Mar 5, 2013
Pundit-centric DC is still insistent that everything is Obama's fault because he's not offering to lead or to compromise, which fact comes into better focus if you ignore all of Obama's efforts to lead or compromise. Greg Dworkin points out the latest to fall into this trap: Bill Keller of the New York Times, who's called out on it by Greg Sargent of the Washington Post. All of which just brings us back to the Upton Sinclair observation that it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. And nowhere is that more true than in Congress, where there's an entire party built on the idea of running know-nothings for office & filling in the blanks later, with the old campaign-in-a-box trick. The less your team knows when they get to Washington, the greater the chance they'll eat what you feed them. We also talked a bit about Mark Sanford's comeback bid in South Carolina, and were reminded that we ought to be talking about the leading Democrat in that race, Elizabeth Colbert Busch. So we did! After a little diversion into regional accents and their political implications, we talked about the latest and greatest in Republican Crazy: the theory of the missing "original Thirteenth Amendment." So now they hate science, history, the judicial system, and basically any metric or system of thought by which people might come to conclusions out of keeping with their wish lists. Hello. Upton Sinclair. Thank you. And just to recap the economic discussion from yesterday, and add a fresh approach via The Atlantic today, this applies to the complete failure to produce job growth even after conceding the entire conservative economic wish list, as well. Ta-da!