John Cole: I’d Add a Couple of Things (About Ryan's plan and the punditocracy)

[n2doc]

by John Cole

DougJ:
What I don’t know for sure is if Brooks, Klein, Sullivan, etc. are cowardly careerist sociopaths, just plain stupid, or both.

Well, both, obviously, but I would add a couple more things- lazy, incurious, insulated, and well-rewarded for staying that way.

1.) They are lazy- Reading the commentary from Sullivan and Brooks and Klein and others, aside from being completely wrong, what stood out to me was how simply predictable it was, regurgitating the coalescing villager CW about Ryan: The plan is bold! It is serious! It took courage! It re-frames the debate! The ball is in Obama’s court! Very wonky! It is a game-changer! Did I mention it is serious? The math demands it! We need to have shared sacrifice! This puts us on the right course! It’s serious and bold!

Read any one of their pieces the last couple of days, and it was like conventional wisdom/villager mad libs. Actually reading the bill, realizing it isn’t serious, it isn’t bold, that it won’t set us on the right path because it gives away as much in taxes as it cuts from the needy, realizing the only people sacrificing are the poor while the well-off are lavished with trillions in tax cuts- well, doing that and actually thinking, like Bruce Bartlett, James Fallows, Paul Krugman, Dean Baker, and others managed to do, that would be just way too much work. Better to roll with the conventional wisdom, churn out a load of bullshit, and when confronted by people that you are wrong, have a hissy fit about the hard left, whine about being picked on and someone using four letter words and capital letters, and dig in. Instead of absorbing what people are telling you, link to the National Review and McMegan, and don’t even bother to figure out basic math such as 22-18. There is a word for this behavior- it is lazy. These guys are on autopilot, have their narrative, and they are sticking to it.

2.) They are also fabulously incurious- When you look at a budget like this that just decimates Medicare and Medicaid, or when you look at the GOP plan to de-fund Planned Parenthood, and simply cheerlead the cuts, you are showing a remarkable lack of curiosity. Do these folks even know what Medicare, Medicaid, and Planned Parenthood do? Do they understand what will happen to poor people with the GOP’s wet dream of Medicaid sent to states in block grants? Pro-tip, you might want to look at things like the tobacco settlement money that was supposed to be for tobacco prevention and the like and see where the money is actually going. You might look at the history of block grants (and how funding gradually declines, is misused, is often not able to be put in use if the necessary structures are not in place, etc.).

The only way you could think slashing Medicare as it is proposed in the Ryan plan and then giving that same amount to the well-off is acceptable is if you simply have no idea what Medicare does and how valuable it is to so many people. You must think the whole program is full of fraud, waste, and abuse. You must think that no lives are actually being saved. That is really the only explanation for some of the behavior from some pundits. They have to think that Medicare must not really be that important, because if you slash it, it isn’t going to have any results other than “saving money.”

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http://www.balloon-juice.com/2011/04/09/id-add-a-couple-things/