New York Times and Krugman plug Minnesota's Michele Bachmann!
Submitted by Bill Prendergast on August 9, 2008 - 12:40am.
Dump Bachmann contributor Karl Bremer noticed this Paul Krugman piece about Republican "politics of stupidity" in the NYT and sent it along.
Know-Nothing Politics
Paul Krugman
And the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid. (continued)
Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.
What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”
In the case of oil, this takes the form of pretending that more drilling would produce fast relief at the gas pump. In fact, earlier this week Republicans in Congress actually claimed credit for the recent fall in oil prices: “The market is responding to the fact that we are here talking,” said Representative John Shadegg.
What about the experts at the Department of Energy who say that it would take years before offshore drilling would yield any oil at all, and that even then the effect on prices at the pump would be “insignificant”? Presumably they’re just a bunch of wimps, probably Democrats. And the Democrats, as Representative Michele Bachmann assures us, “want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, take light rail to their government jobs.”
Is this political pitch too dumb to succeed? Don’t count on it...
...In any case, remember this the next time someone calls for an end to partisanship, for working together to solve the country’s problems. It’s not going to happen — not as long as one of America’s two great parties believes that when it comes to politics, stupidity is the best policy.
Boy, sometimes I get so tired of copying and pasting and formatting stuff for the Dump Bachmann blog--and then something wonderful like this happens and makes it all worthwhile. I ask myself: am I just an anti-Bachmann crank; am I the only reason person who thinks that Bachmann's a nutty, irresponsible demagogue?
Then I get a break; I realize: we're not alone, sane and responsible people can still see it and report on it. Paul Krugman of the NYT hears something she says, instantly identifies it as nuts, and prints it. Bingo! I'm vindicated; the blog is vindicated: a smart professional who covers politics can instantly see how nuts she is--and sees that it's news.
Meanwhile, back in Minnesota where Bachmann actually have constituents--the journalists at the Strib and the PiPress are pathetic little cowards when it comes to Bachmann who regularly strive to keep the newsworthy stories about Bachmann's craziness out of the paper, as if it is their duty to keep that from the voters. They're afraid if they print the embarrassing but true things she says and does, they'll "get in trouble" with the publisher or get laid off or something.
Not so the press outside Minnesota; the Olbermanns and Krugmans of the world. They do not have to worry about reprisals from local Republicans or advertisers if they broadcast or print the truth about Bachmann's crazy demagoguery.
Sometimes, very rarely, in the past: a national news source covered a Bachmann "kooky statement or moment" and this *forced* the Strib or the PiPress to reprint that moment here in Minnesota. We can only hope for more such incidences; if it's left up to the local traditional media, most of the voters will go to their graves thinking that she's nothing worse than a GOP conservative in the tradition of Ronald Reagan. And it seems that the reporters for the PiPress, Star Tribune and MPR are determined to go to their graves doing damage control for her--keeping the nutty stuff she says and does out of the papers.
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Precious know-nothing irony
If you were curious about the big picture of how the oil market works you wouldn't be content to conclude that "since we can't get the oil for a few years, it can't and won't affect the prices until then." What a perfectly ironic example of know-nothing-ism and settling for a simple, yet insufficient understanding. Oil prices are affected by more than just how much inventory is actually coming out of the ground today. Like all other commodities, price is affected by information about what is happening now and in the near future; and also by predictions or estimates about will happen in the not so near future. The notion that there is no affect to oil prices by signalling to the market a willingness to drill more domestically either tomorrow or some years from now is oversimplistic and wrong. To believe verbatim what the conservatives think on this issue, or conversely what the liberals think on this issues is imprudent. To dismiss the pricing impact of news and estimates of future activity is simply wrong and short-sighted.