Let's take a quick trip down memory lane. Does anyone remember this moment?
That was back in 2013. Then, they went ahead and nominated-- and elected-- the dumbest motherfucker in the history of politics as President of the United States. Intelligence, I suppose, is relative. Compared to the GOP right now, calling the Democrats, "the stupid party," is a bit of a stretch. However, intelligence is vital in a political system. I wrote yesterday about the shutdown, and the general dangers of stupidity. I am an unabashed elitist intellectual snob, and I want smart people in power. Giving stupid people power is dangerous, and the more stupid people there are, the greater the need becomes to have smart people around to check them.
And so, we come to the problem of stupidity in the Democratic Party. Has the cancer of stupidity metastasized to produce a Trumpian tumor among the Democrats? No, but the stupid people in the Democratic Party are becoming more prominent, and gaining power. And this should scare us all.
When I wrote, Going Off The Rails On A Crazy Train: The Causes And Consequences of Congressional Infamy, AKA, "the batshit paper," one of the empirical observations in the paper was that most of the prominent wackadoos in Congress were Republicans. Why was that? In some of the initial statistical models, the party effect went away when I "controlled for" ideology, meaning that mostly, what was going on was that the GOP was getting more ideologically extreme, and it was the ideological extremists who were going on cable news and saying crazy shit. However, there was more to it than that. Consider Michele Bachmann. Oh, dear, sweet Michele, how I miss you! She was famous. Why? She was all over the media, saying whatever came to her... sure, let's call it a mind. It was glorious. Even Louis Gohmert isn't quite as satisfying, but you know, I takes what I can gets [sic]. Back when I wrote that paper, though... where was Sheila Jackson Lee? She made "my batshit list," but trying to find her on cable news? There were Democrats who were just as bonkers as dear, sweet Michele, but they... didn't make it to the camera. But when they did, they sounded like that lunatic shitbag, Alan Grayson. Why didn't they show up on camera as much?
I kind of wondered if Nancy Pelosi had some sort of operation to keep the fuckwits from going on air... Operation: Don't Embarrass The Party. The GOP just couldn't manage it. It wasn't something I could ever demonstrate empirically-- just some idle speculation.
Since then, though, some different kinds of Democrats have had the spotlight shine on them as they dance a distressing kind of dance. One that demonstrates that they are about two beats short of a waltz. I see no need to go on another "Bernie Sanders is a fool" rant again. I've done enough of those. Let's be clear, though.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This woman is worthy of every bit as much ridicule as I levy on the worst teabaggers. She knows nothing and has no desire to learn. I shouldn't need to explain why "socialism" has been abandoned, and before anyone tells me about how her platform is really not-so-far-left, and is really practical and pragmatic and all that shit... No. Just... no.
Whatever you think of the general, non-specific phrase, "Medicare-for-all," or something called a "Green New Deal," which doesn't have any actual policy in it...
Federal jobs guarantee. Think about this. For maybe five seconds, or so. That's more than Ocasio-Cortez can manage, but just ponder the concept of implementing it. For five fucking seconds.
How? Ponder the fucking "how?" You have people who either lack skills, live in the wrong places, lack transportation... This is not a serious proposal from a serious person.
You know what is? There used to be a thing called a "negative income tax." Your income is below a certain level, and instead of paying taxes, you get money back to bring you up to a certain level. You know who devised it and advocated it as a simplified system with broad social benefits? Milton Motherfucking Friedman. The right would never go for it anymore, and now we have this "universal basic income" thing, which is basically the same underlying concept, but here's the thing about the negative income tax...
It can be implemented. Whatever you have to say about its benefits and drawbacks, it can be done. Conservatives would now say that it creates too much of a "moral hazard," in policy jargon, and that's a debatable, legitimate point! I don't want my money going to lazy fucks. Do you? The question becomes a legitimate one about how many people are just lazy fucks. If a lot, don't do it. If few, no problems. Just implement it. That's how policy debates should work. Estimate the total number of lazy fucks versus down-on-their-luck people, make an assessment of how many lazy fucks you are willing to fund versus how much good you want to do for the truly down on their luck people, and you have a parent's brother with a nickname derived somehow from "Robert," in some bizarre linguistic thing that the Brits say. What you don't have is an implementation problem, and that was a big part of Friedman's argument.
Ocasio-Cortez isn't smart enough to think about policy in those terms.
And she is being elevated to a stature in the Democratic Party such that she must be protected and coddled and put on some fucking pedestal and worshipped like Bernie Fucking Sanders, whom I hated all along too, partially because he also had no understanding of policy.
And Ocasio-Cortez isn't alone. What the fuck is going on with Elizabeth Warren? This is the woman liberals are supposed to worship as the intellectual?! Have you seen her new proposal to destroy capitalism? What the all-fucking-fuck?! The "Accountable Capitalism Act." What a bunch of anti-intellectual idiocy. And the Democrats are going along with this shit.
OK, lesson time. You probably don't understand what corporations really are, or why they exist. Why? Because you are bombarded with rhetorical bullshit from lefty twits who just need villains and don't understand a thing about economics. Maybe, as the person who hates Trump more than anyone else on earth, save the women he has assaulted, I have enough "cred" to explain this to you. Here's an attempt.
What happens when you start a business, or even non-profit organization? What if there is a problem with the business? It fails, for example. Who owes the creditors the money? YOU! Also, most small businesses fail quickly, and most fail eventually. It makes no sense to operate a business, then, knowing the risks to you, personally, if you can't insulate yourself from those risks. You work for a business, you buy all of your stuff from a business, all of your economic interactions exist based on business... We kind of need that. And if people act rationally, they shouldn't start businesses. So, we have a legal structure that allows people to operate businesses and non-profit organizations such that if there is debt incurred by the business, that debt is owed by the business, not the person or people who found it. So, you start a business, it fails and takes on more debt than income, and the creditors can't come after you personally. If we didn't have such legal structures, you'd be stupid to start a business, and anyone who does start a business that is capable of taking advantage of this legal structure, and doesn't, is a fucking moron. You put your own assets at risk with a high likelihood of losing them. Without the ability to start businesses and not just lose everything, we wouldn't have a fucking economy.
That legal structure-- the thing that owes the creditors, and insulates debtors to allow business to exist in a rational world-- is called... a "corporation."
That's it. That's all it is. Whiny, little, liberals have gotten themselves into a tizzy about "corporations are people!" Stupid linguistic games. A corporation is a legal construct, without which an economy cannot function, and none of the Supreme Court decisions say what you think they say, least of all Citizens United. (Quick demonstration: is a superPAC a "corporation?" No. Then "corporations" don't get special rights under Citizens United. The law doesn't say what you think it says. I'm getting off-track, though.)
Anyway, that's the quick lesson on corporations. So, what the hell is Warren saying about corporations? She wants to pass a stupid, fucking law saying that corporations have special moral responsibilities because she thinks they have special legal rights because "corporations are people!"
Responsibilities that no human citizen person has.
And remember that an economy can't function without corporations. Warren is caught up more in stupid linguistic games than in the substance of the laws on corporations.
Right now, we don't have a capitalist party. The Republicans? They are led by a mercantilist dipshit who is running a trade war while threatening individual businesses with federal retaliation when they make business decisions to maximize profit, if he doesn't like them! Holy fucking shit!!! The Democrats? They're going from a party that just wanted higher taxes to fund a welfare system to I-don't-know-what-the-fuck.
If you understand what corporations are, the role they play in an economy, and the difference between their actual function and the stupid linguistic games people play, then you should be very afraid of this idiotic nonsense Elizabeth Warren is peddling. She's supposed to be the smart one, and this is about as bad as Ocasio-Cortez. If I start hearing this kind of crap from Kamala Harris... that's it, man. Game over, man, game over. (Don't do it, Kamala. Please!)
The Bernie Sanders-ification of the party is rather scary, for anyone with a real education in economics.
And amid all of this, idiots from the left and the right in the House of Representatives tried to oust Nancy Pelosi. The smartest, and most effective Speaker of the House in generations. Here's where I give Ocasio-Cortez at least a little credit. She's a leftist, and at least she recognized that her policy interest was served by voting for the left-most candidate. Nobody emerged to challenge Pelosi formally, but she eventually backed Pelosi when it looked like a fight between Pelosi and that tool, Seth Moulton. She may not know anything about policy details, but she is capable of knowing left from right. However, the anti-Pelosi rebellion has resulted in what looks like the imposition of term limits on committee chairs, but that's going to be tested going forward.
This is the same stupid shit that Newt Fucking Gingrich did after 1994. Yes, that's right, the rising tide of stupidity in the Democratic Party has pushed Nancy Pelosi to accept the same moronic nonsense that the GOP pulled as a condition for them allowing the only smart one in the party to hold the gavel.
These people are stupid, and getting dumber. They are looking ever-more-teabaggeresque, throwing out any notion of policy seriousness and quite literally doing the same stupid shit that the GOP did to undermine its own congressional caucus.
And if you understand that capitalism is important, you should worry, because right now, there isn't a party defending capitalism.
Look, the Republican Party is led by Donald Trump. In comparative assessments of intelligence... the Democrats could visit the traumatic brain injury ward at Walter Reed, pick someone at random, and find someone better-suited for the presidency. They'd find someone with a higher level of cognitive performance, and someone who didn't dodge the fucking draft. As long as the GOP is the Trump Party, they will never stop being, as Jindal put it, "the stupid party." Comparatively, then, the Democrats will be... I can't say smart, but less stupid. However, how can I put this... limbo, limbo, limb-BO! Nope, that bar is so low the Democrats can't help but get over it.
The problem is that someone needs to be smart, and there's only so much Nancy Pelosi can do when she's fighting a rising tide in her own party. John Boehner was driven out of his own party in similar circumstances. Right now, I am envisioning the two of them, lounging on a beach together, having a sort of romance once Pelosi is ousted by useless fuckwits, as they watch the rest of us burn. From a distance. And laugh.
Any other Boehner-Pelosi 'shippers out there?
Related Posts :
This Is Why Chinese President Xi Has Remained 'Timid' While North Korea Has Turmoil In The Region- Top U.S.Departing General In The War Against The Islamic State: Trump 'More Aggressive' in Fight Against ISIS
- Hurricane Clarke fades off radar
Lesotho Army Chief Assassinated By Rival Soldiers- U.S. Picking Off ISIS Fighters In Stranded Syrian Convoy One By One