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.