
There’s that reality and its liberal bias thing, yet again.
Yutsano
What’s wrong with Jack Daniels grill glaze? Other than the HFCS and other artificial crap in it.
And yeah, they will all toe the line here soon enough, lest they be labeled unserious and get disinvited to Sally Quinn’s soirees.
Bubblegum Tate
David Remnick nailed this one in the Sept. 5 issue of The New Yorker:
That’s pretty much it right there.
Big Baby DougJ
@Yutsano:
They always talk about it on those Applebees ads. I have nothing against it.
arguingwithsignposts
All I know is there is an “Obama Recession” going on. And if there isn’t any salad bars at Applebees when we recover, I don’t know how I will live.
TenguPhule
Wingnut Bingo. You win a world where evil thrives and good dies early.
Comrade Kevin
“Runaway inflation”? Isn’t the inflation rate currently somewhere around zero, if not negative?
Zagloba
@Bubblegum Tate:
Reminds me of a conversation with the woman who hosts the local Drinking Liberally.
Her: You know, I try, I try hard, to get inside the mind of a rightwinger. And I really can’t.
Me: That’s because you’re trained as an engineer. Eventually, what you’re putting together has to work, for some nontrivial measurable definition of “work”.
Spaghetti Lee
I gotta say again, I really don’t think poor Ed Burke deserves to be smacked around like this. The guy thought that radical government based on idealized philosophy wasn’t the way to go, but that’s what the Evangelical/Objectivist syndicate is all about. We’d be facing a lot fewer problems as a country if we weren’t surrounded by right-wing yahoos who insisted that Ayn Rand’s Perfectly Logical and Rational Ideas were totally unimpeachable and wanted to kill anyone who insisted otherwise.
As for a better historical figure to name them after, I don’t know…Ivan the Terrible? Genghis Khan. When I see modern conservatives, I think more “Destroy and conquer your enemies and bathe in their blood” than “The wisdom of tradition should be respected.”
Zagloba
@Comrade Kevin: Roughly 1-1.5%, if the magic 8-ball isn’t lying to me again. Low enough that T-Bills are a sure loser to buy, and yet we can’t print them fast enough for demand.
fuckwit
Stupids gonna duh.
arguingwithsignposts
@Spaghetti Lee:
I’m going Godwin. Hell yeah, folks! Hitler!
Villago Delenda Est
@Zagloba:
And that’s why it drives me fucking nuts.
I was trained as a military officer, and like engineers, what you’re putting together has to work in the real world, because your adversary will not cut you any slack.
Redshift
@Zagloba: But gas prices are up from the crash-depressed low when Obama took office, and therefore the inflation rate clearly doesn’t reflect how horribly deprived Real Murkins are now!
Or something like that. I can never quite follow the arguments from wingnuts in Krugman’s comments section, but they frequently seem to revolve around the idea that official measures of inflation must be wrong because it seems like stuff costs a lot more.
Comrade Luke
I dare one of these idiots worried about inflation to define what inflation actually is. I doubt the majority of them could.
hhex65
If you read that list in Sam Elliott’s voice as statements rather than questions it makes total sense.
Spaghetti Lee
@Comrade Luke:
Inflation? That’s easy, son! That’s when the black folk get into the money supply, y’see, and they spend it all on the hip-hop music and the doo-rags and they ain’t enough money left for the white folk, but then them commies in Washington print more money to reward all them fer bein’ so lazy and shiftless.
srv
If we had one of these debates out here, I thought maybe I’d go poison it by screaming for crazy stuff like executing people, ponzi schemes or deserving to die because you didn’t have health insurance…
But it appears I don’t have to.
The problem with the Wingularity is that it really is like being stuck at the event horizon of a black hole.
It goes on forever.
Jenny
Jon Stewart can be such a douchebag.
He’s always the first one to complain when Obama gives a lofty speech, saying he should dumb it down to make it accessible to the low information types.
Fair enough.
But now that the President has done exactly that he’s complaining that a plain spoken speech insults our sophistication.
Oy vey.
And if Obama did something in between, Stewart would be complaining that Obama doesn’t stick to one tone.
Martin
@Comrade Luke: It’s when the top marginal rate goes from 35% to 39%, while lazy people with no income continue to pay no taxes.
Comrade Kevin
Holy Shit, could Olbermann be more sanctimonious? That “special comment” of his was something else. Bitching, in his most Holier Than Thou tone, about fucking baseball uniforms?
James E. Powell
The audience at the debates, and to some extent Republican primary voters, are not cheering for policy positions that they would like to see enacted. They are cheering for candidates who represent their worldview. For the last three decades or so, Republican candidates used resentment and fear to animate these voters. These voters now expect it, and expect it to constantly increase in passion. In order to keep them animated, in order to be something new, the candidates have to express policy positions that are more extreme, more outside what the crowd has heard before. And since the candidates can’t really say the words the crowd really wants to hear, they say other things that fan the flames of that right-wing worldview. So we get applause for executions and for letting people without insurance die.
My sense is that if the current political culture would allow the candidates to say the racial and homophobic epithets, if instead of debating they could just take turns punching an actual hippy, they wouldn’t need to discuss policy positions at all. And the crowd would be totally fine with that. Because they don’t know about policies and they don’t really care.
Martin
@Comrade Kevin:
Yes. It’s like jello and the myth of peak wingnut – there’s always room for more.
Joseph Nobles
These darn young bucks eating T-Bones, having heart attacks, and lying in our emergency rooms in comas. Something’s gotta give.
niknik
@Spaghetti Lee: Dad? I didn’t know you read Balloon Juice! How have you been?? How is Ohio these days?
Frankensteinbeck
@Jenny:
Oh, lord, did he try that again tonight? I try to give him a pass because he’s a comedian. He shouldn’t be held to the standard of a journalist or political commenter. And yet I worry he thinks he is a pundit and serious political commenter. If so, he’s got some fucked up issues with Obama. His interview with Obama was absurd. He harped constantly on how Obama’s ‘change’ promise was a lie because the political tone in Washington remained partisan. That was it. It was all he would talk about.
@Spaghetti Lee:
I’ve read a bit about Burke, and like most wingnut reasoning they seem content to claim his authority without making any effort to accurately represent his positions. Almost none of them apply to the modern US, because Burke didn’t care a rat’s ass about the modern US. He was strictly interested in England’s issues. That was central to his entire ethos. It would be like claiming (I hate to Godwin, but I’m too tired to think of another example of this even though it’s common) that the US is the greatest nation in the world because Hitler thought Germany was the greatest nation in the world.
Jenny
@Frankensteinbeck:
Oh Jesus. Tonight he was complaining that Obama hasn’t been…. wait for it… partisan enough.
Frankensteinbeck
@Jenny:
Yeah. His commentary is solidly in the ‘Obama can do no right’ category. The thing is… is this just a joke? Really, seriously just a joke? Because he is a comedian, and comedians take cheap shots and are not supposed to be happy with anybody. And he does rail across the board at absolutely everyone.
Amir Khalid
Maybe this is overoptimistic on my part. But if you wanted to discredit Teabaggers as a voting bloc and the politicians who pander to them, what could be better than putting them on the television together? Both are seen by the wider public for what they are: the first lot as a hysterical mob, baying for the blood of those unlike them; the second lot as either shameless or spineless in going along with the first lot.
Am I right? How is the reaction to the debates among non-Tea Party Americans? Are they as repulsed as the Balloon Juice commentariat by what they see?
Jenny
@James E. Powell: This is a very good analysis.
Frankensteinbeck
@Amir Khalid:
It’s hard to be 100% certain, because every source of information is heavily biased. In particular, the national television and newspaper news culture is heavily invested in pretending that the Tea Party is a legitimate grass-roots phenomenon representing the country’s all-important independents. Any claim otherwise is anathema and evidence of it is suppressed. Since it’s crucial to understanding the Tea Party to realize that it’s mostly the right wing fringe of the traditional Republican Party, this leads to really warped reporting.
What we know is that Sarah Palin was a gigantic drag on McCain’s ticket. We know that affable idiots like George Bush are popular enough to be competitive in national elections. We know that the Tea Party’s gains were exclusively in the House, where gerrymandering and local politics shelter freaks like Bachmann and always has. In state-wide Senate elections, the Tea Party got creamed and lost even such giveaway seats as Harry Reid’s. Only Rand Paul made it, and he turned away from his extreme positions as soon as he hit the general election. We know that Americans poll almost all incumbent politicians with very low approval, and they’re almost always reelected. We know that the farther right you get, the lower you poll nationally. We know that conservative narratives and liberal positions score high in polls. We know that traditionally presidential winners have emphasized their moderateness (even Bush, the snake) in the general election. Oh, and we know that attacking Medicare and SS leads to horrific backlashes.
My interpretation of this information is that the US in general is perfectly happy with sound bites and vaguely generalized stupidity. They (particularly actual moderates) detest babbling incoherent ignorance and *obvious* extremism or craziness. They also don’t pay much attention this early in the election process and these GOP debates are being followed only by the most hardcore conservatives and horrified liberals.
drunken hausfrau
They also believe that if you have no insurance, you deserve to die.
And, executing innocent people is great. Less lowlifes in the world. Especially those dark skinned ones.
These people are the ugliest Americans.
PurpleGirl
I know what Krugman says about inflation. I know the technical explanation that inflation is low to non-existent. They don’t include food in the calculation of inflation but that is what the everyday person encounters. When I go to the store and buy bacon the price is higher than it was the last time I bought bacon. The can of coffee is smaller than it was last year. Hell, one yarn manufacturer has reduced the amount of yarn in a skein and the price is the same as before.
It doesn’t seem as if prices ever go DOWN.
MariedeGournay
@Frankensteinbeck: I don’t give him a pass at all. The excuse of being ‘just a comedian’ doesn’t wash with me, because his ‘comedy’ is political. He’s enforcing a view, and giving an opinion, and the very power of his platform deems him worthy of being challenged when he is wrong.
Elias Isquith
Soon enough, his colleagues at Kaplan will be explaining why these beliefs are the sign of a finely-tuned Real Murkin mind, an ideal blend of Burkean restraint and Jack Daniels grill glaze that hippies like me could never understand.
Heh.
Rihilism
Snorted or freebase?
Mark S.
My understanding of Burke (it’s been a while and I didn’t read a lot of him) is that he was somewhat progressive for his time but the French Revolution terrified him. He correctly foresaw that it would end up as a dictatorship. His main point was that societies can’t withstand that radical of an upheaval, and that change has to be more gradual.
“Conservative intellectuals” read him to mean that just being against change is somehow a coherent philosophy.
Judas Escargot
@Spaghetti Lee:
Ayn Rand has done more damage to this country than Hitler, Stalin and Hirohito ever dreamed of. And I bet Godwin himself would agree with me…
Did manage to see the debate last night, stayed offline for the most part to process it on my own. Sorry to say my main takeaway was from looking at the audience: So many old, weak, doughy faces out there. So smug in their ignorant certainty, so loud in their call for de facto anarchy, so eager to applaud and cheer at the death and poverty of others.
Yet theirs would be among the first skulls smashed against the curbstone, should they ever get the total anarchy they seem so crave so much.
Oh, the irony.
Calouste
American Exceptionalism is the beginning and end of everything, is it? Part of the reason the public option wasn’t possible was because those commie Europeans have it so it can’t be right because of, uh, America Fuck Yeah!
Bubblegum Tate
@Martin:
Wait, I thought that was soshulism?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@James E. Powell:
@Frankensteinbeck:
Two really solid comments. You folks are hitting them out of the park.
Oh, and the tricky thing about Jack Daniels grill glaze is that it works best if you apply it with Burkean restraint; use too heavy of a hand and the meat will forget nothing and you’ll have learned nothing.
Cris (without an H)
new post category
Gregory
Conanservatives.
Hob
@Zagloba: If you think engineers are immune to wingnutism, especially of the libertoonian variety, then we haven’t met the same engineers.