John Cole on why your government can't do anything at all these days

[elfs]

Wow. John Cole on why our country has become ungovernable. He so nails it, it gives me the chills. He talks about how Americorp is allowed to "design tutoring programs," but it's members are forbidden from tutoring or mentoring children directly. Here's what would happen if someone decided to try and change it:

You all know how this story goes from here- improving literacy would become "socialist indoctrination." Improving health care would become "socialized medicine." Bridging the digital divide would become "giving laptops to welfare queens." And you just know that someone in Americorps may have one day talked to someone from ACORN.

The subservient GOP drones in the blogs would pick up everything Breitbart has said. Instapundit and Reason magazine would wake from their glibertarian slumber to denounce this "vast, wasteful expansion of government." The Fonzi of Freedom, Nick Gillespie, would make fifty idiotic web videos decrying the bill, in between appearances on Fox News and penning stupid op-eds with Matt Welch in the NY Post. Welch would do his own part, pointing out that the French have something very similar to Americorps, and he really enjoyed their services while he and his wife were in France, but now that they are here in America and rake in enough money that they don't need those services, he will loudly and in the most smug manner possible oppose Americorps.

Read it all: This Is What Obstructionism + Nihilism + the Wurlitzer Looks Like

What Cole fails to mention (perhaps because he doesn't assume he has to), is that so much of this right wing noise machine is funded not by its own efforts, but by a conglomeration of industries interested in regulatory capture (Reason magazine, for example, gets a lot of its money from Exxon Mobil), and quasi-religious idealogues representing the Coors, Scaife, and Bradley foundations, all of which (at least in the previous generation) supported the Randian viewpoint first made explicit by Thucydides in 431BC:

You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

Comments

Re: Reason Magazine and Exxon Mobil

[gromm.livejournal.com]

Mmm. A global warming denier!

You mean that blip in the 10 year old data of *one* study? Yeah, that means the whole theory is based on lies despite the fact that dozens of other, independent studies back up their conclusions.

What I like best about GW deniers though, is that basically their entire belief system rests on "but that would make life more inconvenient and uncomfortable for *me*!"

Re: Reason Magazine and Exxon Mobil

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Relax, sparky.

I just said that it's the proponents of Global Warming who turn out to have been making up facts to suit their theories rather than the few scientists and analysts who received small amounts of money from concerned companies such as Exxon Mobil.

I don't deny that there are long-term trends in climate change. I even accept that if you pick your start and end points appropriately, you can claim we're in a warming trend.

I do, however, deny that anyone has a model that lets us predict future changes based on the historical record, much less any actual knowledge of how human activities are likely to influence those future changes.

And since this seems to be the (reluctant) consensus of Global Warming activists, I hardly think you're in any position to argue the point with me.

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