Larison reads the latest nonsense from James Pethokoukis, and remarks:
I’m not sure if Pethokoukis is kidding, but it seems as if he really doesn’t understand anything Stewart was saying on the show.
Daniel- James isn’t kidding, and there is a solid chance he didn’t understand one thing during the entire Cramer/Stewart interview.
I know it isn’t polite to say these sorts of things in the cyber village, but I have yet to see Pethokoukis write anything about politics that would suggest his IQ on that subject is higher than room temperature in Wasilla in the winter. Here he is wondering whether Obama’s interaction with Joe the Plumber had cost Obama the election. Here is Pethokoukis expanding on the Goldberg theorem, guessing that the market downturn last October was based more on the (and I quote) “tax-hiking and regulatory reign of terror” of a possible Obama presidency than the fact that financial institutions worldwide were experiencing massive losses in the aftermath of the housing bubble. Here is Pethokoukis telling us to scrap the stimulus package and instead, to revive the economy, pass a series of capital gains tax cuts and award a technology prize. I’m not kidding.
My all time favorite Pethokoukis is this bit, which most everyone here will recognize as a piece of prime wingnuttery:
I was pretty sure Sarah Palin would do well in last night’s debate after watching Tina Fey try to make her look like an idiot on SNL. Despite Fey’s best efforts, even her faux-Palin still came across as extremely likable. (I sense that Joe Biden, another likable candidate, kind of dug her, too, in a father-daughter sort of way.) Like President Reagan, Palin is Teflon. Now, anyone who loves policy like I do isn’t going to be satisfied with her thin answers. (She was actually much stronger on foreign policy than on taxes and spending and energy. Hungry markets!) Like McCain in his debate, she spoke too much in generalities. I mean, I find it strange, for instance, that neither McCain nor Palin ever notes that 70 percent of the burden of the U.S. corporate tax, the second-highest on the planet, comes down on workers. Not once have I heard a cogent critique of Obama’s tax-cut plan by this ticket.
Bottom line: Palin easily moved back to being a strong asset for McCain and has to be considered the far-and-away front-runner for the 2012 Republican nomination if McCain loses.
I have spoofs and trolls in the comments who would kill to be able to write laughable nonsense like that.
Maybe in the field of finance and business he has a genius I just don’t understand, but when it comes to anything regarding politics, I would pay more attention to any random user at the Free Republic or Red State before listening to anything from Pethokouis.
*** Update ***
From the comments:
1. Tina Fey made Sarah Palin look like an idiot
2. THEREFORE, Sarah Palin would do well in a debateSay WHAT?
This isn’t even bad thinking. It’s magical thinking: take two things completely unrelated and uncorrelated and toss ‘em together to puke out a sentence.
Read him a bit, and you will discover that he sort of specializes in magical thinking.
Also from the comments:
I’m pretty sure it was Pethokoukis, who on the Monday night before the election quoted “senior McCain officials” that the polling was tracking hard for Mac and concluded rather authoritatively that McCain would win a closely contested victory. I only come across his writing occasionally but he seems to be a permanent resident of bizarro world.
Why, yes, that was Pethokoukis:
I just talked to one of my best Team McCain sources who told me that heading into today all the key battleground polls were moving hard and fast in their direction. The source, hardly a perma-optimist, thinks it will be a long night, but that McCain is going to win. So add this with the new Battleground poll (Obama +1.9 only) and the rising stock market…
Not only did he buy the spin from the McCain campaign in the face of OVERWHELMING contradictory polling evidence by EVERY pollster in the country, but he also supplemented the McCain spin with his own nonsensical belief in the Goldberg Theorem that the day to day fluctuations in the stock market were a solid indication of who was going to win the election.
TenguPhule
Or at least deliver a good Indian Rug Burn.
TenguPhule
Good times. When spoof was young and free and the key to eternal revenue streams was cutting taxes on the gains we don’t have.
Library Grape
I didn’t think there would something that I would find as entertaining as John Stewart’s epic smackdown of Jim Cramer last night, but I just came across the most side-splittingly hilarious video of Fox News anchor Shepard Smith openly and ruthlessly mocking Glenn Beck throughout the day.
At the end of it, I literally couldn’t stop myself from laughing for a few minutes. I wonder how many lashes this earns him in the Rupert Murdoch Torture Chamber.
Enjoy! librarygrape.com/2009/03/foxs-shepard-smith-openly-mocks-glenn.html
El Tiburon
Take my wife please-
rimshot-
That’s what she said!
rimshot-
Get a free bowl of soup with that?
rimshot-
Where do I sign up?
srv
I have a theory that DougJ is actually Ross Douthat.
Comrade Stuck
As Mr. Pethokuluis strikes a blow to the final nail in the coffin of Peak Wingnut, he glimpses the long line behind him, all eagerly awaiting their turn.
Faux News
Good thing Palin is Teflon. It will be easier to clean off the multiple "starbursts" that Pethokoukis has over her.
sgwhiteinfla
The scary thing is that he is putting forth mainstream Republican thought right now. I don’t even know how much longer we can use the term "WingNut" because it sorta implies a fringe element when the truth is more and more we are seeing that they are no longer the fringe of the Republican Party. I wonder what "moderate" Republicans really think about the current rhetoric coming from their party.
gwangung
Um, isn’t this his area of expertise? Is he putting two and two together? Does he realize how VC works? How BUSINESS works?????
(Like, how are people going to SURVIVE and eat while they’re waiting for that technology prize to be awarded?)
jake 4 that 1
John, did you delete random sentences? ‘Cos right now this wad seems to go from being kind of meh about Ms. Starburst to "ZOMG, she’s the bestest!"
Total wookies on Endor.
Fxd.
MattF
Now, here I’d never heard of Pethokoulis before, not ever. I’m seeing that there’s a downside in reading this blog; a negative aspect, as it were. Like the doctor says– "You may experience some discomfort and momentary nausea."
Zifnab
EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW! My third eye will never be clean!
Wile E. Quixote
@MattF
As long as you’re not getting a four hour erection after reading Balloon Juice, or any erections at all for that matter, you’re still OK.
E.D. Kain
You about sum it up, John.
different church-lady
It’s like trying to explain to a fish that there is a world outside of water: the fish just isn’t going to understand it no matter how much you explain it, nor how polluted the water gets.
Mark S.
Wow, I didn’t think anyone would have the balls to suggest privatizing Social Security right now. But if anyone is looking to investment opportunities, may I suggest pitchfork and torch companies?
Tom Hilton
It does raise an interesting question: which would lose you more money, betting on Jim Cramer’s stock tips or Jim Pethokoukis’ political predictions?
calipygian
That is fucking hilarious. And Chris Wallace comes off as really, really pathetic by taking Beck seriously.
Smith reading an e-mail from an irate viewer:
"Shepard Smith really needs to change his snotty attitude about Glenn Beck. He is just jealous."
Smith turns to the camera and says dryly, "Everybody is".
Comedy gold.
Dennis-SGMM
Like President Reagan, Palin is defunct.
AhabT'Pooner
It was kinda of like watching Ronald Reagan suck dick for rock, using homemade Comesicles.
Anoniminous
WTF?
WT-effity-F?
1. Tina Fey made Sarah Palin look like an idiot
2. THEREFORE, Sarah Palin would do well in a debate
Say WHAT?
This isn’t even bad thinking. It’s magical thinking: take two things completely unrelated and uncorrelated and toss ’em together to puke out a sentence.
Maybe there is some higher version of a "dog whistle" as in "bat whistle" — as in batshit insane — message in there but Lord knows it escapes me.
ryan
I’m pretty sure it was Pethokoukis, who on the Monday night before the election quoted "senior McCain officials" that the polling was tracking hard for Mac and concluded rather authoritatively that McCain would win a closely contested victory. I only come across his writing occasionally but he seems to be a permanent resident of bizarro world.
TR
@Library Grape:
That is comedy gold. Nice catch.
Shep Smith lets the mask slip occasionally — Katrina was a notable example — and when he does, it’s a thing of beauty.
Just Some Fuckhead
Alternate post title: I Just Can’t Quit You, Daniel!
amorphous
Duh, it’s called logic.
gex
@calipygian: We need links!
calipygian
gex –
See comment number three.
TenguPhule
Finger comes pre-extended.
Dennis-SGMM
Does this joker have any idea that the good people who invested in stocks and bonds now don’t have any money to invest in stocks and bonds?
Edit: Sorry, forgot that Ponzi schemes always require fresh meat.
Laura W
@Just Some Fuckhead: The night’s still young, Fuckhead. You sure you wanna shoot the proverbial wad this early?
garyb50
Like MattF, but going even further, I don’t know anything about Larison either. And I consider myself lucky. And I include Doughat in that. I don’t care about any of them. I won’t read a single sentence they write. They can all just go fuck themselves. I’ll continue to read BJ because it has the best commenters in all of blogdom. But these guys this post refers to? Fuck’em.
Anoniminous
amorphous:
There is no causal connection (per Mill in System of Logic) between a Tina Fey comedy skit and debate achievement by Sarah Palin. There is no sufficient condition, there is no necessary condition, and there is no sufficient and necessary condition.
Svensker
@garyb50:
You should rethink Larison. He’s sane and very intelligent. Don’t always agree with everything he says, but he’s definitely worth your time. Douthat? NSM.
CMcC
You quote: "She (Palin) was actually much stronger on foreign policy than on taxes and spending and energy."
True. Perceptive fellow.
LV-426
There’s the problem. That we ever had a love affair with investing.
Shygetz
@gwangung:
Let them eat cake.
Joshua Norton
Someone get this guy a magazine rack. Because, Oy, does he have issues.
Library Grape
@calipygian:
Did you laugh as hard as me during this exchange with Chris Wallace?
SMITH: Do you even understand this Glenn Beck Friday? Because I really don’t.
WALLACE: Well, I do, and what pains me — and you know, Shep, how highly I respect you — is you seem upset by Glenn Beck Friday.
SMITH: Upset?!
WALLACE: I mean, Glenn is a meteor here at Fox News–
SMITH: He is the greatest star of all time!
WALLACE: And you should be happy for his success–
SMITH: I am here to worship him.
—
It’s comedy gold Jerry, GOLD! (here’s the link for those of you who haven’t seen the video yet: librarygrape.com/2009/03/foxs-shepard-smith-openly-mocks-glenn.html)
MikeJ
David Carr from the NYT on BBCA discussing l’affair Stewart. BBC actually showed about two minutes. Imagine if a US network showed that much!
Martin
You act like you’re encountering the GOP for the first time…
Napoleon
@MikeJ:
PBS did an entire segment. They even invited Stewart and CNBC on and they declined. They showed a couple of minutes and had 3 guest discuss, in general, financial reporting.
AnotherBruce
Um, does anybody here speak wingnut so they can tell me wtf this means?
Paulie Chestnuts
Stewart does the NYT crossword puzzle every day.
I had a pretty good idea of how that interview was going to unfold.
TenguPhule
It stole our wallet and gave us the Clap.
MikeJ
Some of us don’t bother until at least Thursday. And if you don’t use ink you’re cheating.
JL
@MikeJ: OMG, Please don’t tell me that you do Friday and Saturday in ink. I used to get the Times daily and Monday through Wednesday is pretty easy but I could never conquer the Friday and Saturday without an Almanac or other resources. Wordplay (the documentary) was great.
Andrew
From the comments over at Larison’s… Roubini and Taleb vs The Panel of Supreme Morons.
Forget the CEOs. Those financial talking heads need to be the first ones up against the wall. What pathetic creatures.
Obama needs to put Roubini and Taleb in charge of Treasury and nationalize the shit out of the banks.
John Cole
@Andrew: Was that the video where Roubini and the other fellow were explaining what was going on, and the CNBC anchors were ignoring them and asking for stock tips?
Mark S.
@AnotherBruce:
My guess is if corporations didn’t pay any tax, they would use 70% of the money they saved to pay their workers more. I remember several years ago in the print National Review some jackass arguing that if workers were really rational, they wouldn’t want any tax on capital (i.e. the workers would pay all of the taxes in the country) because it would mean so many more jobs and bonuses for the proles. These people are as delusional as the people who think the world is 6,000 years old.
JL
It appears that Keith got the memo from the head of MSNBC.
Library Grape
@JL:
I just noticed that. Amazing that Keith wouldn’t be talking about the best story of the day. Even Keith’s stature can’t protect him from the dictates of corporate media. Doesn’t the NBC reaction to this just typify reasonable people’s concerns over the iron grip that corporate media has over the thought and discourse in this country? Shameful
JL
@Mark S.:
You mean they’re not the same folks.
Dennis-SGMM
@AnotherBruce:
It means that the cocksuckers who have chased cheap labor to the farthest ends of the earth wouldn’t have done so if we had just reduced corporate income taxes to zero.
The Cat Who Would Be Tunch
@TR: That’s why I find Shepard Smith baffling at times. I also remember him pushing back on the meme that the media was in the tank for Obama and him being shocked at Nader’s ‘Uncle Tom’ comment, if memory serves me right. There are times when he sounds so utterly reasonable when he seems to speak his mind that it makes me wonder what the hell he’s doing on Fox News.
@AnotherBruce: You could ask John Cole to translate for you. Zing! (That’s the sound of me getting banned.)
BP in MN
@AnotherBruce:
As people have said upthread, I’m guessing he’s arguing that the tax incidence of the corporate tax ends up falling 70% on workers, with the corollary being that if we lowered the corporate tax rate wages would rise.
This is actually a pretty serious question when you talk about the economic justice of raising taxes, and it’s not always intuitive. Remember that the effect of the luxury tax during the Bush pere administration effectively just ended up putting the workers at shipyards that built yachts out of work. Similarly, if you just eliminated the workers’ portion of the payroll tax and made it all employer-based, it might not raise wages at all. (Incidentally, that means that figuring out how much tax is really paid at various income levels is really tricky — I haven’t seen a good study that tries to take into account the actual tax incidence of the employers’ portion of the payroll tax).
It also doesn’t account for whether there’s some income effect to the incidence. It could be that the labor market is such that at low wage levels the tax actually falls mostly on the employer, and only falls on the worker at higher income levels. Or it could be the other way around.
The problem is that the rightwingers who propose lowering the corporate tax don’t say how they’d replace the revenue. I suspect they’d either cut spending that would otherwise disproportionately benefit lower-income people, making things a wash at best for workers, or else they’d rely on the magic of the Laffer Curve.
Andrew
JC – Yep. And then the anchors became actively hostile when Roubini and Taleb suggested that the system was screwed up and the banks needed to be nationalized.
I loved Taleb’s line about being having 100 to 200 percent of his assets in cash.
Brian J
@Matt S:
Leave aside any sort of recommendation to privatize Social Security. That’s an entirely separate issue right now, or so I think.
The biggest problem with James Pethokoukis’ response is that it seems to be against a straw man of what Stewart said, at least in the clip he cited. Does he really think Stewart believes all investing is a waste? If so, where the hell is he getting that?
From what I can tell–I have yet to see the take down–Stewart’s chiding people like Cramer for being cheerleaders and gossipers instead of journalists. Specifically, he’s attacking the idea that investing is the sort of practice where you do very little with not that much and end up with quite a bit, consistently. In other words, Stewart is going after the sort of acts that could very well make the market more volatile, the sort of things that people like Cramer seem to champion.
As we all know, there are pretty standard rules of investing that most people seem to follow: buy low and sell high, invest for the long term, and don’t use money you don’t have. If James Pethokoukis feels that there’s something wrong with Stewart going after advice that goes against these sorts of rules, then he is free to do so. But he can’t create a position that Stewart doesn’t hold out of thin air.
Sadly, like so many on the right, that’s exactly what he’s doing.
Poopyman
Hmmmm, has anybody ever seen this guy in the same room as Baghdad Bob? That dude has to have a job somewhere, and it’s as good a theory as any.
gwangung
So, exactly what Stewart’s been snarking about…
dmsilev
@JL:
I do the Saturday puzzle in ink, though there are usually a few squares with letters scratched out and rewritten. It usually takes me a couple of hours, but not in one sitting. It helps to spend a while working on it, take a break and do something else, and then come back to the puzzle. My subconscious crunches away at it in the background.
I can finish it unaided about half the time, and the other half I have to spot myself a couple of Google searches.
-dms
Bill
Don’t forget: He was the originator (Part 1, Part 2) of "Dude, where’s my recession?" The dink is always wrong. About everything.
Kevin Moore
I will try to use "batwhistle" in future conversations and blogging.
DougJ
In fairness, I think that it’s likely that the results of the election overstated support for Obama among voters. If you factor in the Bradley effect, then McCain won in a squeaker.
les
@Svensker:
I don’t know your definition of sane; but Larison is, admittedly and by any reasonable definition, irrational. Nice word music, sorta, but no need to hurt your brain trying to figure him out.
SenyorDave
In fairness, I think that it’s likely that the results of the election overstated support for Obama among voters. If you factor in the Bradley effect, then McCain won in a squeaker.
DougJ,
I had to re-read this one a couple times before it hit me. I might have to borrow the classic "the results of the election overstated support for Obama among voters".
gnomedad
@Library Grape:
Chris Wallace: "I’m on the Glenn Beck bandwagon and I advise you to join it as well."
Words fail me.
NonWonderDog
@Anoniminous:
No, it’s worse than that. Pethokoukis saw Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin and, unbelievably, decided that he would like to have Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin as his president. Because he was so impressed with parody Sarah Palin, he reasons that real Sarah Palin must be even better.
It took some time for my brain to accept that anyone could think such a thing, but that’s what the words he wrote mean.
Library Grape
@gnomedad:
Lol, seriously. someone likened it to V for vendetta. so appropos
CT
Didn’t anyone else see Wallace as agreeing with Shep, only playing it perfectly straight? Wallace seems like the type of low key guy who would smirk at Beck’s megalomania.
Et Tu Brutus?
Trolling Spoof: Rasmussen had polls narrowing in McCinsane’s direction just before the election. Spoofing Troll: Sara for real was/is so much hotter than Tina for fake, how could any man or lesbian fail to avoid being bonked by starbursts and subsequently voting for the McCinsane/Impalin ticket.
chopper
@Anoniminous:
eh, it’s not at all different from palin’s manner of speech. ‘word salad’ is what my brother called it. just re-watch the couric interview.
Svensker
@les:
Really? I must be nuts, too, cuz he makes a lot of sense to me. Maybe better up my meds.
les
@Svensker:
I agree that, in a way, he makes sense. He’s internally consistent, he’s smart and a hell of a wordsmith. But the premise of everything he says is that you cannot arrive at a correct conclusion (even if you totally agree with him) unless you begin from his preferred interpretation of god as run through orthodox catholicism. No society, no political movement can succeed properly unless every member behaves and believes as he does; freedom consists in everyone voluntarily giving up the right to act in ways he finds "wrong." Absolute top down authoritarianism, but it’s ok because everyone "voluntarily" behaves "properly," because they know that the ruler is infallibly right. It’s some scary bullshit, and by no definition I understand is it rational.
So he’s totally on board with "the damn libertine liberals and teh DFH’s are destroying society with their tolerance and diversity." The fact that he disagrees with the notion that the U.S. has a mission to kill all the brown people is nice, but he will very happily agree to demolish their society and insist they be right like he is.
3D
Pethokoukis sounds like a Street Fighter sound effect.