Kaus’ BS meter explodes.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Bigotry
Lileks has some thoughts on clueless anti-Christian bigots in entertainment. And the fact that they’d never bravely slander Muslims in the same manner.
Also, a question about movie stars past. I left a heretical comment that Marilyn Monroe was highly overrated. And I think that Hedy Lamar was hot for her brains (she invented frequency hopping).
Restoring The First Amendment?
Could SCOTUS be prepared to overturn McCain-Feingold, six years late?
I hope so. Supporting it was one of Sandra Day O’Connor’s more boneheaded decisions, and I hope that replacing her with Alito makes the difference.
I’ve always thought that George Bush’s signing the thing was an impeachable offense, since he took an oath to uphold the Constitution, but freely admitted that he was signing a bill that he viewed as unconstitutional. He was supposed to do his job, not kick it upstairs to the court and hope they’d do theirs.
Alice In Wonderland Continues
If the problem was too little regulation, then why are the unregulated institutions being used to bail out the regulated ones?
I wish that someone had asked the president that question last night. And here’s another missed opportunity — if the solution to our problem is nationalizing health care, why is Europe, where they did that years ago, having the same problems we are?
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here are some more questions that should have been asked last night:
Mr. President, a staple of Democratic party rhetoric over the years is that the GOP is the party of big business and the Democratic party is the party of the working man. Yet it would appear to the casual observer that Wall Street banks have hijacked your administration and are moving heaven and earth to socialize their staggering losses. Do you find it worrisome that Republicans are now increasingly inclined to argue that what’s good for Citigroup is not necessarily good for America, reversing the long-established rhetorical order of the political universe? And how comfortable are you with your progressive allies who are now wondering aloud about an administration that argues that bankruptcy is only an option for “the little people”?
We may not have the best government that money can buy, but we definitely have one that money can buy.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s an excerpt from the Barone piece that I’ve been thinking about for a while:
Democrats like Barack Obama and Barney Frank, at least on the campaign trail or in sound bites, have portrayed the financial crisis as the product of deregulation. The solution, they say, is more regulation. In that vein Frank, one of the brainiest members of Congress, is proposing that the Federal Reserve become a regulator of systemic risk, with the power to regulate firms that because of their size or strategic position are of systemic importance.
My American Enterprise colleague Peter Wallison has argued powerfully that this is a bad idea. Neither the Federal Reserve or other regulators identified the systemic risk which caused this crisis. Neither did most financial institutions or investors. Systemic risk is hard to identify for the very reason that it is systemic: It results from just about everyone doing what turns out to be the wrong thing. (Housing prices will always go up, therefore there is no risk in buying mortgage-backed securities, etc.) Identifying some firms as posing systemic risk is saying that they are too big to fail, in which case they’ll take undue risks and end up having to be bailed out by the government. These strike me as very strong arguments.
I would have a lot more confidence going forward if the people running things now weren’t the same people who didn’t see this coming (and in the case of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, and Charles Schumer, partially responsible for it). Why not put Peter Schiff in charge? He’s one of the few who actually called it far ahead of time. Of course, the last thing that this administration wants is someone who actually understands economics.
Hookers And Congressmen
…and staying bought. Some thoughts from Glenn Reynolds:
it wasn’t just AIG: Wall Street in general gave profligately to Barack Obama, and to Democrats generally, in 2008. Yet now, when the polls shift, all of those politicians who were so happy to take the cash are suddenly pretending they have never even heard of Wall Street. Instead they’re getting behind punitive taxes, protesters steered to executives’ homes and what both the Financial Times and the New York Daily News have called a “witch hunt” against bankers and brokers.
As Joseph Nocera wrote in the New York Times, “Congress, with its howls of rage, its chaotic, episodic reaction to the crisis, and its shameless playing to the crowds, is out of control. This week, the body politic ran off the rails.” They probably acted nicer when they were asking for money just a few months ago.
If these donations had been given out of love and admiration, Wall Street donors would have reason to feel jilted. But if–as is generally the case with political donations–they were more in the order of protection money, then Wall Street donors may instead feel duped. They might want to ask themselves what protection, exactly, they got for their investment.
And more from Jonah Goldberg:
The Democrats were whorish in their quest for AIG money. But once the money stops flowing and the neighbors are watching, the Democrats suddenly pretend they never wore the naughty librarian outfit for their Wall Street Johns.
As Glenn says, it might be refreshing to see businessmen support politicians who support free markets. Some do, but too many don’t. Because we’ve let the government get out of control, they get far too much financial leverage from their political contributions. As Glenn notes, when an investment in a politician has a much higher payoff than an investment in (say) plant, the country has gone far off the rails from what the Founders intended.
The King Of False Choices
Some thoughts on one of the president’s more duplicitous rhetorical tactics:
I thought of a few of Obama’s statements along these lines. We choose either his entire program of massive deficit spending or we choose “an economy built on reckless speculation, inflated home prices, and maxed-out credit cards.” We either choose his budget, which is “inseparable from this recovery,” or we go back to “the very same policies that have led us to a narrow prosperity and massive debt.”
Obama frames himself as the man with all of the solutions. Even if America has experienced noteworthy bubbles and busts of some kind in nearly every decade of its existence, we’ve never had a leader like Barack Obama before, so maybe we can prevent it from ever happening again:
[T]he most critical part of our strategy is to ensure that we do not return to an economic cycle of bubble and bust in this country…The budget I submitted to Congress will build our economic recovery on a stronger foundation so that we don’t face another crisis like this 10 or 20 years from now.
Those who have other ideas, who worry about nationalization of the economy, the doubling of the national debt in six years, and who fear that they are watching the nation collectively drink Drano to fix its stomach-ache — we call them “nay-sayers.”
And haters. And racists.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Only peripherally related, but here’s someone diagramming an Obama sentence.
Unlike the blogger and commenter, I never enjoyed, or was very good at, diagramming sentences. Fortunately, though, like spelling, I seem to have a good innate sense of English grammar.
The Tranzis Take Power
One has just been nominated to be legal advisor to the State Department.
Great. I doubt if people knew they were voting for this in November, but they were.
The Teleprompter Addiction
Neoneocon has some thoughts:
Barnett noticed—as many had, even at the time—the enormous difference in articulateness between Teleprompter-Obama and Obama unplugged (the latter is the title of Barnett’s article). That was the easy part. The more discriminating observation Barnett made was between the message of Teleprompter Obama and the message of ad-lib Obama. The two were not just different in degree—they were profoundly opposite in tone and essence. Ad-lib Obama was far more angry and more radical—indeed, although Barnett doesn’t mention it, this Obama resembled the angrier and more radical Michelle Obama, in her earlier campaign remarks that drew so much controversy.
Obama is addicted to his Teleprompter not only because he knows he sounds better—smoother and smarter—with it than without. The deeper reason for his reliance on it may just be that he differs so profoundly from the persona he wishes to convey that he quite literally cannot trust himself to speak without it. Shorn of the Teleprompter, he not only runs the risk of revealing a disfluency that could rival (or even exceed?) that of his reviled predecessor George Bush—he may reveal who he truly is, an angry man with a profoundly radical agenda for America.
No surprise to those of us who paid attention all last year.
Don’t Hold Your Breath
The media should resign over President Obama’s failure.
Actually, they won’t have to resign. Given the continuing financial failure of newspapers, they seem to be getting fired. What will happen to Frank Rich when the New York Times finally goes under?
[Late morning update]
Whoops, there goes another one. After a hundred seventy four years, the Ann Arbor News is closing its doors this summer.
Chicago Moves To DC
I pointed out a few posts ago that the current style in Washington is the Chicago Way. Now John Kass, who has been covering Chicago politics for a long time, agrees:
“Stunned, stunned is the word,” said Obama.
Stunned?
It turns out that his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner—who didn’t pay all of his federal taxes but was still deemed worthy by Obama of collecting yours—knew all about the AIG bonuses weeks ago.
That was long before Washington Democrats began shrieking in pretend outrage over the bonuses, as if they didn’t vote for them, sort of like Chicago aldermen shrieking about corruption from the 5th Floor.
It’s like Mayor Richard Daley saying, “Gee, I dunno” when news breaks that his nephews are in another multimillion-dollar government deal. Or that time that Daley gave $100 million in affirmative action contracts to men he knows well, yet was stunned to learn later that they were white guys, not black females.
These days, the Washington Way is looking just like the Chicago Way. Those of us from Illinois can see it, what with City Hall guys pulling White House strings.
And no, that’s not a good thing.
And anyone who is surprised is a fool.