How to identify a childish, ignorant columnist: Jacob Weisberg at Slate

Down With the People
Blame the childish, ignorant American public--not politicians--for our political and economic crisis.

By Jacob Weisberg

In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

Anybody who says you can't have it both ways clearly hasn't been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic--or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation--is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There's another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood.

Sorry, but actually I think the opposite, and it's not driven by some idealistic peaen to the glory of the American public. It comes from a cynical exuberance about the value of survival.

The public is READY to make hard choices.
TO SURVIVE
THEY ARE COMING TO THE CONCLUSIONS
COMPELLED BY DEBT

THEIR DEBT

It is the politicians
that are in a sphincter writhing
scrotum tightening paroxysm of fear over
BRINGING THE DISCUSSION TO A HEAD
BECAUSE THEY LIVE IN FEAR
THEIR PERSONAL GRAVY TRAIN ENDS.

They live in fear that their little games of pitting fire breathing commies against grimacing shrieking racists will fall apart and they will remain nakedly exposed as having euchred their way into 8 terms of fun by making the other side into extremist freaks demonized beyond cooperation of any sort.

.

They live in fear of someone taking a good look at health insurance company donations with the understanding that no national wide open market will exist to ruin their fun by driving premiums down the way cell phone plans plummeted. Or sign ons by big Rx companies to insure reimportation of cheap drugs from Canada won't cost a Gulfstream IV for the staff that counts. On the way to ASPEN for a 'critical meeting'.

They live in fear that THEIR deals like Ben Nelson's Nebraska Buyout will become common knowledge.

Worst of all they live in fear in Washington, that if they look out the window they'll see the crowd outside the Louvre with placards giving directions to the Bastille .. when all the crowd with torches and pitchforks want is THIS:

They live in fear of a serious discussion based in reality, and devoid of the polemics which prevent serious solutions from being considered.

And the life of the republic and its 234 year old GRAVY TRAIN of expansion, and personal freedom is at stake.

They live in fear we will REALIZE IT.

AND ACT

AND READ THIS

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