"There was something bracing about the way he did it--his passion, his humor, his intolerance of stupidity, his preference for leaving an honest mess for others to clean up rather than a tidy lie for them to admire." --Michael Lewis, of Bill James in Moneyball.
This morning I was faced with a Hobbesian choice, which is to say, a choice between the lesser of two evils.
Caught on the treadmill, I had 60 minutes to watch TV programs with men seated in TV studios talking about who is going to win the Super Bowl, or I could watch air head bimbos with great makeup talk about who is going to win the Presidential campaign or I could watch last night's Republican debate in Florida.
I went with Florida--at least there were no commercials, which are often better than the programming, but this morning even the commercials were uninspired, so I had to stick with the debate.
What was fascinating was listening to each of the four horsemen of the apocalypse inveighing on the horrible, and I mean horrible, state our country is in, and they each quoted numbers and statistics so fast it was difficult to keep up with how bogus those numbers really are.
Newt Gingrich is a particularly facile historian. Did you know we entered World War II properly? We declared war on Japan through an act of Congress--the last time we actually did go to war by an act of Congress. Now, that is the proper way to get into a war. It makes the war much more respectable, or something.
Not that Newt disagrees with the wars we waged without an act of Congress--he is all for Vietnam and the Gulf War and Iraq and Afghanistan, far as I can tell. So are all the other Republicans, save Ron Paul, but he is not really a Republican.
They all know so many things and have the numbers (which I suspect they make up as they go along) to show: 1. The economic morass was caused by Obamacare.--which actually hasn't kicked in yet. 2. The economic morass was caused by the bail out bill or by the Federal Reserve (which is a Democratic Party plot to bankrupt the nation by lending money to welfare queens) and 3. We'll be right as rain just as soon as we stop all government spending and pay down the deficit and balance the budget--but none of this will require the rich paying more taxes; in fact if the rich pay less, the country will recover even more quickly. 4. President Obama's rejecting the pipeline from Canada proves he hates American industry and workers. 5. The tourist industry in Florida would be benefited greatly by more drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. 6. Ronald Reagan was the greatest President ever because he fought for free markets and good old capitalism and limited government spending which resulted in the greatest explosion of our national debt and deficit ever seen before or since him.
No, wait, that last part wasn't mentioned. Reagan was a saint. He did all the right things for the economy.
The trouble with the tangled woof of fact is that it is so untidy.
No comments:
Post a Comment