Friday Flow Chart: The Overton Window

I have just begun The Overton Window. It is ahhhh-mayyyyy-zzzziiiinnnngggg. From the first chapter:

The Situation

I am going to admit it. I do not hate David Brooks. I sort of like him. He strikes me as one of the classic American characters: the amiable fraud. Here is a man who, seeking to report from the real America, could only summon the stamina to drive one state over, a sojourn from which he returned and made it all up anyway. There is a kind of charm in a fudged travalogue. If it was good enough for Marco Polo . . .

Brooks is big on today's most obnoxious coinage, accountability. He rides it like a whore, which is to say that he can't quite get it up and really just wants to talk to someone other than his wife. The fraud is obvious. Having abjured both judicial and administrative means as stifling the special spark that is America in every teacher and doctor, he proposes no means through which the accounts may be kept. If not through regulation and not through law, then . . . ? Oh, please, tell me that Brooks is becoming an anarchist too!

The idea that Americans--Americans, of all people!--are in a desperate hunt for responsibility--responsibility!--is exactly the sort of hokum you'd expect from such a fraud. It is simultaneously reassuring and meaningless. We just want grown-ups that act like grown-ups. Nonsense. We just want it all, yesterday if possible, and for free.

More Innumeracy at the WaPo

Someone really ought to explain to Washington Post columnists what a marginal tax rate is.

We're Only in It for the Money

The Donk shitshow is getting pretty intense. By which I mean HIGH-larious. So . . . what, Digs? The articulate, professional, executive, upper-middle-class former advocate and supporter of Barack Obama is suffering from, um, some kind of false consciousness? So, she's rationally concluded that no one, least of all "Our President," gives two shits and wet burp about any poor schmuck anyway, and this is the fault of, um, the "right-wing noise machine"? Check this shit out:

The right's non-stop attacks eventually just wear people down, sap them of their enthusiasm, make them question their own judgment, especially in the face of a negative and less than hopeful future. You have to be pretty committed to want to wallow in this toxic mud every day and most people have better things to do with their time.

I'm not saying that if the GOP wasn't relentlessly attacking Obama that this woman would feel good about him. He hasn't been very successful at addressing her concerns and there are plenty of liberals who are critical of him as well. But even if he were able to allay her concerns about the economy and the future of the country, the exhaustion that comes from battling back these lunatics is what really takes its toll.

Willfully misconstrue much? The lady is exhausted because she is trying to feed her family and send her kids to an Obligatory 4-Year Credentialling Facility and save some money so that she and her old man don't have to spend their waning years in fixed-income penury. She isn't "battling back" any goddamn lunatics; she's trying to make ends meet, you psychopathic monster!

Gaze at the Military

Haha. Remember when smarty-pants liberals called ol' Gee-Dub "the boy emperor." And Obama was a font of measured wisdom or some bullshit. Dude, compared to Obama, George is starting to look like Marcus fucking Aurelius. I mean, this shit even embarrasses me. Barry O is starting to look like Millard Fillmore.

I sort of feel sorry for him. I mean, usually you have to wait until your second term for your underlings to start jockeying for the honor of making you look ridiculous in a Woodward "book".

As for actual gays in the actual military, that is one club from which I'm happy to be excluded. It is a more interesting testament to the current arrangement of forces in the empire. Can a barracks emperor be very far away?

Demos

Here is one of the Cohens--I can never keep them straight--making one of the requisite, occasional pitches for democracy that are required of major American opinion columnists. Suffice to say that the persistent confusion of an organizational structure with a moral category is the problem here. It gives rise to all sorts of additional weirdness. For instance, because democracy is a categorical moral good, a country like Russia, when its government acts in some manner that some or other Times-sinecured domehead thinks is morally dubious, becomes less democratic. (Alternately, a country like China, when it, whatever, lets someone look at porno on the internet, or loosens travel restrictions, or embraces the stock market, becomes more democratic.) These estimations have very little to do with the procedural features of any country's government. I mean, is Russia really less democratic than the United States? I don't know. Is the United States less corrupt than Afghanistan? By what measure?

Democracy's apologists, like Cohen, do not much care for democracy, as proven by the vapors they get over "partisan shrieking" and "legislative paralysis" and the Friedmanian tumescence that accompanies their slavish dream of a more scientific govenment. (I do not much care for it either, but you won't hear me humming its hosanas.) They are great advocates of abstracted Freedoms and Liberties, failing ever to define what precisely constitutes freedom or liberty, but the actual mechanics of democracy, i.e. what democracy actually is, dismay and dispirit them. They approvingly cite discredited, preposterous claims about the nature of the social compact, the absurd idea that democratic citizens somehow willingly submit to their governors, when of course an American, unless he is very rich (or Jewish!) has no more choice in his citizenship than a Chinese. The exercise of the franchise is emphatically not "the consent of the governed"; it is the participation in a semi-obligatory public ritual, yes, but it's not like you can resign from America. The right to make minor determinations about who is in the government is not the same as the ability to change your government, or to abolish it, and the illusion that you, as a citizen, are party to the social compact is as delusional as some poor schmuck who thinks he's party to the contract someone just put out on his life.

And speaking of gangland hits, there's this gem:

The lingering wars waged partly in democracy’s name in Iraq and Afghanistan hurt its reputation, however moving images of inky-fingered voters gripped by the revolutionary notion that they could decide who governs them. Given the bloody mayhem, it was easy to portray “democracy” as a fig leaf for the West’s bellicose designs and casual hypocrisies.

Yo, democracy is "a fig leaf for the West’s bellicose designs and casual hypocrisies."

Achtung, Lady

Oh, man, I and a colleague of mine actually got these bulletins at work. We thought they were a scream. I guess I should've tipped off a reporter friend, but they were so kooky and underproduced (as in, How's Microsoft Publisher 2003 workin out for ya?) that we thought it was some kind of crazy joke.