Please pour yourselves a little glass of your preferred beverage of relaxation, get out the popcorn, if you like, sit back and enjoy the show.
First, the ground rules: Jackass awards are not exclusive to the Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh or propagandists for right wing and conservative thought. A jackass is viewed as one who is either arrogant or stupid enough to believe he/she can get away with fooling, lying to and/or willfully misleading others. In other words, any person who holds a position of influence whether one is a politician, elected official, community, or business leader, and this includes all media pundits, anchors and spokespersons for all of the above, who arrogantly or stupidly insults the intelligence of those they do, or hope to influence, is a jackass.
A jackass is also one who refuses to accept or lies about certain realities such as:
The simplest explanation for why America's reality got so distorted is the economic imbalance that Barack Obama now wants to remedy with policies that his critics deride as "socialist" ("fascist" can't be far behind): the obscene widening of income inequality between the very rich and everyone else since the 1970s. "There is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few," the president said in his budget message. He was calling for fundamental fairness, not class warfare. America hasn't seen such gaping inequality since the Gilded Age and 1920s boom that preceded the Great Depression.
This inequity was compounded by Bush tax policy and by lawmakers and regulators of both parties who enabled and protected the banking scam artists who fled with their bonuses and left us holding the toxic remains. The fantasy of easy money at the top of the economic pyramid trickled down to the masses, who piled up debt by leveraging their homes much as their '20s predecessors once floated stock purchases "on margin." Our culture, meanwhile, painted halos over celebrity C.E.O.'s, turning the fundamentalist gospel of the market into a national religion that further accelerated the country's wholesale flight from reality.
Finally, a jackass is one who wants to revert to the same old failed and stupid policies that got us into this economic meltdown in the first place.
Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight made a very interesting observation in his article about Tim Geithner and the bank bailout.
At the end of the day, a great deal of the debate between liberals and conservatives is about how to apportion wealth. It seems so banal to talk about it that way, and so we put all sorts of window dressing on it, but that's really what it's all about. But on this issue of the banking crisis -- and to a lesser extent this was true of the stimulus -- there is a much larger delta on the aggregate amount of wealth that the United States stands to gain (or lose) than on how that wealth is distributed. Over the next 6-18 months, the outcomes for everyone from the top of the economic ladder to the bottom rung are very strongly correlated.
Hats off to the banal and obvious.
We have always known the Republicans traditionally embrace the belief that the rich deserve to get richer. If the rich get richer everyone will benefit b/c the wealthy will toss a few cake crumbs down to the not-rich and voila! we will all be dancing in the golden paved streets together. As far as I am concerned this ideology should be called Trickle Down Voodoo Arts. Unfortunately it is glaringly apparent to most of us how this Republican black magic works. It is for, by and of the rich.
If we think of Republican lawmakers' collective behavior through this very difficult financial period we can see how all of their posturing, grandstanding, pontificating, temper tantrums, clown acts and faux rage over the stimulus package is all about fighting to maintain the Trickle Down status quo.
Today is my son's birthday. He is working for the Obama campaign as a field organizer in southwestern Va. This diary is written in honor of his birthday and for his hard work on the campaign trail.
What is it about Republicans and their knack for choosing unqualified and bungling candidates on the top or bottom of their tickets?
It appears that 2008 is no different from 2004 in terms of choices where the worst of the worse of Republican candidates are concerned. History will prove, in no uncertain terms, that W. is the worst president in recent times. His ratings are plummeting downward, especially since the financial melt down on Wall St. Whether Republicans care to admit it or not the GOP delivered three extraordinary calamities since 2000: 9/11, Iraq and the Wall Street crash of September 29, 2008.
Is John McCain really a different kind of Republican? Let's hear what CNN's Jack Cafferty has to say about McCain and the current financial disaster on Wall St.
What the Traditional Broadcast Media needs right now is threefold-
1. Steady Doses of Olbermann
2. Less O'Reilly
3. More Jack Cafferty.
Olbermann's and O'Reilly's respective ratings are taking care of items 1 and 2, and now the intertoobz have given rise to a campaign to take care of the Cafferty Deficiency on CNN.
