Andrew Sullivan still hasn’t corrected his addition errors or put 4 percent of GDP in context, and he’s still pretending Paul Ryan is a courageous truth-teller.
I remain of the view that he deserves credit for being the first American with real political accountability to tell the truth about the depth of our fiscal predicament
Projecting 2.8% unemployment is telling the truth? Cutting social programs and giving the savings to the rich in the name of deficit-reduction is telling the truth? What exactly was truthful about Paul Ryan’s plan? Oh, I know, it’s brave because its barbarism annoys liberals. Was it Winston Churchill or Edmund Burke who defined courage as grace while punching hippies?
I’ve always been ambivalent about Daily Dish. I like the cute videos and the quality of the writing. For a time, I admired Sullivan’s, admittedly self-important, attempts to cast himself as the Orwell of the internets. No more. Sullivan’s lazy, incurious, simplistic cheerleading for RyanCare has diminished him and his place in the blogsophere (for what it’s worth). I see him now as just another glib, shallow Brit carpetbagger, the same as John Derbyshire or Tunku Varadarajan.
lacp
…you forgot Peter Brimelow.
arguingwithsignposts
I wish our pundits had real accountability. And Ryan isn’t accountable for shit. He’s a representative in a reliably red district.
Ash Can
Sullivan can be sensible in one article, then in the next he can not only careen off the rails, but crash and burn in the ravine on top of it. I don’t know if it’s tied to his meds, his pot smoking, or what. I don’t care. I don’t have the patience for that kind of inconsistency.
Jay in Oregon
Countdown until he’s placed in the Blogs We Monitor And Mock As Needed section…
Dr. Squid
Someone tell Sully that a Congresscritter who represents a district that’s guaranteed to favor him by 30 points is not politically accountable.
joe from Lowell
The first to tell the truth about the depth of our fiscal predicament? WTF?
Everyone from Barack Obama to Bernie Sanders to Pat Buchanan to Paul Krugman to Ron Paul has been running around talking about the seriousness of our fiscal predicament. If anything, the problem has been overstated, to the extent that people are talking about there being a short-term, as opposed to long-term, fiscal crisis to deal with.
Brain Hertz
Well, I guess it wasn’t intended to be a factual statement.
/obvious
Joe Beese
Somwhere Jane Hamsher is plotting how she can become public enemy #1 around here again.
In any case, Sully has his green card now – so you’re stuck with him.
nepat
Agree with this. Interesting that his Ryan flame-out coincided with his move to Daily Beast – IMO a major hit on his overall gravitas. It’s like he’s intuitively dumbed it down for the tabloid audience.
NonyNony
@Joe Beese:
Wait – aren’t you an American too? Shouldn’t that be we’re stuck with him if you’re talking about his green card?
mclaren
America has gone so insane that we now read headlines like “Left’s angst grows over Obama’s shift to the political center.”
Are these people drunk? Are they on LSD? This isn’t “Obama’s shift to the center,” it’s not even close to the political center. If Obama comes out for cuts to Social Security and medicare to fund more tax cuts for the rich, it’s extremist reactionary craziness, and this country will burn. People won’t stand for it.
Fuck Sullivan. If Obama buys into this madness, it’s time for a revolution.
Facebones
My favorite Sully meltdown was back in January of 2005, after the big tsunami in India & the South Pacific. There was an article which had an comment from a National Guardsman who was helping in the clean up. He said something along the lines of how rewarding it was to help people and to see how thankful they were and this is why he joined the guard, not to blow stuff up.
Well! Sully got his knickers in a twist over hat! He started ranting about how he was the soldier’s master and he’d better suck it up and do what we told him to do! The was the most entitles and self-absorbed outburst I think I ever read. (Mind you, I rarely visit the Dish so he may have gotten worse.)
lonesomerobot
Do these people really not remember Paul Tsongas?
Quiddity
When Sullivan was getting excited about the two deficit commissions in late 2010, he wrote of his liberal readership, “I’m sensing a break”. Because even back then he was saying odd things about cuts to Social Security (the least of our problems). But with the Ryan-love, he’s made a colossal mistake. An earlier commenter said it was his macaca moment – not in the racial sense, but in the sense that he’s discredited himself. Of particular interest is Sullivan’s obvious failure to comprehend mathematics. His obtuseness on this is reminiscent of the Duke of Gloucester’s remark to Edward Gibbon (author of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire): “Another damned thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble!” Or perhaps Emperor Joseph II to Mozart: “Too many notes!”
It’s all too complicated for the British Upper Class Twit who would prefer to stay protected within his shield of ignorance.
cleek
@mclaren:
you first.
BGinCHI
As Benen points out here, if we just do nothing the deficit will decrease:
washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_04/028928.php
So, if Sully is going to keep acting like a lazy moran, he might as well sign on to a plan that’s even “bolder” than Ryan’s: do nothing.
trollhattan
ATC yesterday had Kthug and a wingnut du jour/former Bush economist, now belieftank opinionator discussing the Ryan thang. The two don’t operate in the same solar system.
npr.org/2011/04/12/135354918/looking-at-ryans-budget-blueprint
Darn facty facts!
Comrade DougJ
@Facebones:
He’s always been self-absorbed, but you probably have to be to do what he does.
mclaren
@cleek:
You can solve this problem simply and easily by using your pie filter.
When you end up living in a cardboard box under an underpass, remember: cleek’s pie filter!
That’s the answer.
scav
Truthful to The Dream! I mean come on, how else to distinguish the true believers? Mere appearances on this terrestrial earth and sheer mathematical logic are as nothing to the mighty will of True Belief.
kdaug
Point is, he’s been given the chance to walk back. He sure as shit reads what’s said here (or his minions recon for him). But instead, he doubles down. He’s missing the forest for the trees.
Robin Hood in reverse is – psst – un-American, Sully. Perhaps the green card will help speed along the osmosis, but until then, trust us. This ain’t Britain.
cleek
@trollhattan:
i loved that bit. they really were light years apart on the issue. Krugman couldn’t conceal his contempt and derision, while Holtz-Eaken was all like “Rah! Rah! Rah! Let’s hear it for Paul Ryan! Rah! Rah! Rah! He’s the smartest ever!”
BGinCHI
@trollhattan: I assume Holtz-Eakins’ statements weren’t intended to be factual.
joe from Lowell
@lonesomerobot:
In Lowell, you still sometimes see cars with bumper stickers that read “Another Economic Patriot for Tsongas.”
But because he had a mild speech impediment and wasn’t batshit insane, the media pretends that it was Ross Perot who made deficit reduction a top-tier in the 1992 election.
joes527
@mclaren:
Ohh! Ohhh!
You get the tricornes and I’ll find some fake bandages to wrap around our heads. But where are we going to get a fifer?
MattR
@joe from Lowell:
This was similar to my first thought. I completely disagree with the proposition that Ryan was telling “the truth about the depth of our fiscal predicament”
cleek
@mclaren:
but if i pie you (again), where will i get my hourly dose of doom-mongering ? how will i know what catastrophes are imminent, today ?
ed
meh
Suffern ACE
@joe from Lowell: Oh no. The President is “Pivoting” today in response to the Ryan plan. He’s never spoken about the need for tax and entitlement reform until this evening.
FlipYrWhig
@joes527: I’m right near Colonial Williamsburg. Give me a shout. We can probably import a case, or just take one off a pallet behind the blacksmith’s shop.
Mark
I stopped reading Daily Dish a while back due to Sullivan’s inability to come to grips with Obama not delivering on his promises. It’s my way or the highway with Sullivan. I chose the highway.
Quiddity
At least John Derbyshire knows mathematics. (He really does! I have his book on prime numbers.)
FlipYrWhig
@cleek:
I think there’s some redundancy in that department of our enterprise.
Gus
I still read Sullivan. Your mistake was taking him seriously. He’s just unreadable on a bunch of different things. During the ’08 primaries, I just skipped whatever he said about Hilary Clinton. Ditto with the “Palin isn’t Trigg’s mother” shit. Now the Ryan stuff. I never thought Sullivan was an important thinker or anything.
Paul Gottlieb
On most issues, Sullivan is basically a dilettante; he doesn’t care to do the hard work on actually analyzing an issue, so whoever looks the most impressive and talks the nicest gets his vote. When he’s talking about an issues that he cares passionately about, he is very worth reading. His old New Republic article in defense of gay marriage was eloquent and informed, but on most issues, he is a sucker for any impressive sounding faux-libertarian who throws a few numbers around. And he is trapped in the notion that anything “counter-intuitive” must have some real merit–particularly is it smacks of nicely polished racism
Punchy
Doug — why do you fucking care what he thinks? What’s your obsession with what some fat, bald dude w/ an accent and bad takes? It’s becoming clinical.
JohnR
He’s a tad more thoughtful than Our Megan, but on the other hand, she has a comment section. I guess it about evens out. “The Atlantic – meditatus vestri paycheck!”, as it says under the large portrait in oils of David G. Bradley hanging on the lunchroom wall.
Murc
I’ve always been of the opinion that Sullivan is a little bit too smart too really go all the way down the rabbit hole into National Review land.
Andrew has two… I think needs is the right word, although that comes off as a little presumptuous, and they show with intensity in his writing. The first and by far the most pronounced (and the creepiest) is a need to have a leader he really believes in. I mean REALLY believes in, that he can hurl himself into the cult of personality of completely and wholeheartedly. Reagan, then (and to an extent still) Obama, then David Cameron, then Paul Ryan.
The problem is that he’s smart enough to (eventually) see reality when its waved under his nose. Longtime readers will have noticed that the bloom is DEFINITELY off the rose when it comes to Obama, and that his hymns to Reaganism have gone from ‘constant’ to ‘nearly non-existent’ over the years. It’ll happen with Ryan too, and even faster.
The second and less obvious need is to believe that the universe REALLY CAN be made to work along conservative, market-driven lines. For all he claims that conservatism isn’t an ideology, he believes in it with the same fervidity as he does his Catholicism. And so anytime someone comes forth with an agenda that even has the blush of credibility, he is all over it.
Again, problem there is that he’s actually kind of smart, and can only ignore evidence for so long. A decade of looking at what modern right-wing rule does to a country really kicked the tar out of him in that respect, and trust me, what Cameron is doing to Britain will kick the tar out of him MORE. (And he WILL have to face up to Cameron’s actual agenda at some point. If nothing else Johann Hari will corner him and cram evidence down his throat.)
In a way I feel kinda bad for him. Life would be so much easier for him if he had all his writing talent, but simply was dumber and more willfully blind.
Having said all that, I kinda feel the same way about him I do about Balko; I find his economic innumeracy and overall agenda to be horrible and a little dishonest, but as long as continues to use his media perch to beat the drum on torture and civil liberties, I will continue to read and support him. It’s work far too few people are doing.
And Doug; Sullivan has a way of slowly getting back into your good graces over time. He want BATSHIT INSANE for a few years after 9/11 (I know I’m not the only person here who remembers the post in which he said that American liberals would mount a literal fifth column in support of islamist jihadis) and came back from that.
FlipYrWhig
@lonesomerobot:
Or Mondale saying that he’d have to raise taxes? Or Bruce Babbit saying he’d stand up for higher taxes?
Ryan
The only courageous thing about the Ryan plan is that he is finally admitting that the Republican Party is actively trying to destroy the middle-class and the poor to buy another private jet for the rich. Normally, they try to hide that from people.
JPL
Ryan would be telling the truth if he said in order to give millionaires and billionaires tax cuts we have to divert money from social security and medicare to pay the bills.
That’s the truth and Sully is an idiot to pretend otherwise.
Nylund
Sully took a page straight out of Megan McArdle’s play book. Must be something they teach ’em over there at the Atlantic.
When cornered with overwhelming facts, double down on your claim (“Ryan’s plan is serious and courageous and I stick by that!”), but also try to weasel out of your original positions (“I never said the plan ITSELF was courageous and serious, just that he was courageous and serious for having a plan!”)
It shouldn’t be too long before he starts blaming his calculator, some illness, or trying to use some personal anecdote involving his parents to prove his point.
I guess you can take the man from the Atlantic, but you can’t take the Atlantic from the man.
Violet
@Joe Beese:
Green cards can be revoked. He’s not a citizen. They can kick him out for violations of his green card. Citizenship is still a ways off for him, having just received his green card.
He is not allowed to vote as a green card holder. There are some gray areas, where some local municipalities allow green card holders to vote in some local elections. But green card holders cannot vote in national elections. In fact they can lose their green cards if they do.
And naturalized citizenship can be revoked. They have to prove you “lied” during your naturalization process, but really, it’s not hard to find something on someone if you want to kick them out of the country. “During your application interview you said your refrigerator door opens on the left. In reality it opens on the right! Citizenship revoked!” (This question actually happened to a relative of mine who married a non-US citizen and caused them trouble in their green card application process.)
lonesomerobot
@joe from Lowell: yes, and THAT was courageous: a Democrat in 1992 talking about the deficit. Is the Concord Coalition still in existence?
I’m just wondering if we’re actually going to have to re-live all of that 90s nostalgia once more — the government shutdown, the extremely wealthy, basically crazy outsider candidate who could threaten to run as an independent (Trump). Too bad Admiral Stockdale isn’t still available to be his running mate.
Culture of Truth
He’s a “fifth column”-accusing fascist. He should be beneath contempt.
Dave
@Ryan: This. Ryan is openly saying that the GOP wants to ratfuck 95% of the population for the remaining 5%. That Sullivan thinks that is “serious” says more about him than it does about Ryan.
Joe Beese
@NonyNony:
Well, I like him – despite his errors in judgment.
Just like our Mister Cole.
Corner Stone
@joes527:
I’m sure President Stuck is lurking round here somewhere.
Oh! You wanted a “fifer”. Well, he is used to blowing on a pipe so I’m sure he’ll pick it up quickly.
MattR
@Dave: I will repost a comment I made while watching the Daily Show on Monday night.
Amanda in the South Bay
Doug, this whole post is so unserious, I demand you show me a plan!
PoliticalHack
“Cutting social programs and giving the savings to the rich in the name of deficit-reduction is telling the truth?”
There is nothing untruthful about cutting social programs and giving to the rich, even if stating it is for deficit reduction.
Immoral? Yes
Unethical? Yes
Despicable? Yes
But technically not untruthful if he believes that social spending hurts the deficit while being thinking we are on the “wrong” side of the Laffer Curve. But if he believes and thinks those, then we do have to add “delusional” to Immoral, Unethical, and Despicable.
Corner Stone
I can’t believe you dropped the “Tunku” bomb up in this piece.
Sasha
I suspect that, like Iraq, Sullivan will eventually see what is in front of his nose in regards to Ryan’s plan and his “courage”. Unfortunately, like Iraq, I suspect that it will require an unnecessarily long struggle.
Mako
Thanks for the update. Please keep us informed.
Maybe if we are lucky he’ll mention Balloon-juice again and we can all bask in our importance.
SensesFail
@Quiddity: Agreed! I’m actually reading “Prime Obsession” now (I literally put the book down ten minutes before I jumped on this blog). It’s a great read so far (I’m in Chapter 4).
arguingwithsignposts
Sullivan never learns. he’s not a good writer wrt anything that doesn’t directly involve his personal interests, and he can go fuck himself.
/moore award entry.
Ailuridae
Can we all be spared the tut-tutting of the Atlantic’s many factual errors until somebody corrects/apologizes for ED Kain’s fast and loose history with the facts? Pretty please?
balloon-juice.com/2010/11/08/democracy-is-also-good-but-not-efficient/
I could argue further about whether a biddable contract equals a monopoly (in this case it does – again, if Dell were to win a biddable contract to be the sole provider of all computers in the United States for five years that would still be a monopoly even if they bid on it, even if they only had it for five year. It would not be a monopoly if it were merely a single job – say the construction of a building on a college campus, or the single purchase of Dell computers for the Education Department.)
Is what Sullivan is doing really more dishonest than that? Really? When you have
George WillED Kain’s posts on your front page it is tough to take you seriously taking others to task on factual errors.arguingwithsignposts
@Ailuridae: I think you’re horning in on matoko’s territory there.
taylormattd
DougJ, you might well mount a fifth column.
singfoom
I’m just waiting for Sullivan to say that his idea that Ryan and or his plan was courageous “was never intended to be a factual statement”.
Sully won’t ever admit to being wrong on this. He really does think Ryan is the first to talk about it. Even if the plan is absolute pie in the sky bullshit, that plan mean’s he’s serious.
I agree with you Doug, that it’s all lies, but Sully is pathological. Sure, go ahead and mock him, but he’s like a troll. Don’t expect him to take in new information and change his mind..
Comrade DougJ
@Ailuridae:
I’ll ask Kain about this.
EDIT: Not trash collection, I can’t take it anymore. I agree, it was not a good post.
McGeorge Bundy
I read Sullivan’s blog frequently (that is, more or less daily) from 2007 to 2010. I’m not sure if I’d been suckered by what I thought was his pretty reasonable support for Obama or what, but it’s clear now that he’s lost his goddamn mind; if he ever had it in the first place, that is. He’s a lazy and insufferable blowhard. His smug Seriousness makes me ill.
ed drone
@joes527:
Would you settle for a fiddle or banjo?
Ed
eemom
I want to know who agreed to give Sullivan a green card, so that I can personally call them on the phone and tell them they suck.
freelancer
@Ailuridae:
EDK has since then had what some would call a “Road to Damascus” moment. You might as well spank Cole for what’s in his archives.
cleek
@Amanda in the South Bay:
i laughed out loud when Holtz-Eakin dropped that line on his NPR bit with Krugman yesterday.
sadly, Krugman didn’t laugh, too.
Ailuridae
@arguingwithsignposts:
Not at all. The bolded portion is clearly factually incorrect. It still isn’t corrected. If Doug or John Or Tom want to get pissy about the Atlantic allowing clear factual errors on their site (or the WaPo for that matter) that’s fine. It just should be pointed out that a far more dishonest claim (one of many by Kain) has stood uncorrected on their front page for over a year
Ailuridae
@arguingwithsignposts:
Not at all. The bolded portion is clearly factually incorrect. It still isn’t corrected. If Doug or John Or Tom want to get pissy about the Atlantic allowing clear factual errors on their site (or the WaPo for that matter) that’s fine. It just should be pointed out that a far more dishonest claim (one of many by Kain) has stood uncorrected on their front page for over a year
mclaren
@cleek:
No worries, when Obama slashes social security and medicare to give even bigger tax cuts for the rich and you find out your city is ripping up the roads because they can’t afford to pave ’em with asphalt anymore and you can’t get to work because they’ve also shut down the busses…pie filter.
That’s always the answer.
Just use your pie filter.
Ailuridae
@freelancer:
And I am still waiting on a retraction or correction. Finding religion is no excuse for allowing previous lies (and far more sinister lies than what Sullivan is offering up) to remain uncorrected.
Mark S.
@Violet:
Really? WTF?
BTD
I’ve always detested him as a dishonest, racist, sexist, McCarthyite.
Glad you finally agree with me Doug . . .
Tsulagi
You’re pissing into the wind trying to get that correction.
Unable to do simple math even a 1st grader could correct then stubbornly holding to it in the face of all evidence is one of those legs of the teabagger stool or points on their pointy tri-corner hat: Stupid. The other legs or points: Perpetual victim and the Kyl Principle–what comes out of my mouth is not fact based.
Brachiator
@kdaug:
True dat. The Brits have actually had people in the streets protesting massive cuts. Americans? Not so much as a peep, apart from some pushback in Wisconsin on the state level.
On the other hand, the British Labour policy is as clueless as the Democrats when it comes to mounting intelligent opposition to conservative (or Tory) craziness.
trollhattan
@MattR:
That was a brilliant setup and delivery. Mike Pence appears to be a truly awful person. In other words: perfect.
But I like his work on “Madmen.”
Ailuridae
@Comrade DougJ:
EDIT: Not trash collection, I can’t take it anymore. I agree, it was not a good post.
Bull shit. Those post were full of clear, unequivocal lies. Fuck this “not a good post” nonsense.
danimal
Last month, when this entire blog was on a Bobo-punching exercise, I asked if the blog would continue to exist if it weren’t for Bobo-punching. I was reminded that there is always Sullivan.
I think it’s about time to short Sullivan-punching and invest in Bobo-punching futures.
dollared
If we’re going to keep on with the Sully thing, I demand compensation: I want to see “Tiny Tim must die” as a rotating tagline. I’ll settle for the more literal “Tiny Tim must be denied chemotherapy.”
Observer
@Ash Can: Sully’s going off the rails on a crazy train? Only another Brit could have written that.
Egan
It’s really quite amazing how much Sullivan has destroyed his credibility in such a short amount of time. I, too, was disturbed by his painting of Ryan as a “truth teller”, considering the utter dishonesty surrounding his plan.
I also have taken offense to Sullivan’s endless comments about how the burden is now on Obama to respond, which is akin to my placing a bottle on a table, claiming a genie will pop out and eliminate our debt and then declaring “your move!”
Finally, the notion that Ryan’s proposal is “courageous” has it backwards. There is nothing more cowardly than claiming increased revenues from cuts and a broadening of the tax base (not to mention fantasy numbers), but then refusing to actually specify how this would work. Deferring that burden to future Congresses is decidedly UNcourageous.
freelancer
@Ailuridae:
That’s understandable. I was just thinking of that standard, that if John had to retract/scrub everything he was wrong about, he’d be spending most of his blogging time editing strikethroughs into old posts up to around 2005 or so that few if any read anymore.
arguingwithsignposts
@Ailuridae: Good point. perhaps EDK would like to amend the post.
Amanda in the South Bay
I think its important to take a step back and ponder what’s really important: What Would Oakeshott Do?
eemom
@Mako:
dude. We GOTTA keep hammering on this one. For He who just got a green card holds the keys to the gate of Beltway CW.
Can we but persuade him to see the error of his ways, the entire emmessemm will tumble domino-like to our side.
cleek
@mclaren:
like my mom always said: why wait for evidence when you can pre-emptively shit yourself?!
not quite sure what you think you’re trying to say by repeating this. but, i’ll just go ahead and assume it’s something dire.
Villago Delenda Est
@Quiddity:
Sullivan is not a British upper class twit. He’s a British upper class twit wannabe. There’s a reason why he’s on this side of the pond.
He’s Tory slime, of that there is absolutely no doubt. But he couldn’t socially climb in Britain, so he bailed.
FlipYrWhig
Is “Tunku Varadarajan” a character from Star Wars?
Violet
@Mark S.:
Yep. They took my relative and her husband into separate rooms and asked them all sorts of ridiculous questions. They had different answers on which way the refrigerator door opened, and that tripped them up. This was the interview to get the green card, but I can easily imagine crap like that being used to “prove” someone “lied” during their citizenship application process, if they were trying to revoke someone’s citizenship.
My relative’s husband did get his green card, but their different answers on this question were a stumbling block and held up the process for awhile. My relative is a very smart woman who works in an industry that requires attention to detail and they also hired an immigration attorney. They did not mess up the paperwork or other related issues. It was the interview where things got dicey. This was the only question they knew they had different answers on.
Joel
Is Christopher Hitchens getting the Ser Ciappelletto treatment?
Villago Delenda Est
@FlipYrWhig:
One of the Neimoidians on the Trade Federation battleship in Ep I, if I recall correctly.
Dennis SGMM
Ryan’s plan is brave because he forced himself to hold back on the obvious solution of turning the poor and infirm into snack food.
I want to know how long it will take the Villagers to begin talking him up as “A presidential candidate who’s willing to make the tough decisions necessary to get the nation’s financial house in order.”
Quiddity
@SensesFail: Towards the end of the book it gets a little hand-wavy, but overall its a fun read. Oddly enough, as Derbyshire recounts the personal histories of some of the players, he shows an uncharacteristic (for him) sensitivity to the tragedies of life.
trollhattan
@danimal:
I choose Door 3: Friedman-wackin’. Chait reminds us how it’s done:
tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/86612/i-am-huge-in-libya
kdaug
@Brachiator: Point taken.
HyperIon
DougJ wrote:
Wow. Your genius is astounding. Not.
To prove you REALLY mean it, don’t ever link to him again. Or read his site.
mclaren
@Egan:
It’s really quite amazing how much Obama and the entire Democratic leadership have destroyed their credibility in such a short amount of time.
Remember when Jane Hamsher predicted before Obama’s inauguration that Obama would slash medicare and social security in the name of imaginary “bipartisanship” and Yglesias went berserk explaining how that would never, ever happen?
Remember how I predicted the U.S. would wind up bogged down in Libya and just a few days Mnemosyne and a bunch of other cranks rushed forward to explain how that could never, ever happen because “America is leaving tomorrow”?
Source: “Air strikes escalate, stalemate deepens in fighting around Libyan cities”
Here’s another prediction for you: since Obama has systematically embraced every single insane reactionary far-right Republican policy since he entered office, he’s going to continue right down the list. Abolish public schools nationwide? Obama will come out for it. Shut down medicare entirely? Obama will propose it, it’s only a matter of time. Flat tax? Obama will come out in favor of it. Poll taxes? Obama will enthusiastically support ’em. Bring back debtors prisons? Obama will support that. Involuntary debt servitude (if you’re late paying your phone bill, you get sold into slavery by the phone company)? Obama will support that too.
And the Democratic leadership will back him, and so will the Obots on this blog.
Dave
The Daily Dish: Sullivan’s struggle to miss seeing what’s in front of his nose.
joe from Lowell
@Suffern ACE:
Never. Not once. He’s certainly never talked about bending the curve* on medical costs to bring down Medicare expenses, or about doing away with Medicare Advantage, or about raising the cap on payroll taxes.
*That’s a little phrase I just made up, just now. You get it? Like a line on a chart? I think it’s pretty good, myself.
;-)
MattR
@Violet: Geez. I made jokes about things like that after my roommate married his British girlfriend. (I guess it is a good thing I never made the anonymous phone call that I was threatening) I can easily imagine screwing up some detail like that, especially if you have moved or bought a new fridge recently. Heck, I moved my computer desk to a different corner of the room a few weeks ago and I still get up out of my chair and turn straight into a wall on a semi-regular basis.
Brachiator
@mclaren:
Progressives used to be smarter. They had a better understanding of the tax code. Now they just mainly whine about tax cuts.
Massive tax breaks for the rich are built into the current tax system. It’s not just tax cuts. Fer sample, consider the magic of Roth IRAs, guaranteed to help bankrupt the government by robbing it of future tax revenues:
Because Obama and the Democrats are always on the defensive, they can’t deal with these head on. Because the Congress was gutless Obama had to agree to extend the Bush tax cuts until 2012, and he may have to extend them again to avoid a presidential campaign trap. Meanwhile the GOP will keep calling for tax cuts, part of a diversion to keep intact all the tax goodies that have crept into the tax code since the Rule of Ronnie.
trollhattan
@trollhattan:
Never mind Friedman, Cole has found a choice new McMegan nugget (next thread). She’s the new Martha.
celticdragonchick
@Murc:
This.
joe from Lowell
@lonesomerobot:
You can have my plaid flannel shirt when you untie it from my cold, dead waist.
Midnight Marauder
@Murc:
His unrepentant advocacy of The Bell Curve disagrees with you.
MattR
@mclaren:
Has this actually happened yet? Or do you just assume that is what Obama is gonna offer in a half hour?
kth
Paul Ryan has been a U.S. Representative since 1999. Accountability would entail a good close look at his voting record in Congress since that time. And why didn’t he propose slashing Medicare when Bush was President?
Bulworth
The point of this, what raises the Ryan Plan to the level of Seriousness in the minds of Sullivan and our Media Village Elite is Ryan’s insistence that our economic/budget condition is Very Serious and that only Drastic Changes will correct the Debt Crisis.
That Ryan’s plan doesn’t actually correct the Debt Crisis is besides the point. He gets credit for pointing out the Debt Crisis.
Also, too, that Ryan simultaneously ignores the employment crisis makes the Ryan Plan double-plus good for our Villagers.
joe from Lowell
Jeebus, our loony troll has now gone from confidently predicting that Obama will slash Social Security and Medicare in order to fund upper income tax cuts to pretending he has already been proven right.
I suppose that’s not terribly surprising from someone who thinks that an article about the French and British complaining that our contribution to the Libya operations since NATO took over is too small is actually proof that we’ve become bogged down in a large-scale military commitment.
You want a prediction? Obama is going to come out against cuts to Social Security, in favor of raising taxes on rich people, and mclaren is going to pretend he was proven right, again.
Dexter
@Violet:
Oy!! I am halfway through my own green card process. I guess me and my wife better figure out refrigerator door, car door, specs of everything we own.
Quiddity
@Egan: That expression, “broadening of the tax base” is one I’m deeply suspicious of. From what I’ve read, it means pushing tax burdens down on those with little or no income. “broadening”, like “strengthening” (e.g. of Social Security) are multi-dimensional transformations – to get mathematical – that can bite you. You can strengthen Social Security,
make it good for the long haul (dimension A)
by reducing benefits to $20 a month (dimension B)
Or you could do something different; something progressive, for example. But we must be careful not to embrace these almost meaningless words like “broadening” or “strengthening” as long as there no consensus about the underlying formulas.
TG Chicago
I’ve also soured on Sully lately. Not only the Ryan stuff, but he also called Islam a “screwed up” religion:
andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/04/sparks-from-a-book-burning.html
I emailed asking him how he can call Islam “screwed up” based on the reaction of some fanatics while not calling Christianity screwed up based on the fool who burned the Koran. No response.
trollhattan
@Dexter:
Ever see “Memento”? Just carry a stack of Polariods of everything in your day-to-day life. I actually can’t envision having to go through such a quiz, not with so much at stake. Brings another movie to mind: “Defending Your Life.”
Best of luck!
danimal
@trollhattan: So much fail, so little time.
@joe from Lowell: You are clearly wrong in your predictions, Joe. McLaren’s a she.
maus
Liking gays and disliking racists & Palin doesn’t mean you’re not also an asshole.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
@Quiddity: “That expression, “broadening of the tax base” is one I’m deeply suspicious of.”
No kidding. If that doesn’t set off every doublespeak alarm in your head when you hear it, you must be new here.
Since repub’s favorite dead horse to flog is that the bottom 50% of the americans don’t pay income tax, and everybody else does, guess who you have to raise taxes on to “broaden the tax base”. Broaden is the operative word here, because it’s not Increase or Adjust or Refine or Tweak or Strengthen or Repurpose or anything else. It’s Broaden. And the only way to broaden is to add more payers into the system, not adjust the rates of those already paying.
Yutsano
@kth:
Because deficits don’t matter under Republican Presidents.
Corpsicle
Balloon Juice’s relationship with Sullivan is remarkably like Sullivan’s relationship with conservatism. No matter how many times conservatism lets him down, screws up, shows itself to be meaningless lies and bullshit, he just can’t give it up. No matter how many times Sullivan shows himself to be racist, misogynist, shallow, lacking in any kind of empathy, and just fucking stupid, the Balloon Juice bloggers just can’t let go. What’s that line in Brokeback Mountain? I wish I knew how to quit you?
Now I’m supposed to believe that a math error is the straw that broke the camel’s back. Yeah, right. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Violet
@Dexter:
It all depends on what interviewer you get. There are easy interviewers and tough ones. The easy ones just ask one or two questions and stamp everything and you’re on your way. The tough ones can make it a nightmare.
If you haven’t hired an immigration attorney, they are worth every penny. Don’t scrimp on that.
Also, bring multiple copies of EVERYTHING you have submitted to the interview because you should expect the interviewer will not have a copy of anything you’ve submitted.
Comrade DougJ
@HyperIon:
How old are you? I’d like to know because about 1/3 of your comments don’t sound like they could have been written by anyone over the age of 15.
trollhattan
Also, too, the LA Times is shrill.
motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/04/gop-plan
Joel
@Brachiator: Roth IRAs aren’t as bad as you make them. Yes, it’s a federally sanctioned waiver on capital gains, but there are caps on annual contributions and maximum income. You’re still paying income tax and the capital gains taxes paid by the middle class are pretty marginal.
rickstersherpa
@Yutsano: Bingo.
Brad DeLong finds more anaylsis concerning the “truth” telling of Representative Ryan.
James Harney cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3458:
“Even some critics of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget plan have praised his “courage” and his willingness to make “hard choices” to address looming deficits. But, upon closer inspection, Chairman Ryan’s widely reported claim that his plan produces $1.6 trillion in deficit reduction proves illusory. In fact, the numbers in his plan show that his budget produces just $155 billion in real deficit reduction over ten years…. That’s because his budget cuts are offset by $4.2 trillion in tax cuts that would go disproportionately to those at the top. In essence, at least for the next decade, this plan is far less a blueprint for addressing deficits and far more a proposal to redistribute large amounts of resources from those at the bottom to those at the top….
About $1.3 trillion of the claimed $5.8 trillion reduction in spending, however, comes simply from taking credit for spending less in future years for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as a result of the already-planned drawdown in the number of troops fighting in those countries. While this accurately reflects the difference between spending for the wars in Ryan’s plan and spending for the wars projected in CBO’s baseline, it does not represent savings or deficit reduction resulting from any change in policy proposed by Ryan….
CBO follows the baseline rules established in the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 (as subsequently modified). For taxes and mandatory spending, the baseline projections generally assume that there will be no changes in current laws governing taxes and mandatory programs. But for discretionary spending… assuming current law does not make sense…. [B]aseline rules require CBO to assume that for each account and activity, Congress will provide the same amount of funding in each year the baseline projections cover as it provided in the most recently enacted appropriation bills (adjusted for inflation). This generally serves as an adequate proxy…. There is, however, one large anomaly — funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that causes the current baseline projections to vary significantly from what it will cost to continue current policies. Following the baseline rules, CBO projects that in every year from 2012 through 2021, appropriations for the wars will remain at the current annual funding level…. Yet a drawdown in troops is already well underway in Iraq and is planned for Afghanistan…. Chairman Ryan’s budget merely plugs in the CBO’s estimate of the war costs under the President’s proposal, without changing them.
This difference of about $1.05 trillion between the war costs in the Ryan budget and those in the CBO baseline thus does not represent new savings that result from Ryan’s budget proposals. Yet Ryan counts this $1.05 trillion, plus the $250 billion reduction in interest costs that such a $1.05 trillion spending reduction would produce, as $1.3 trillion in spending cuts and deficit reduction….
Ryan himself said in a February interview that savings in the Obama budget that come from the troop drawdown should not be considered real savings or deficit reduction. Ryan commented that the Obama budget showed savings of $1.1 trillion because the costs under the proposed withdrawal were compared to a baseline that assumed “they’re going to be in Afghanistan and Iraq at current levels for ten years,” and called these “phantom savings.” Ryan was correct to term these “phantom savings.” And if the phantom savings are not counted as real savings, the amount of spending cuts that Ryan’s proposals produce is $1.3 trillion less than Ryan claims…”
Friends don’t let their friends vote Republican.
MattR
@rickstersherpa: You provided a link. You don’t need to excerpt a screen of text. Beyond any legal/fair use issues, it is damn annoying to have to scroll through.
Brachiator
@Joel:
I have no idea what you are talking about. ALL OF THE APPRECIATION from a Roth IRA accumulates tax free. This is the problem, not the initial contributions. No tax is paid on the distribution. Zero. Nada. Zip.
Also, currently anyone in the 15% bracket pays zero tax on capital gains. So, for example, a couple who had $50,000 in capital gains from a trust or S Corp would pay zero tax. A couple with $50,000 in wages would pay tax. It ain’t fair, and it is a trick that wealthier taxpayers can leverage far better than middle class taxpayers.
HyperIon
@Comrade DougJ wrote:
I feel the same way about many of your posts. ;=)
HyperIon
@Brachiator wrote :
The silver lining is that us po folks get to contribute just as much as the richies. I’ve been maxing out my Roth contributions since the program started. Switched from IRA to Roth IRA.
Comrade DougJ
@HyperIon:
Case in point.
Brachiator
@HyperIon:
Of course, the rich have the extra cash to help spouses and their children fund their Roth IRAs.
And then, when the po folk look around and need Medicare or other assistance, you got the GOP going, “we don’t have any money because we don’t have that money that’s locked in Roth IRAs. We need to cut taxes and cut programs.”
So po folks have to ask. What programs really help you and which are sucker bait that will let the GOP whip around and kick you in the ass?
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I knew you’d figure it out eventually Doug J. I think it took you so long only because we humans are such habitual creatures. And Sullivan has done some good writing over the years, but in the end he is a glib and shallow Brit carpetbagger who calls Paul Ryan courageous in hopes of getting a date with him, or at least a lingering glance. In all fairness, Ryan does have lovely blue eyes and a cute widow’s peak, but the heartlessness ruins the visuals for me.
HyperIon
@Brachiator:
Was the Roth IRA legislation a GOP idea?
IIRC it was an attempt to get people to save.
I agree that there are other ways to accomplish that other than saying “Contribute after tax now and never pay taxes on the earnings.”
My point was that it was not designed to “let the GOP whip around and kick you in the ass”. At least I am not aware of any evidence that supports that POV. If you know otherwise, please supply a link. It came into being in the 90s…when there were still sane repubs. The fact that insane GOPers now want to scorch the earth to pay for the debt THEY generated hardly seems the fault of the Roth designers.
As for it being tax policy that is now no longer affordable, yeah, that may be true. But so are the Bush tax cuts. Congresscritters often pass silly legislation. I don’t share Kevin Drum’s opinion that the tax free status is impossible to roll back though. What can be done, can be undone.
d.s.
After reading Sully’s blog for a few months you come to realize the man is a wacky riddle of contradictions that you can never really resolve.
He’s a barebacking social conservative warblogger pacifist egalitarian glibertarian.
He likes Ryan’s public persona, and didn’t bother to read his plan before posting on it. He now sorta realizes what a trainwreck the actual plan is so he’s weaseling out of it already.
You just got to roll with it instead of expecting logical consistency out of the man. It’s just not going to happen.
jake the snake
Andrew Sullivan, John Derbyshire, Dinesh D’Souza: the best arguments for restrictive immigration laws.
pattonbt
I think Sullivan and Bobo really did damage themselves in the “credibility” department on the Ryan “budget” posts. By jumping in so fast, so confidently and so “man crush”-y, it showed that they are not actually looking for honest debate on issues and/or coming to nuanced, well thought out solutions to real, difficult problems. It showed that they are desperate. Desperately looking for anything that can assuage the fear they have inside that everything they have taken as an article of faith their whole lives, the beliefs that have given them their lofty positions in life and the accuracy of their intelligence are wrong. Day after day they see the evidence that what they believed and the policies they advocated and helped put into motion did real, evident harm to society and that “the other side” was right. Every issue wrong. They are public intellectuals who are shown over and over again to be wrong. So they are desperate. And desperate people take desperate action.
So right before the end, when they actually have to change and accept they were wrong, they always double down. They have to find a saviour. They have to jump at anything that they can point to and say “See! I wasnt wrong all those time! I’m right and good and moral!”.
Now, I do not think they will ever fully come around. If they do any penance on the Ryan budget (which I do not think they will do straight forwardly) it will be mealy mouthed and weasel worded so they can absolve themselves of their idiocy as much as possible.