US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

yeah, David Broder didn't really much like politics either. ergo his reflexive "centrism."

friedman! they all hate it

why do people take them seriously?

i guess cause ""people"" hate politics

These people. If they hate politics so much, they can damn well stop participating in 'the conversation' or accepting payment for their involvement.

The problem with Friedman is that he's also accepted as a foreign policy sage.

so we have to endure him on at least six cable news channels.

another problem is that there are at least six cable news channels

(I don't even pay for cable)

Ah, Friedman - the most famous person ever to write for my high school's newspaper.

I assume this was last year

In fairness to the guy, he pays for a scholarship for aspiring journos from my town so he gets mensch points for that.

DJP ty for that

lol damn

LOL Dan.

hate politics? Methinks they dost protest too much. It's a filthy emdeavor, and pundits take to it like pigs to slop.

Well, and besides, the political commenter at Brooks' level of fame assumes an air of detachment: they're the only ones who can see Things As They Are. Which is why Obama will have a lucrative career on television in sixteen months or six years, whichever comes first.

journos and commentators like the "inside baseball" aspects of politics, plus the gossip. politics is showbiz for ugly people, as either frank zappa or jay leno once said. they don't like detailed discussions of policy, partly because they don't understand policy discussions but mainly because that shit is for technocratic geeks (because it's like hard and requires analysis and knowledge).

David Brooks was told there would be no math

but its not that brooks and friedman and (RIP) broder hate policy or numbers! they hate conflict. friedman in particular would love a country run by a council of technocratic geeks

The worst kind of totalitarianism imo.

don't they know that conflict builds character

It's like the scenario in Devo's "Through With Cool."

the brooks/friedman/broder wing just doesn't like that there are different kinds of people in the country, with different desires, ideas, and relative levels of power. none of those guys has shown to have much of a read on the real source of political energy, and can't understand why the whole thing isn't just sorted out by now.

I want more fighting, myself

you could move to wisconsin

or Syria

no, the progressives-with-balls kind, not the limbs-flying kind.

Meanwhile Ezra Klein follows Andrew Sullivan's lead and posits that Obama has been a terrific conservative president.

Too bad so many conservatives will vote against him because he is a Mau-Mau and a communist. Of course, the John Birchers called Eisenhower a communist sympathizer, too.

Klein actually says: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s

"we are the change we voted against 20 years ago"

OBAMA 2012

haha he actually did all those policies republican wonks put together to have something on file, but republican pols were never ever going to do

x-post

but its not that brooks and friedman and (RIP) broder hate policy or numbers! they hate conflict. friedman in particular would love a country run by a council of technocratic geeks

― ban drake (the rapper) (max), Tuesday, April 26, 2011

My aerospace engineer brother sometimes endorses this Friedman point of view.

during the healthcare debate i remember feeling like "why am i supporting bob doles health care plan"

"why am I paying to keep Bob Dole alive?"

bcz single-payer is airy-fairy Candyland shit

I wonder if the centrist Democrat plan is to appeal to the private sphere (since the public one is already beholden to them) as the Republicans increasingly turn into the wingnut/flat-earth party?

"There's gold in them thar hills!"

The political genius for the Dems is that it is a massive part of the economy, has and creates/expands both private and public sphere special interests and is nation-wide.

Don't overrate the Dems' political genius.

i dont think the private sphere really gives a shit as long as they dont have to pay taxes

as long as they dont have to pay taxes ...while continuing to operate in a country with a sound infrastructure, the world's most expensive armed forces, and the dollar remains the reserve currency of international finance.

yeah, i still think they dont really care

true, until they discover they do care and didn't know it.

that is why the GE CEO is bouncing that private sphere around like Chaplin w/ the globe in The Great Dictator.

xp

Alterman: Obama really is like Carter.

Stylistically speaking, Barack Obama could hardly be further from Jimmy Carter if he really had been born in Kenya. Carter was a born-again Baptist who was raised on his father’s peanut plantation and supported George Wallace on the road to the Georgia state house. Barack Obama—well, you know the story. But the two men have a great deal in common in their approach to the presidency, and not one of these similarities is good news for the Democrats or even for America. Both men rule without regard to the concerns of the base of their party. Both held themselves to be above politics when it came to making tough decisions. Both were possessed with superhuman self-confidence when it came to their own political judgment mixed with contempt for what they understood to be the petty concerns of pundits and party leaders. And worst of all, one fears, neither one appeared willing to change course no matter how many storm clouds loomed on the horizon.

*****

So what does Obama propose? Well nothing so simple as his own party’s highly popular political platform for this president. He’s too smart for that. Rather, as Ezra Klein points out,, Obama’s deficit reduction plan, while not quite as brutal as the Republican Ryan plan, is even more conservative than the Simpson-Bowles plan, which was itself deeply conservative. He calls for raising less money in new taxes and far smaller cuts in the defense budget, chasing the Republicans into territory that is well to the right of anything even Ronald Reagan dared propose before his 1980 shellacking of Jimmy Carter.

"we are the change we voted against 20 years ago"

lol

but its not that brooks and friedman and (RIP) broder hate policy or numbers! they hate conflict. friedman in particular would love a country run by a council of technocratic geeks

actually, i stand corrected. max is 1,000% correct about brooks/friedman/broder. this troika isn't particularly GOOD about discussing policy in any meaningful way IMHO, but that is different than saying they are not concerned with policy or anti-technocrat.

anyway, we're all morbz now. at least we know that next year's "lesser evil" candidate will be as much Bob Dole circa 1996 as Jimmy Carter (a comparison i've made myself since like the moment Barry threw his hat in the presidential ring several years ago).

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/157759-schumer-pressures-boehner-on-oil-subsidies-

So now the White House and Schumer have finally decided that ending oil company subsidies is a good idea? It is, but they should have tried earlier and I doubt they will now properly keep up the pressure on Boehner to do so (Republicans consider ending subsidies to be a tax increase) as it also makes political sense.

Bam is still an even lesser Bill Clinton to me, w/out a phony Prosperity Bubble to protect him