Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Outsourcing to the master

Sometimes I think I should just give it up and rename this blog, "What Charles P. Pierce Said." A couple of clips from yesterday's bloggy goodness:

About the supercommittee failure:
Kerry and the other Democratic suckers failed to realize that Republican intransigence appeals to an actual viable political constituency, while Democratic flexibility appeals to about 42 op-ed columnists and three guys with mailing lists.

So the Republicans propose "revenue increases" that include whacking the mortgage-interest deduction for middle-class homeowners at a time when foreclosures are still at high tide, but oppose actual tax increases, which they have sworn with their hands on Grover Norquist's dick to resist to their last breaths. Meanwhile, the Democrats beg for tax increases at the top end while offering to take several bites out of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. A half-bright, blind zoo animal could write the attack ads. And, at the end of it, John Kerry starts calling people making half-a-mil "middle class."
And occupy class warfare:
It is past time for actual politicians to step up here and take advantage of the obvious political potential inherent in the polling data for the issues on which the Occupy movement is agitating. It is time to stop listening to the voices who plead for calm moderation and for a cotton-candy centrism that melts at the first sign of resistance. It is time for politicians on the other side to be as fervent in their calls for economic justice as Newt Gingrich is in his calls for kiddie janitors and adolescent wage-slavery. It is time for someone — anyone — to step to a very big microphone and say that the problem with Americans is not that they are lazy, or coddled, or anesthetized by 70 years of the welfare state, or morally unmoored (Thanks, David Brooks!), but that the problem with Americans is that a bunch of expensive suits stole all their money, looted their pensions, made a mockery of their hard work, and labored for decades to develop dozens of ways to swindle them, all the while fashioning a politics that told them that the ultimate freedom was the freedom to have your pockets picked. And that the problem now, as we have said, is that people got no jobs, people got no money.

Barney Frank wonders where the Occupiers were during the elections of 2010? Give them a politics worthy of their courage and they'll show up. This does not seem to me to be a difficult problem, but it does appear possibly to be the last chance for progressive politics for an awfully long time. You don't need an $850,000 contract to see that.
Usual disclaimer. Read it all. In fact, read his whole blog every single day.
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