Driftglass reads BoBo so you don’t have to.
Politicans
Still you’re hoping that she’s well-spoken
It’s a story as old as the internet itself: someone creates a geek-friendly blog, pretends it’s written by an attractive young woman, and soon enough lots of idiots start reading the blog and crushing on the semi-fictional blog author. The fact that this particular faux hot-girl-geek-blogger was a pseduo-intellectual neoconservative (but I repeat myself) makes the story that much better.
Someone needs to do this with a Randroid blog. Some of you will protest that Megan McArdle already has, but I think that’s ultimately unfair and inaccurate on a number of levels.
(via)
Update. This thought crossed my mind too.
Still you’re hoping that she’s well-spokenPost + Comments (115)
Galtian Majesties Request
How about a Christie-Bayh “No Labels” candidacy instead?
Christie’s potential candidacy has been an increasingly fevered fantasy of a certain cadre of some media and business elites — mostly based in New York, with a smattering of California technology and entertainment players — since last summer. That’s when he showed up at a Sun Valley conference hosted by the investment banker Allen and Co. and wowed the crowd, including Rupert Murdoch, with what many in attendance described as a nimble mind and a speaking style that was both articulate and blunt-spoken.
How long til our Galtian overlords can snap their fingers and install a new government without all the muss of primaries and debates? It’s not far off, is it?
When it happens, you can be sure that Very Serious People will agree it’s for the best.
You don’t have to be rich
I understand the argument that there are reasonably middle-class people who are worth over a million dollars. I am sympathetic to the notion that their lives are different quite different from those of the Koch brothers or Bill Gates. But Bieber, Mary, and Joseph, this is some unconvincing shit, even for Kaplan:
Though the average American family is rich beyond the wildest dreams of the average family in Bangladesh, where per capita income recently rose above $700, it’s not much compared with those who summer on beachfront properties in the Hamptons. When John D. Rockefeller learned in 1913 that the late J.P. Morgan had left an estate of $60 million, including a fabulous art collection, he reportedly said: “And to think — he wasn’t even rich.”
This what has gone wrong with conservatism: it has been savaged by the soft bigotry of low expectations. Wingers can put the dumbest arguments they want into Kaplan opinion pieces and they’ll get published. Winger candidates can show complete ignorance of any and all issues and they’ll still get elected. Once in, they can lead the country into catastrophic wars and be re-elected.
There is simply no incentive for a winger to be anything other than a complete fuck-up, a blithering drooling idiot whose arguments wouldn’t pass muster with your average 12 year-old.
That sweet smell of patchouli
Not to make this an all E-Dub day, but what struck me most about that clip Dennis and John talked about wasn’t Mike Barnicle’s bloviation (what’s the brother gonna do, he’s Boston Irish) but Halperin’s ridiculous question (and subsequent haranguing) about China’s military threat. I get that it was supposed to sound all serious and gatekeepery — we should hold candidates to higher standards, at least here in Aspen! — but the truth is that the Yellow Peril, to the extent that it exists, is mostly economic, not military, just as Warren said, so Halperin was transparently kind of a dick, as he himself might put it.
Halperin has been known to kiss a lot of candidate tush, as this picture shows, but he also knows that you’ve got to sucker punch a hippie every time you get a chance.
What makes Warren a hippie? She’s a tough 60-something woman from Oklahoma who never spat on any soliders. But she bucks the Washington establishment and not in an all-American let’s-string-up-Ben-Bernanke kind of way. That makes her the kind of person you wouldn’t see at an Applebees salad bar and thus any Serious Pundit is duty bound to fuck with her.
What a crazy system we have here.
I can’t stand it, I know you planned it
I guess I’m the type who likes to ask cui bono sometimes. That’s why I could never be a serious person:
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), vice chairman of the Senate Democratic Conference, believes “some” Republicans “want the economy to actually fail.” Paul Krugman recently said in his column, “[I]t’s hard to avoid the suspicion that G.O.P. leaders actually want the economy to perform badly.” Eugene Robison, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was recently asked whether it’s possible Republicans would sabotage the economy. “Well, let me be honest,” he said. “It has occurred to me that this is a possibility.” E.J. Dionne Jr. and Dan Gross have raised the same concerns.
A few months ago, Kevin Drum wondered whether this will ever be “a serious talking point,” adding, “No serious person in a position of real influence really wants to accuse an entire party of cynically trying to tank the economy, after all.”
It’s a no-brainer, if the economy is bad enough, Republicans have a good chance to win the White House. What’s the downside? Maybe you lose a few seats in Congress.
But Eric Cantor is an honorable man. So are they all, all honorable men.
The invisible hand of Jesus
Glibertarianism and Christianism are now as one (via Wonkette):
About one in five Americans combine a view of God as actively engaged in daily workings of the world with an economic conservative view that opposes government regulation and champions the free market as a matter of faith.
“They say the invisible hand of the free market is really God at work,” says sociologist Paul Froese, co-author of the Baylor Religion Survey, released today by Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
[….]Most (81%) political conservatives say there is one “ultimate truth in the world, and new economic information of cost-benefit analysis is not going to change their mind about how the economy should work,” Froese says.
[….]This is a distinctly American cultural finding and specific to this point in history. It was different in the past, it might be different in the future and it’s different now in Western Europe, Froese says.
I’d like to see the data about how this was different in the past, but I can’t find it (here’s a link to the survey itself).