Category: New York Times

Show Me This ‘Social Contract’, Krugman

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by Smitty

Your latest piece of farce is titled ‘The Social Contract‘, and you quote Elizabeth Warren on the topic:

Elizabeth Warren, the financial reformer who is now running for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, recently made some eloquent remarks to this effect that are, rightly, getting a lot of attention. “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody,” she declared, pointing out that the rich can only get rich thanks to the “social contract” that provides a decent, functioning society in which they can prosper.
Which brings us back to those cries of “class warfare.”
Republicans claim to be deeply worried by budget deficits. Indeed, Mr. Ryan has called the deficit an “existential threat” to America. Yet they are insisting that the wealthy — who presumably have as much of a stake as everyone else in the nation’s future — should not be called upon to play any role in warding off that existential threat.
Well, that amounts to a demand that a small number of very lucky people be exempted from the social contract that applies to everyone else.

Here are a few ideas for follow-on columns:

  • Define this social contract. Codify it and put it before me on paper, so that I can decide if I feel like yielding any personal sovereignty to it, as I have the Constitution. In other words, no hand waving, Mr. Nobel weenie.
  • Define this “luck” that supports these “very lucky people“. As a luck skeptic, I’m queasy with that kind of argument.
  • Explain just what, if anything, private property still means in your “social contract” realm. While I am not materialistic, and cannot track envying the private property of others, I do enjoy being left alone. So, private property: can I have some?
  • What kind of vow of poverty will you undertake in your infinite concern for those not prospering? You yourself may personally be guilty for the failure to attain fortune of some person in Drain, Oregon. I should like to think that you’re going to shoulder your fair share of the burden while we sort out just how guilty you really are. Start with giving up everything; we’ll re-distribute a bit of wealth back your way as soon as we sort out some staffing challenges.

Workin’ hard, trying to keep the good Krugman full of good ideas for future work.

NYT Editor: ‘We Wanted to Believe’

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Another rube self-identifies:

Just a few winters ago my wife and I took our daughters to witness the inauguration of a man who had campaigned on hope and embodied possibility. We are pretty immune to political euphoria, but, circulating among the footsore pilgrims, we could imagine our country had embraced the idea that we were all in this together. When the newly sworn-in president congratulated us all on choosing unity of purpose over recriminations and worn-out dogmas, we wanted to believe that we had done exactly that.

We already knew that New York Times editor Bill Keller was a gullible chump. We are surprised he would admit it so openly.

And speaking of chumps, David Brooks:

It recycles ideas that couldn’t get passed even when Democrats controlled Congress. . . .
This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.
Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country.

And here is why you’re a sap, Brooks: You looked at the long era of Republican ascendance (1981-2006) and decided that the cause of GOP policy failure was that Republicans were too conservative. Ergo, you reasoned, some sort of “moderate” bipartisan compromise was the solution. But the failures of the GOP are due to other reasons entirely — including the constant stream of disinformation flowing from the media — and so the bipartisan compromise approach you recommend only leads to Democrat victories.

Paul Krugman Remains Free To Drop An Upper-Decker

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by Smitty

People may object to the use of a scatalogical term to describe a Krugman excretion, but I submit that the level of perversion on display by the gentleman supports the label. Allow me to object to Krugman’s choice of historical time frame, scope of analysis, boring guilt play, and refusal to understand federalism.

Time Frame Continue reading Paul Krugman Remains Free To Drop An Upper-Decker →

Pardon Me While I Run The Fisk Bus Over Loco MoDo A Time Or Twa

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by Smitty

Fisking a Maureen Dowd column. It’s the blogger version of calisthenics, really.

Maureen Dowd Smitty
One day during the 2008 campaign, as Barack Obama read the foreboding news of the mounting economic and military catastrophes that W. was bequeathing his successor, he dryly remarked to aides: “Maybe I should throw the game.” Rules of Lefty Punditry:

  1. History began with George W. Bush.
  2. Pre-history was golden, but W. killed it, for spite.
  3. BHO has Olympian powers, except where the Stygian evil of W drags BHO down.

Continue reading Pardon Me While I Run The Fisk Bus Over Loco MoDo A Time Or Twa →

Jonah Goldberg, in Fine Form

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Worked up into a long-overdue rant:

Tom Friedman — who knows a bit about Hezbollah — calls the tea partiers the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP bent on taking the country on a “suicide mission.” All over the place, conservative Republicans are “hostage takers” and “terrorists,” “terrorists” and “traitors.” They want to “end life as we know it on this planet,” says Nancy Pelosi. They are betraying the Founders, too. Chris Matthews all but signs up for the “Make an Ass of Yourself” contest at the State Fair. Joe Nocera writes today that “the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests.” Lord knows what Krugman and Olbermann have said.
Then last night, on the very day Gabby Giffords heroically returns to cast her first vote since that tragic attack seven months ago, the vice president of the United States calls the Republican party a bunch of terrorists. . . .

Read the whole thing. You can also read the Joe Nocera New York Times column that helped set off Goldberg’s rant.  Scott Whitlock at Newsbusters has video of Chris Matthews, in case you missed this:

“Why did [Obama] let this develop for six months…this drum roll of the Republicans saying, ‘We’ve got the baby. You don’t get the baby back unless you pay us?’ Why do you let the other side have the baby, to use kidnapping terms?”

Meanwhile, the supposed radical Tea Party terrorist plan passed the Senate 74-26. So three-quarters of senators are “hostage takers,”  including such fanatics as Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Al Franken, John Kerry, Debbie Stabenow . . .

Krugman, STFU!

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by Smitty

Sitting There Feeling Useless sits Paul Krugman, unable to grasp that the American people aren’t buying his swill.

The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further.

Can you not grasp reality, man? Government Spending Triggers Fiscal Undertows.
Only somebody with the mentality of an insect would lack the wisdom to see that, beyond a certain early point (long ago passed in our case) the governmental cast on the economic limb with the fracture* causes atrophy of the market muscles. Human beings that do not confuse themselves with Socialist ants can grasp that an exoskeleton on the limb implies increasing weakness over time, not recovery. Load-shed the government spending, the over-regulation, the suffocating growth of bureaucracy, and go for some good, old-fashioned physical therapy.
Sincerely, Thanks For Understanding.
–Smitty

*Caused by a load of regulation that landed upon it.

Update: Surberlanche!

Update II: Linked at WyBlog, too. Thanks!

Update III: Left Handed Nib and That Mr. G Guy pick it up.

Update IV: Tagged by marfdrat.

Pamela Geller Linked by New York Times

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Not in a good way, but by a couple of Norwegian writers blaming her (and “Islamophobia”) for the Oslo massacre:

Hatred of Muslims and resentment of the left — one of us has repeatedly received resentful diatribes against the “multiculturalist elite,” and was mentioned in Mr. Breivik’s own writings — is not confined to Norway. Mr. Breivik has praised Gates of Vienna, a Web site that compares contemporary Europe to long-ago wars with the Ottomans. He has praised writers like Bruce Bawer, the American author of “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within,” and Bat Ye’Or, the pseudonym for the British author of the conspiratorial “Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis.” He is an enthusiastic reader of the virulently anti-Islamic blog of Pamela Geller, an American who leads the group “Stop Islamization of America” and gained notoriety for her opposition to an Islamic center near ground zero in Manhattan.
Europe’s new right is, in other words, not neo-Nazi; it has swapped anti-Semitism for Islamophobia. After a hiatus of several hundred years, fear of Islam reemerged around 1989, as the Cold War was ending and Iranian mullahs issued a fatwa against the British writer Salman Rushdie. It gained popularity as increasing numbers of Muslims entered Europe as immigrants in the 1990s, and became widespread in the aftermath of 9/11. Traditional racism may actually be waning in several European countries, but hostility toward Islam and animosity toward Muslim immigrants and their children is on the rise. . . .

At least the authors don’t pretend that “hostility toward Islam” arose without any provocation.

The question, I’d say, is which is the greater danger: Islamicization or Islamophobia? And if you believe the former is the greater danger, then the latter is actually rational — even when it presents itself in “virulent” fashion.