Meet the Press Is Terrible

And David Gregory is a massive tool.

I have never been a fan of NBC’s Meet the Press. Very few novel or insightful statements have ever been made on that program because of the nature of the guests. When Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner or Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen appear (as the latter did today) one can pretty much anticipate every canned-sounding response to come out of their mouths. Such is the business of interviewing members of presidential administrations who are essentially cogs in a well-oiled public relations machine. Even when opponents of the administration or ruling party are featured, their criticisms are also frustratingly platitudinous. You see it in the back-and-forth between Democratic and Republican politicians and liberal and conservative pundits which are fraught with shallow exchanges that reflect the impoverished nature of the political discourse. And it’s even worse when the moderator is in on it.

During the latter half of today’s show, there was former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. David Gregory was hosting. (I’m not one of those people who believes in a global Zionist banking and media conspiracy, but when you have four Jews and only four Jews talking about the economy on the major American Sunday news talk show, you can’t act surprised when those people come out of the woodwork.)

At one point Gregory quoted David Brooks’ most recent column in the New York Times:

The psychological war between business and the Obama administration also is taking a toll. Business types think the administration is stuffed with clueless professors. Some administration officials think corporate honchos are free-market hypocrites prowling for corporate welfare.

Gregory then added his own bullshit:

How did things get so bad? Because a lot of people in the business community say a big part of the problem is there's nobody who works in the administration that’s actually run anything, that's actually run a business, and that's contributing to their attitude and their policies.

The idea that’s circulating in the press these days is that the Obama administration is anti-business. It’s a crazy idea, but it’s out there. And not only is it out there, but here’s David Gregory repeating this garbage with an assist from David Brooks. Who but the American media or a deranged conservative could look at Obama’s multi-trillion dollar giveaway of taxpayer money to the private sector in the form of loans with 0% interest, loan guarantees, straight subsidies, stimulus spending, and a health care reform act that will necessitate a massive of transferal of wealth from the public to private HMOs, and conclude that this is anti-business activity? I suppose it could be said that the recently enacted financial reform legislation qualifies as “anti-business,” but when one considers the watered down nature of that pathetic bill, it is immediately realized that overcoming its constraints will be no great trial for the criminal bankster assholes who run this country by proxy. That’s the problem with the media: they are easily manipulated into false narratives that corrupt the public debate, so that when something or crazy is alleged by enough politicians or government officials (e.g., “death panels”), it suddenly becomes a serious claim dutifully repeated by media puppets pundits.

Let’s see what Alan Greenspeen had to say in response:

I can’t answer that question, and the reason I can’t is I've never seen anything like this. I’ve been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I’ve never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I’m not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it’s got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive. We’ve got to change it.

Is Greenspan for real? So the animosity people have toward Wall Street has nothing to do with the financial crisis, but “a general schism” between Americans? How does that even make sense? If there’s anything that unites people on the left and right, it’s blaming the fucking banks and Greenspan himself who are the ones actually responsible for this mess. What’s that? Mayor Bloomberg wants to correct me?

The public is upset. If they haven’t lost their job, they know somebody that has. If they haven't lost their house, they know somebody that has. What do you do? When something’s wrong, it’s government’s job to fix it, it must be government that’s responsible for causing it. Government wants to stay in office, they look for somebody else to blame. And it's much too simplistic to say the banks did everything wrong. We all wanted to expand the economy, we all wanted to expand home ownership. We all wanted Wall Street to create the money so we could have all these mortgages. And then invariably that leads to excess, and then invariably that leads to a correction, more violent with time. And then we have to look for villains. And we’ve got to stop all this. One of government’s jobs is to promote the economy and to promote American commerce and finance and the arts around the world. And this constant tearing each other apart—we can sit down and we can say, “What did we do wrong?” and “How are we going to fix it?” But always pointing fingers and finding fault with everybody, we need to find solutions.

You have to give Michael Bloomberg some major credit here. The man has balls. Balls he should be strung up by for even making these remarks, but balls nonetheless. Here’s the eighth richest guy in America whose net worth as of 2008 was $20 billion, who founded a news organization that caters to big business essentially saying that we have to stop pointing fingers at the big banks because there’s plenty of blame to go around. And David Gregory just sat there like the douche he is, when he could’ve turned to Alan Greenspan and asked, “What about lowering interest rates to less than two percent for a prolonged period of time after 9/11, Mr. Chairman? How much responsibility do you personally bear for the creation of the housing (debt) bubble and its subsequent bursting?” That would’ve been the greatest question in the history of the show and David Gregory had a prime opportunity to ask it. But he didn’t, because he’s a big pussy and isn’t interested in catching the purveyors of conventional wisdom off-guard.

But I must admit, the words of conventional wisdom do have a relaxing quality about them. Maybe that’s why Americans are so tamed by it. See, the American people are like a fat person’s stomach. A stomach doesn’t like food that’s bad for the body, but very often it’s expected to digest it anyway because the person calling the shots likes three-bean burritos, nachos with a seven-layer dip, jalapenos, and beer (in that order). So the person in charge really does a number on the stomach by eating all this crap and the stomach gets uneasy and angry and rumbles on occasion. Whenever corrective action is needed, the fatty takes a big swig out of a pink bottle to force some conventional wisdom on the restless mass to sooth it temporarily. But rather than learn the lesson that one ought not to force feed the stomach in that way, he figures that as long as he has that pink bottle in his medicine cabinet, he can always calm the rumblings when they arise. Problem is, you can only wail away on your stomach for so long until you shit your guts out.

- Max

Worst. Column. Ever.

Bitch

The other day when I checked my email inbox, I noticed a friend had sent me a link to an Op-Ed written by a woman named Terry Savage at the Chicago Sun-Times. I am both glad and sorry that I read it. Glad because I now know that Terry Savage exists, but also sad because I now know that Terry Savage exists.

In her column Savage proudly recounts how she berated three little girls at a lemonade stand. Their crime? They were giving away lemonade for free.

“You must charge something for the lemonade,” I explained. “That’s the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs—how much the lemonade costs, and the cups—and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money.”

There is something sinister in wanting to disabuse small children of the notion that giving is good and telling them basically that if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing for money.

Then, using her sharp inductive reasoning, Savage concludes,

The kids are learning from the society around them. No one has ever taught them there’s no free lunch—and all they see is “free,” not the result of hard work, and saving, and scrimping.

Believe me, Terry, I think I can speak for all people under thirty years of age when I say that we got the fucking message on this one. Not only do we know that nothing’s free, we also know that we are going to be worse off than your generation, which to reiterate, is the most selfish generation in history. I doubt I’ll ever have the opportunity to collect a Social Security check even though I currently pay into it. And I don’t know what Medicare will look like by the time I’m sixty-five, but I’m sure it will be there for you in the twelve years you have to go. Asshole.

The arrogance and cluelessness of Baby Boomers never ceases to amaze me. If young people today are learning from the society around them, where exactly are they getting the impression that shit is free? Personally, I’m in student loan debt up to my eyeballs, I can’t afford health insurance, and home ownership is a total fantasy for me right now. And that goes for millions of people my age and younger. We hold no illusions about any of this.

Boomers don’t want to admit it, but their kids have it tougher than they did—way tougher. My father—a Boomer—was able to go to college full-time while paying for it with a part-time job. There was no loan, no debt. That’s unimaginable today. What’s also unimaginable today for younger people is buying a house that they won’t be paying off until the end of time. Even with the recent drop in real estate prices over the last four years, home prices still exceed what they were thirty years ago in terms of inflation adjusted dollars. Meanwhile, wages have stagnated, benefits have been slashed, public services have been cut, and people like Savage and Baby Boomer tea partiers are calling for more punishment. For example, Nevada senate candidate and quintessential teabagger Sharron Angle has called for the elimination of the Department of Education and wants to phase out Social Security and Medicare, presumably after she’s eligible for those programs. And a good case can be made for scrapping them. Those programs are in trouble thanks to the Boomers who continue to sap their funding, so Boomers want to do away with them, but gradually. After all, they don’t want to send themselves up the river with no paddle.

Here’s one more awful sentence from Savage:

And so the voters demand more—more subsidies for mortgages, more bailouts, more loan modification and longer periods of unemployment benefits.

Ironically (or maybe expectedly), Terry Savage supported the bank bailouts (TARP) in 2008. That means according to Savage, it is ok for the government to use taxpayer money to bail out banks that were struggling due to their own insatiable greed and risk appetite, but it is not ok for children to hand out free lemonade because it sends the message there is such a thing as a free lunch.

That sounds about right. It’s nice to see that the business pundits are once again bashing the American people for thinking they should be cut some slack. I mean who do these American citizens think they are? AIG? Citigroup? Memo to the unwashed masses: Welfare and bailouts are for businesses, not for you. At least, that’s what Terry Savage seems to think.

Newsflash: Millions Of Americans Stupid, Southerners Dumber Than Most

On Monday the Boston Globe published the ugly results of a survey asking Americans from which country the United States gained independence:

Twenty-six percent of those surveyed did not know that the United States achieved its independence from Great Britain, according to the poll, conducted by the nonprofit Marist Institute for Public Opinion.

Six percent named a different country, including France, China, Japan, Mexico, and Spain. Twenty percent said they weren’t sure.

The pollsters broke down the numbers and found gaps in knowledge according to region: 32 percent of Southerners weren’t sure or named the wrong country; 26 percent of Midwesterners were in the same category, as were 25 percent of Westerners and 16 percent of Northeasterners.

Well imagine that, the South has the highest percentage of ignoramuses in the country. Nearly a third can’t answer what is arguably the most basic American history question. You know, I don’t knock Southerners because I think we here in the Northeast are better; I knock Southerners because they think they’ve cornered the market on everything from morality to individualism. You hear it in their rhetoric: they’re the “real America,” not like us East Coast Elitists who exist only to undermine their traditional American values and kowtow to terrorists.

I was going to write a longer post on this, but then I remembered that everything I wanted to say has already been said—quite beautifully might I add—on fuckthesouth.com

P.S. I have decided that from this point on, I will refer to the American Civil War as Lincoln’s Folly.

- Max

The United States of Narcissism

An important characteristic of a mature adult is the ability to take constructive criticism from others and turn it into a vehicle for self-betterment. Another sign of maturity is the ability to admit when one is wrong or has made mistakes, and the willingness to rectify them.

These are universally admired characteristics which speak to a common decency in those who possess them. To lack these features in one’s personality constitutes a glaring deficiency that will no doubt be unpleasantly noticeable to those who must interact with that person. Americans can be a forgiving bunch, willing to overlook minor or mild transgressions if only the perpetrator will make the necessary ritual mea culpa and look sincere while he allocutes. In some cases he may even be praised for his humility in the face of the giant mess of his own creation. After all, “Everyone makes mistakes.”

The fallibility of humans is a fundamental and unavoidable fixture of the species. Everyone is aware of this gloomy reality which is actually the very foundation of most religions, including Christianity. But in the United States, the public is completely unwilling to apply this simple idea to itself, or more specifically, the government for which the public is largely responsible. In other words, individual Americans are expected to apologize when they do harm to another or admit to being an ass on occasion. But Americans believe that Americans are virtually beyond reproach as a collectivity. I am thinking in particular of the reaction in the U.S. to Barack Obama’s overseas speeches last year in which he said America had been “arrogant” and “dismissive” of its allies in international affairs—surely an understatement of the first order. Controversy shortly ensued. World Net Daily declared, “Obama apologizes for America.” Mitt Romney decried Obama’s “Apology Tour.” RedState.com returned the critique, saying it was Obama who had been arrogant and dismissive. Of course, the president did not actually apologize for anything, but in this age of America fetishism and feigned outrage by armchair patriots, Obama’s comments constituted an affront to all red-blooded, flag-waving Americans.

How is it that a nation can laud the willingness of individuals to admit wrongdoing, while at the same time hopelessly lack the ability to admit to its flaws as a collective entity (as embodied by the government of the United States in its relations with others)? I have tried my damnedest to reconcile these realities but I find myself wholly incapable of performing the necessary mental contortions for this task. Most Americans do not suffer from personality disorders, but solicit an American’s opinion on the Motherland and you are likely to observe a slew of symptoms associated with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (IV), the criteria for NPD are fulfilled when a person exhibits five or more of the following symptoms:

1. has a grandiose sense of self-importance

“American is the beacon of freedom for the world.”

2. is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

“America is the greatest country on earth.”

3. believes that he or she is “special” and can only be understood by, or should associate with, people (or institutions) who are also “special” or of high status.

“America is an exceptional nation.”

4. requires excessive admiration

“Love it or leave it!”

5. has a sense of entitlement

“God bless America.”

6. is interpersonally exploitative

“Europe owes us because we bailed them out in World War II.”

7. lacks empathy

“Fucking illegals! Fucking welfare bums!”

8. is often envious of others or believes others are envious of him or her

“People immigrate to America because we are the land of the free.”

9. shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

See all of the above

As you can see, the United States public suffers from severe NPD. Who among us would entertain the company of someone who possessed even just a few of the above characteristics, let alone all nine? Yet collectively, the American people are a giant asshole. Yes we are. Take it away, Lewis:

- Max