Colman McCarthy: Taliban Admirer and Generally Shitty Human Being

I was never an ardent supporter of “Don’t ask don’t tell.” Of course, it’s difficult to support a half-measure. I am generally receptive to both arguments for whether or not gays should be permitted to serve in the military, but tend to come down on the side that our civilian leadership should pursue policies that unburden soldiers of the complexities that come with sexuality as much as possible. Of course, DADT (I hate that acronym; it feels like what I would call my father if he happened to be Mr. T.) was used as a smokescreen for years by private universities to bar ROTC programs from campus. If there’s a silver lining on the tiny puff of a dark cloud that was the DADT repeal, it is that this canard is delegitimized and private universities must confront their own silly, anti-American biases.

'Don't ask, don't tell' has been repealed. ROTC still shouldn't be on campus.

By Colman McCarthy

Before we move on, check out this guy’s Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colman_McCarthy) Pacifist? Anarchist? Classic.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Now that asking and telling has ceased to be problematic in military circles, ROTC has resurfaced as a national issue:

This is still very much a niche issue. DADT was a niche issue. No one outside the gay community thought it was a priority.

Will universities such as Harvard, Yale and other Ivy League schools be opened to Reserve Officers' Training Corps since colleges can no longer can argue that the military is biased against gays and therefore not welcome?

Don’t underestimate the counterintuitive chicanery of the learned and bespectacled. Your colleagues in academia regularly argue such this blather. I can hear it now: “the United States military has a long record of [blah blah blah] and the wounds from the dark days of “don’t ask don’t tell” are still raw…[story courageous gay Marine facing persecution]…this university is a sacrosanct institution of higher learning devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Now let’s all go get some grant money to give crystal meth to giraffes or break ground on the new “Neville Chamberlain Peace Studies and Nonviolent Conflict Resolution Center” building.

The debate reminds me of an interview I conducted over parents' weekend at the University of Notre Dame in 1989.

How timely. After you’re done, I have a totally awesome story about how I learned how to use Lego®s. (What do you want? I was 3.)

I sat down with Theodore Hesburgh, the priest who had retired two years earlier after serving 35 years as the university's president. Graciously, he invited me to lunch at the campus inn.

::waits patiently for relevant information::

During our discussion, he took modest pride at having raised more than a billion dollars for Notre Dame, and expressed similar feelings about the university's ROTC program. More than 700 student-cadets were in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

Roughly 6% of the student body.

Few universities, public or private, had a larger percentage of students in uniform then. The school could have been renamed Fort Hesburgh.

Was that a joke? Really, I can’t tell.

When I suggested that Notre Dame's hosting of ROTC was a large negative among the school's many positives,

Subtle.

Hesburgh disagreed.

As do all of us who aren’t bathing in the self-righteousness that comes from a complete detachment from reality.

Notre Dame was a model of patriotism, he said, by training future officers who were churchgoers, who had taken courses in ethics, and who loved God and country. Notre Dame's ROTC program was a way to "Christianize the military," he stated firmly.

I asked if he actually believed there could be a Christian method of slaughtering people in combat,

Combat is not slaughter. Men slaughter pigs and cows and chickens. It is intentionally arbitrary. The word exists for killing in a manner where fighting would be ridiculous. The similarity, of course, is that both combat and slaughter, differing in both purpose and execution, are both necessary.

or a Christian way of firebombing cities,

(Full disclosure: I’m an avowed atheist) That is pretty much the entire purpose of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Not to get too deep into theological issues that interest me very little, the distinction between that story and combat is that the Biblical story invokes God’s judgment as a justification for the destruction. This is where I, as an atheist, get to say that man’s judgment is just as valid. Boiling Christianity down to sound bites like the golden rule might be okay for Sunday School, but I’d expect a professional who lectures on religion to acknowledge that the subject has a little more depth.

or a way to kill civilians in the name of Jesus.

Civilian casualties are a part of war. They have been a part of all wars. When committed by the United States military, they are accidental and/or those responsible are tried. The existence of error does not invalidate the purpose behind the action.

That said, the United States military doesn’t do anything in the name of Jesus.

Did he think that if enough Notre Dame graduates became soldiers that the military would eventually embrace Christ's teaching of loving one's enemies?

There is a difference between loving your enemy and subjugating yourself to him.

The interview quickly slid downhill.

Because you mocked the man’s religion and labeled his students war criminals and bible-thumping crusaders. You’re lucky you got out of there without a black eye, even if you were talking to a priest.

These days, the academic senates of the Ivies and other schools are no doubt pondering the return of military recruiters to their campuses. Meanwhile, the Pentagon, which oversees ROTC programs on more than 300 campuses, has to be asking if it wants to expand to the elite campuses, where old antipathies are remembered on both sides.

Damn hippies.

It should not be forgotten that schools have legitimate and moral reasons for keeping the military at bay, regardless of the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell."

If shrieking “killers!” in the face of ideological opponents is the hallmark of legitimate and moral reasoning, well, the left has a lot of re-thinking to do on the abortion issue.

They can stand with those who for reasons of conscience reject military solutions to conflicts.

Actually, “those who, for reasons of conscience reject military solutions to conflicts,” by definition, can’t stand for anything, lest they risk militarizing their opponents.

They can stand with Martin Luther King Jr.

Requisite hero-worship and invocation of personal morality beyond reproach.

and his view of America's penchant for war-making: "This madness must cease," he said from a pulpit in April 1967.

That is, if you ascribe to the notion that war is, in abstract, madness. Certainly on the ground, war can feel chaotic, but we elect sober, responsible leaders so that the high-level trajectory of our military incursions is not random, incoherent, or mad.

Even well short of the pacifist positions, they can argue the impracticality of maintaining a military that has helped drive this country into record depths of debt.

Oh please open this can of worms. The moral justification for a private university barring ROTC programs is about the public debt? Does that finally mean that debt is a moral issue?

The defense budget has more than doubled since 2000, to over $700 billion.

A ten year doubling period means an approximate growth rate of 7.2%. Considering that we’ve been drawn into two wars since 2000, a growth rate a full percentage point lower than the S&P 500 geometric mean returns seems pretty reasonable. I’d like to ask, what’s the rate of growth for school budgets? Tuition costs?

They can align themselves with colleges such as Hobart, Earlham, Goshen, Guilford, Hampshire, George Fox and a long list of others that teach alternatives to violence.

Nihilism 101, Dependency and Self-immolation 221, Embracing Stockholm Syndrome 302, and a graduate thesis on The Sublime Freedom of Subjugation.

Serve your country after college, these schools say, but consider the Peace Corps as well as the Marine Corps.

The Peace Corps isn’t about service. It’s about delaying your life to embrace a self-serving quest for purpose and meaning. If that’s your thing, stop planting soy beans in Ethiopia and start praying. You don’t have to travel the world and worry about being killed or raped by Congolese rebels. Everything the Peace Corps does, the free market could do better. The only difference is that the Peace Corps hoodwinks kids into doing it for free with the absurd promise of enlightenment, purpose, or moral superiority. There is no valid way to describe the Peace Corps—or organizations like City Year and Teach for America—other than exploitive.

Will the Ivies have the courage for such stands? I'm doubtful. Only one of the eight Ivy League schools - Cornell - offers a degree in peace studies.

That’s not why Cornell is a laughingstock, but it doesn’t help. Also, I’m not sure how offering a worthless piece of paper translates into heightened morality.

Their pride in running programs in women's studies, black studies, and gay and lesbian studies is well-founded,

Not to get sidetracked, but those programs are laughable. They’re petty, biased, and infamous for harboring extreme left-wing ideologues that use their position to indoctrinate students.

but schools have small claims to greatness so long as the study of peace is not equal to the other departments when it comes to size and funding.

Please reread this sentence and come back once your ire’s good and healthy.

Now what the fuck is this? Greatness is defined by “peace studies?” It’s a made-up field. Peace, in and of itself, is also not a laudable goal. Anyone can forge peace if they surrender enough. This guy is lobbying for an Ivy League job in a national newspaper? Who the hell are the editors here?

At Notre Dame, on that 1989 visit and several following, I learned that the ROTC academics were laughably weak. They were softie courses.

Coming from a professor of Peace Studies? Those bullshit curriculums define the “softie course.” Why? Two reasons: 1) the professors are dickless, and 2) the professors know that their funding is contingent on the size of the department, and even college kids are, by and large, smart enough to know that “Peace Studies” is a degree that will get you laughed out of job interviews that actually pay. Also, all the ROTC guys I knew were engineers. I know it’s not Walden, but electrical resistance is pretty important too. Also, have I mentioned my disdain for Henry David Thoreau?

The many students I interviewed were candid about their reasons for signing up: free tuition and monthly stipends, plus the guarantee of a job in the military after college.

All reasonable positions, but somehow I don’t trust his ability to filter their sentiments into two sentences.

With some exceptions, they were mainly from families that couldn't afford ever-rising college tabs.

Who can afford $45k+ per year? Especially when most top tier schools give preferential treatment in the guise of affirmative action to lower income applicants? Everyone else either gets scholarships or student loans. No one actually buys the argument that college is inaccessible for low-income kids without ROTC assistance. That said, it helps.

To oppose ROTC, as I have

Once again, a tastefully subtle homage to his own impeccable morality.

since my college days in the 1960s,

Fertile grounds for this blossoming smugness. Let me make this clear: you, Mr. McCarthy, are a member of the worst generation to ever live in this country. Your youthful rebellions were petty, self-centered, and ill-conceived. The entire hippie movement was based on lies and chemical ingestion. Your draft-dodging antics were nothing short of despicable. Your political choices—Republicans included until 1980—were terrible. Jim Morrison was a douche and Acid Rock/hippie culture did more to ruin the Beatles than Yoko Ono. You continue to milk Social Security and pension benefits as though you’ve earned them. You raised your children into a world in which everything from dodgeballs to nuclear apocalypse was to be feared, monitored, and ultimately regulated. And it is only by the grace of the military, which you abhor, that America never turned into East Germany.

when my school enticed too many of my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier.

You just accused them of killing civilians and slaughtering enemies. You can’t abstract that upon the military and absolve those committing the crimes. Yes, Mr. McCarthy, you are anti-soldier.

I admire those who join armies, whether America's or the Taliban's:

WHAT THE FUCK?!?!

for their discipline,

You can find that in a football team.

for their loyalty to their buddies

You can find that in a gang.

and to their principles,

You can find that in a church.

for their sacrifices to be away from home.

You can find that at a summer camp. None of these attributes are what make soldiers great.

In recent years, I've had several Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans in my college classes. If only the peace movement were as populated by people of such resolve and daring.

The peace movement attracts spineless weenies and neck-bearded idealists (Two Thoreau references in one post? Yeah I just did that.) who are prone to excessive whining and blocking out the realities of their existence. Those are not valued attributes in the military, but the peace movement certainly coddles them

ROTC and its warrior ethic

Which you just praised two sentences ago, I’ll remind you.

taint the intellectual purity of a school, if by purity we mean trying to rise above the foul idea that nations can kill and destroy their way to peace.

No one means that when they say “intellectual purity.” That drivel isn’t a definition for intellectual purity at all. In fact, it’s neither intellectual nor pure. It’s a mission statement for a drum circle based in a misunderstanding of geopolitics and human nature more often found in bedtime stories.

If a school such as Harvard does sell out to the military, let it at least be honest and add a sign at its Cambridge front portal: Harvard, a Pentagon Annex.

Non-sequitur. Corporations regularly shape curriculums in business schools because it better prepares students for the professional environment. Scholarships are often given to students with restrictions on fields of study. Neither of these stipulations implies any ownership over the university or its day-to-day functionality.

Colman McCarthy, a former Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington and teaches courses on nonviolence at four area universities and two high schools.

Recycling Despair

Dust off your old copies of the Times, folks. Bob Herbert's dredging up artificial outrage over the abysmal conditions for the middle class from all the way back in 2003. Fun stuff.

The Data and the Reality

So you don’t fall into the same trap as Herbert, data is a reflection of reality. Similarly, projections are pure fiction. There are important distinctions that come with losing degree of freedom.

By BOB HERBERT

Published: December 27, 2010

I keep hearing from the data zealots

Is this the new pejorative for “number crunchers?” What, are they knocking down his door? You’re not that important, Bob.

that holiday sales were impressive and the outlook for the economy in 2011 is not bad.

True and true, just as the economy in 2010 was not bad. It’s been like a great deal in poker where you only manage to pocket the ante. You still won the hand, but you should have garnered a much bigger pay day. The gains in 2010 have resolved many of the outstanding risk contingencies that had been priced into the market. There is no longer a good chance that the economy will plunge into a double-dip. There is no longer reason to believe that the entire EU will collapse in the coming months. There is no longer reason to believe that California and Illinois will descend state-wide versions of Detroit.

Maybe they’ve stumbled onto something in their windowless rooms.

Can’t you feel the disdain for private industry already? Quantitatively focused analysts may as well be a new breed of troll, scurrying in and out of break rooms, using z-scores and pivot tables as postmodern mysticism.

Maybe the economy really is gathering steam.

Somewhat fittingly, the allusion is to rickety hundred year-old technology.

But in the rough and tumble of the real world,

How is this type of pandering populism any more appealing than Sarah Palin’s caribou-shooting folksiness? Yes, Bob Herbert—your spewed ink is a less effective, ideologically opposing version of “how’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?”

where families have to feed themselves and pay their bills,

Woe is capitalism. Capitalism is the source of all bills. Money is the root of all evil.

there are an awful lot of Americans being left behind.

Why? They can’t catch up with the steam-powered train/riverboat? Are they old? Or gimpy?

A continuing national survey of workers who lost their jobs during the Great Recession,

Can we come up with something better to call the crash of ’08, please? How about the Mortgage Meltdown of ’08? Housing Bubble Crash? Residual rage from the Phillies winning the World Series?

conducted by two professors at Rutgers University, offers anything but a rosy view of the economic prospects for ordinary Americans. It paints, instead, a portrait filled with gloom.

Fearmonger levelup! Don’t forget to allocate your experience points to ‘frantic non-sequiturs,’ ‘distended similes,’ and ‘misinterpretation of data.’

More than 15 million Americans are officially classified as jobless.

At least, so says the quantitative troll in the windowless room.

The professors, at the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, have been following their representative sample of workers since the summer of 2009.

Statistical ear-perk: “their representative sample”

The report on their latest survey, just out this month, is titled: “The Shattered American Dream: Unemployed Workers Lose Ground, Hope, and Faith in Their Futures.”

Doesn’t that title make you want to punch a hippie? It’s hard for me to gauge, because wanting to punch a hippie is pretty much my default setting.

Over the 15 months that the surveys have been conducted, just one-quarter of the workers have found full-time jobs, nearly all of them for less pay and with fewer or no benefits.

That’s what happens in recessions. You take worse jobs. Restructuring is why firms swing to profitability, re-invest those profits, and emerge with an eye towards growth.

“For those who remain unemployed,” the report says, “the cupboard has long been bare.”

Except for the 99 (now more) weeks of unemployment benefits they have been suckling,

These were not the folks being coldly and precisely monitored, classified and quantified as they made their way to the malls to kick-start the economy. These were among the many millions of Americans who spent the holidays hurting.

What the fuck are you talking about? Yes, they are being coldly and precisely monitored. That’s why you have this bullshit study by a couple of pointy-heads out of Rutgers.

As the report states: “The recession has been a cataclysm that will have an enduring effect. It is hard to overstate the dire shape of the unemployed.”

And if that verbiage doesn’t scream “objective scientific integrity” to you, well… you’re sane.

Nearly two-thirds of the unemployed workers who were surveyed have been out of work for a year or more. More than a third have been jobless for two years. With their savings exhausted, many have borrowed money from relatives or friends, sold possessions to make ends meet and decided against medical examinations or treatments they previously would have considered essential.

Unemployed people, meet the saving best friend of every horse-faced trollop and beer-bellied Limp Bizkit devotee at last call: lowered standards.

Older workers who are jobless are caught in a particularly precarious state of affairs. As the report put it:

“We are witnessing the birth of a new class —

I feel compelled to let Bob know that he doesn’t actually get to cut the umbilical cord or bury the placenta in the back yard.

the involuntarily retired. Many of those over age 50 believe they will not work again at a full-time ‘real’ job commensurate with their education and training.

Does an extensive background in mimeography? Blacksmithing? How about typewriter maintenance?

More than one-quarter say they expect to retire earlier than they want, which has long-term consequences for themselves and society. Many will file for Social Security as soon as they are eligible, despite the fact that they would receive greater benefits if they were able to delay retiring for a few years.”

Brilliant analysis: jobs are good!

There is a fundamental disconnect between economic indicators pointing in a positive direction and the experience of millions of American families fighting desperately to fend off destitution.

No, there is no fundamental disconnect. This is simply a journalist that doesn’t understand the difference between leading and trailing indicators. As evidence, here’s a small sampling (August 2003-December 2003) of Herbert’s economic ramblings:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/07/opinion/despair-of-the-jobless.html?ref=bobherbert

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/14/opinion/no-work-no-homes.html?ref=bobherbert

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/opinion/there-s-a-catch-jobs.html?ref=bobherbert

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/29/opinion/the-white-collar-blues.html?ref=bobherbert

Remember the recession in 2003? Yeah, neither do I. This is the same article with more cooperative statistics.

 Some three out of every four Americans have been personally touched by the recession — either they’ve lost a job or a relative or close friend has.

Can we play six degrees of Recession? You have six moves to connect to someone who’s lost a job and/or Kevin Bacon.

And the outlook, despite the spin being put on the latest data, is not promising.

No one is forecasting a substantial reduction in unemployment rates next year.

There are two reasons for that: 1) employment is a trailing indicator. It improves after the economy in general has already turned around. 2) The economy is growing far too slowly as the result of poor fiscal policy from Washington.

And, as Motoko Rich reported in The Times this month, temporary workers accounted for 80 percent of the 50,000 jobs added by private sector employers in November.

And, because of the Census, virtually every month since April. Nevermind.

Carl Van Horn, the director of the Heldrich Center and one of the two professors (the other is Cliff Zukin) conducting the survey, said he was struck by how pessimistic some of the respondents have become — not just about their own situation but about the nation’s future. The survey found that workers in general are increasingly accepting the notion that the effects of the recession will be permanent,

Probably true. This is mostly because the government did not allow the companies that caused the recession to fail. If they had, smaller companies would be clamoring for the market voids left by GM, Citi, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and small businesses all over the country. Instead we have buttressed failed leadership and enshrined failed business models.

 that they are the result of fundamental changes in the national economy.

“They’re losing the idea that if you are determined and work hard, you can get ahead,”

Because, for years we’ve been beating back the entrepreneurial spirit that makes America great. It’s not working hard that breeds success. It’s producing something better than anyone else for cheaper than anyone else.

said Dr. Van Horn. “They’re losing that sense of optimism. They don’t think that they or their children are going to fare particularly well.”

The fact that so many Americans are out of work, or working at jobs that don’t pay well, undermines the prospects for a robust recovery. Jobless people don’t buy a lot of flat-screen TVs.

Yes, but jobless people don’t produce a lot of flat-screen TVs either.

What we’re really seeing is an erosion of standards of living for an enormous portion of the population, including a substantial segment of the once solid middle class.

Does anyone else despise the middle class as much as me? Stop demanding your politicians pander to you. Stop allowing upper and lower class people alike to fly your banner. Stop embracing the vocabulary of Marx to pursue the ideals of Smith. America is a great place because class has no meaning here. Upper and lower classes are fluid, and constantly changing by virtue of the complexities of the market alone. The middle class worship is an expression of our failed drive to self-improvement. I don’t aspire to be middle class. I aspire to be stinking, filty rich. I want to be above the upper class. You should too, as long as you don’t expect to do it by winning the lottery.

Not only is this not being addressed, but the self-serving, rightward lurch in Washington

This is where the sharp jerk of the wheel to the left differentiates Herbert from a traditional bleeding heart. He is a pure poverty pimp, exploiting hardships for political gain.

is all but guaranteed to make matters worse for working people. The zealots reading the economic tea leaves see brighter days ahead.

Did I or did I not say that Herbert would compare quantitative analysis to mysticism? Do I know these jackasses or what? **Victory dance, Final Fantasy music plays somewhere in the background**

 They can afford to be sanguine. They’re working.

Mostly because they have a skill set that is so far beyond your comprehension that you consider it with disdainful reverence. 

'The Ghost of a Swift Kick in the Ass" Knows No Mercy.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Humbug Express

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: December 23, 2010

Hey, 

Get to it, beard-o.

has anyone noticed that “A Christmas Carol” is a dangerous leftist tract?

Tract would be less accurate than, say fable or parable, but I’ll let it slide. It's too early in the article for me to get belligerent.

I mean, consider the scene, early in the book,

Catch your breath, big guy. This is the written equivalent of a child rushing to tell his mother a story about finger painting. “…and then, when we got to school, in third period, the one the Ms. Jenkins teaches, we opened the blue jar so that we could paint our dinosaur, and then Sally got some yellow paint on her dress, and then, Billy dropped the dinosaur book and ruined the picture of the dilapisaurus, and then, I mean, then, [deep breath] the teacher said it looked like a turkey.” Take ‘er easy, slugger. You might pass out.

where Ebenezer Scrooge rightly refuses to contribute to a poverty relief fund.

Please note the relevant features here: this is a private charity funded through voluntary contributions

“I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing,”

This is also what we like to call “common sense.”

he declares. Oh, wait. That wasn’t Scrooge. That was Newt Gingrich — last week.

Krugman won’t tell you, but this is in reference to extending unemployment benefits, which are stretching into their second year. Please note the relevant features here: unemployment benefits are a public program funded through mandatory contributions.

What Scrooge actually says is, “Are there no prisons?” But it’s pretty much the same thing.

Public vs. private, voluntary vs. mandatory. With the Obama administration nationalizing industries and using the influence of government agencies (see: Kathleen Sebelius) to stifle opposition and compel constituents to “voluntary” compliance, I can see why Krugman fails to make the distinction. Were this private industry, this type of behavior would fall somewhere between blackmail and racketeering.

Anyway, instead of praising Scrooge for his principled stand against the welfare state,

Again, charities are private. They have nothing to do with the state.

Charles Dickens makes him out to be some kind of bad guy. How leftist is that?

While I certainly understand that Krugman is trying to be ironic, the world is full of leftist parables masquerading as moralistic children’s tales:

--Robin Hood is elevated by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged as the manifesto of her redistributionist villains

--The Giving Tree is an anthem for aspiring eco-terrorists

      --The Lorax—this one’s just too easy. “I speak for the trees!” Yeah, well I speak for the chainsaws, backhoes, and helicopter-mounted buzz-saws, Jack.

--Bluebeard (especially in its current incarnations and feminist reimaginings) portrays all wealth as an accessory to deranged rapists.

      --Charlotte’s Web is anti-agrarian nonsense

      --The Phantom Tollbooth is a tip of the cap to Dadaists and nihilists—or something. My third grade teacher would be displeased to know that I got bored and stopped reading before the end.

      --Green Eggs and Ham gives credence to the notion that all strife is born of ignorance as opposed to sustentative issues.

As you can see, the fundamental issues of public policy haven’t changed since Victorian times.

I’m going to bludgeon this, because I’ve got my bludgeoning stick handy: Charity differs from statism insofar as charity is PRIVATE and VOLUNTARY.

Still, some things are different. In particular, the production of humbug —

I get that economists refer to everything as interchangeable widgets and function in the absurd make-believe land where “utils” are a more important metric than money, but this is just fucking silly—and not in a cute way.

which was still a somewhat amateurish craft

:: Requisite joke about writing being an amateurish craft for Paul Krugman ::

when Dickens wrote — has now become a systematic, even industrial, process.

I’m no literary critic, but Dickens was the premier literary icon of the industrial revolution era. While he rarely dealt with the issues of industrialization, he certainly lived in an era that embraced production far more than our post-industrial society.

Let me walk you through a case in point, one that I’ve been following lately.

If you must; I always brace myself for such meanderings when I open up the Times’ Editorial Page.

If you listen to the recent speeches of Republican presidential hopefuls,

I’m expecting no fewer than 3 Republican presidential candidates mentioned by name. This is just protocol.

you’ll find several of them talking at length about the harm done by unionized government workers, who have, they say, multiplied under the Obama administration.

A recent example was an op-ed article by the outgoing Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty,

There’s 1.

who declared that “thanks to President Obama,” government is the only booming sector in our economy:

With you so far.

“Since January 2008” — silly me, I thought Mr. Obama wasn’t inaugurated until 2009

True, but the Democrats in congress enacting his legislative agenda ascended in 2006. By 2008, President Bush had simply lost the will to continue fighting the good fight against a hostile congress and a more hostile media.

 — “the private sector has lost nearly eight million jobs, while local, state and federal governments added 590,000.”

Horrors! Except that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, government employment has fallen, not risen, since January 2008.

Seriously. I addressed this last time. My Office of Personnel Management data trumps your Bureau of Labor Statistics data. 17 seconds!

And since January 2009, when Mr. Obama actually did take office, government employment has fallen by more than 300,000 as hard-pressed state and local governments have been forced to lay off teachers, police officers, firefighters and other workers.

In other words, administrators in charge of making sure schools use more “facially-friendly” dodgeballs, meter maids, male strippers in fireman’s outfits, and dim-witted cousins who lucked into appointed do-nothing posts. If so, fantastic.

So how did the notion of a surge in government payrolls under Mr. Obama take hold?

It’s not just federal workers that piss us off. It’s state employees, local employees, government contractors, and non-profit workers who push the American work force away from profitability. It’s a new class of petty tyrants, amassing power in their state-sponsored fiefdoms. It’s the debasement of a market-driven system for compensation.  In short, it’s not the numbers. It’s the influence.

New regulation forces companies to hire new employees for compliance. That will not translate to the statistics, but these new employees add no value, and costs are passed on to the consumer. New graduates view a government job as solid gold. Wall Street is a distant second. Productive industry is a distant third. The fear is not that we’ll be inundated by legions of federal employees; it is that we will all—public sector or private—be working for the government.

It turns out that last spring there was, in fact, a bulge in government employment. And both politicians and researchers at humbug factories — I mean, conservative think tanks — quickly seized on this bulge as evidence of an exploding public sector.

No, you buffoon. It was widely acknowledged as a dampener to the over-hyped good news about the surge in employment figures. That, of course, didn’t stop fellow buffoon Joe Biden from dubbing Summer 2010 as “the Summer of Recovery.” Fail.

Over the summer, articles and speeches began to appear highlighting the rise in government employment and issuing dire warnings about what it portended for America’s future.

[Citation needed]

But anyone paying attention knew why public employment had risen — and it had nothing to do with Big Government. It was, instead, the fact that the federal government had to hire a lot of temporary workers to carry out the 2010 Census — workers who have almost all left the payroll now that the Census is done.

Yes. We said absolutely all of this while the Obama/Biden tag-team thumped its chest about improving unemployment figures in early 2010. We knew then that it was bullshit.

Is it really possible that the authors of those articles and speeches about soaring public employment didn’t know what was going on?

No. Everyone I talked about the economy with during that period knew that the Census was inflating the numbers. No one I talked to thinks that the government is hiring up a storm. We know why. It’s broke and the Republicans are going to yank on the reins of the federal government. That doesn’t assuage our concerns on the scope and influence (often misstated as the size) of government.

Well, I guess we should never assume malice when ignorance remains a possibility.

Anyone familiar with the myth of Narcissus and Echo? Does he really believe that he’s the only one who understands this basic algebraic truism?

There has not, however, been any visible effort to retract those erroneous claims.

Largely because they STILL ARE NOT ERRONEOUS. If they were counted in the unemployment figures, they should be counted in our analysis as well.

And this isn’t the only case of a claimed huge expansion in government that turns out to be nothing of the kind. Have you heard the one about how there’s been an explosion in the number of federal regulators?

Not even a little. I’ve heard that there is going to be a huge explosion in the number of federal regulators. IRS agents to administer the Obamacare mandate; SEC drones to enforce FinReg; the food safety bill will force more municipal drones into the schools to make sure the salad par is stocked with organic, locally grown cucumbers.

Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute looked into the numbers behind that claim, and it turns out that almost all of those additional “regulators” work for the Department of Homeland Security, protecting us against terrorists.

Well that, and taking over/censoring various websites for alleged copyright infringement without a court order and groping air travelers…sounds like a regulatory agency to me.

Still, why does it matter what some politicians and think tanks say? The answer is that there’s a well-developed right-wing media infrastructure in place to catapult the propaganda,

Lies. Damnable lies. The right has talk radio and sometimes Fox News. The left has the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, virtually all daytime talk, and the entirety of the Hollywood apparatus and a slew of other former heavyweights that I’m forgetting.

as former President George W. Bush put it, to rapidly disseminate bogus analysis to a wide audience where it becomes part of what “everyone knows.” (There’s nothing comparable on the left,

I like to think of Paul Krugman as Mr. Magoo. The idiot can’t even see that he and his ilk are the mechanism on the left to disseminate falsehoods with an ideological slant. This is like Colonel Sanders insisting that no one in Kentucky cooks chicken or Robert Byrd claiming that the Democratic party was never a haven for contemptible racists.

which has fallen far behind in the humbug race.)

Mostly because the newspapers are failing as a result of being antiquated, outdated, and publishing the type of blather spewed by Paul Krugman.

And it’s a very effective process.

He would know.

When discussing the alleged huge expansion of government under Mr. Obama, I’ve repeatedly found that people just won’t believe me when I try to point out that it never happened.

Because your statistics are dubious—or--at best, completely irrelevant.

They assume that I’m lying, or somehow cherry-picking the data.

Nailed it.

After all, they’ve heard over and over again about that surge in government spending and employment, and they don’t realize that everything they’ve heard was a special delivery from the Humbug Express.

We get it. Everyone but you is a sheep.

So in this holiday season, let’s remember the wisdom of Ebenezer Scrooge. Not the bit about denying food and medical care to those who need them:

This is not even close to an appropriate use for a colon.

America’s failure to take care of its own less-fortunate citizens is a national disgrace.

We have welfare, food stamps, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, SCHIP, and a network of charities more wide-ranging than any in the world. We have food banks and blood drives. We have free emergency room care and free education. We have 15000 pages of tax code that are designed to give breaks and loopholes to favored constituencies of “less-fortunates.” Our impoverished have color TVs and cell phones. The United States has colossal safety net that is precisely designed to “take care of its own less fortunate citizens.” No one with a brain in their head believes that the safety net is deficient.

But Scrooge was right about the prevalence of humbug. And we’d be much better off as a nation if more people had the courage to say “Bah!”

Nope, but in the spirit of “A Christmas Carol,” I’ll make sure the ‘Ghost of a Swift Kick in the Ass’ pays you a visit sometime soon.

We are Officially in Lockdown. ZOMBIES!

When Zombies Win

Get your shotgun and your NRA card. Brush up on your basic military strategies and prepare to funnel the walking dead into a semicircular killzone, folks. We’re in it for the species!

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: December 19, 2010

When historians look back at 2008-10,

This is boring. Where are the zombies?

 what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas.

And the resurgence of reason beginning on November 2, 2010.

Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything

Let’s make a list of what the free market is right about:

—    America prospers for two and a half Centuries under free markets

—    The Soviet Union languishes for 70 years after eschewing free markets before completely imploding

—    Argentina, in tinkering with currencies and destabilizing government, falls from an American contemporary to a minor regional power

—    China rediscovers free markets after going socialist, and enjoys spectacular growth. Also see Vietnam.

—    Europe continues the drift from free market ideas to socialism. Everything stagnates.

And big government Keynesians have...theories and small sample sizes, I suppose.

 — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.

Screaming teenager to parents: “YOU NEVER LET ME DO ANYTHING!!!1! I HATE YOU!” Also, still no zombies.

How did that happen?

Maybe you need to AltaVista search for all those newfangled newsies on the interblogs.

How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees,

Tell anyone who works at a bank that they were unregulated prior to 2008. I dare you. They will knee you in the gut. That might be me projecting.

did we end up with Ron Paul, who says “I don’t think we need regulators,” about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed?

How did we get to the point where the Fed—which has failed (miserably) in every purpose it was originally intended to function—is the sacrosanct Bureau of Bureaucracy in Charge of Economic Growth?

How, after the experiences of the Clinton and Bush administrations — the first raised taxes

The economy didn’t begin to take off until 1994, when Republicans swept into congress.

 and presided over spectacular job growth; the second cut taxes and presided over anemic growth

And Krugman claims Wall Street takes a short-term view to the detriment of the long term…The vast majority of the economy is not a response to government. That’s how we know that we’re still free. The bacchanalian of growth in the dot com bubble was the result of the exuberance of a brand new technology and a geopolitical landscape free from conflict. The 2000s were the opposite: a business climate that had confronted the limitations of the new technology and a far less secure world following 9/11.  

even before the crisis

Which happened a mere year and a half after the Democrats retook the congress in 2006.

--did we end up with bipartisan agreement on even more tax cuts?

First, there are essentially no new income tax cuts. The tax cuts I assume Krugman is referring to is the estate tax cuts. A confiscatory estate tax has always been a primary goal of socialists since Karl Marx—it is listed in the Communist Manifesto as a necessary precondition for socialism. The American people, as a whole, disdain that idea.

Trying to sell people on paying more taxes so that more of their money can be funneled through the massive inefficiency of the government bureaucracy is inherently a losing argument. Even if you assume no fraud, waste, or corruption in the federal mechanism (a tremendously generous concession on my part, because any apparatus that large attracts terrible people to do terrible things under the banner of virtue), you are expecting people to believe that the central command of the federal government can allocate resources more efficiently than 300 million informed—or even uninformed—consumers. No matter how smart the cabal is, they’re still dumber than the combined masses.

The answer from the right is that the economic failures of the Obama administration show that big-government policies don’t work.

True. What happened to unemployment not going over 8%? Oh, and I’ve officially given up on zombies showing up.

But the response should be, what big-government policies?

Cash for clunkers, the stimulus, the second stimulus, the takeover of GM, the takeover of the student loans industry, Obamacare, FinReg, brinksmanship with increasing taxes, threats against opposition, airport pat-downs, Pigford, the latest [thankfully defeated] budget monstrosity, government funded propaganda, and colossal cronyism. Even if some of these programs haven’t gone into effect yet, they have gone into effect on the American economy. Business owners aren’t stupid. They can see what’s coming down the pike, especially with Obamacare (at least, those not well connected enough to get waivers). The market has priced that uncertainty, and it has forced people to sit on their money.

For the fact is that the Obama stimulus — which itself was almost 40 percent tax cuts —

Since tax cuts can’t actually cost the government anything, I’m going to assume that this number, like all the other numbers about the cost of tax cuts, are figments of some progressive’s imagination.

was far too cautious to turn the economy around.

So you keep saying. Yet the people who drive the economy, the people who invest in new facilities, hire new employees, start new businesses, are intrinsically connected to the popular uprising that took place this year that staunchly said no to more stimulus. Indeed the waste of the Stimulus was the rallying cry for the conservative movement to turn out the Tea Party, which, if the New York Times is to be believed (and it isn’t) is prominently affluent. Even Krugman wouldn’t discount that the affluent are the people who make the decisions regarding more hiring.

And that’s not 20-20 hindsight:

It’s not 20-20 at all. And this is a place for a semicolon, not a colon.

many economists, myself included, warned from the beginning that the plan was grossly inadequate.

No, Paul, "grossly inadequate" was just the recurring theme from your latest attempt at couples' counseling. What’s that old joke about the one-handed economist?

Put it this way:

Your license to use colons has been revoked under penalty of zombie attack.

A policy under which government employment actually fell,

This literally took me all of 17 seconds to google.

http://www.opm.gov/feddata/HistoricalTables/TotalGovernmentSince1962.asp

Year	Executive branch civilians (thousands)	Uniformed military personnel (thousands)	Legislative and judicial branch personnel (thousands)	Total Federal personnel (thousands)
2000 4	2,639	1,426	63	4,129
2001 4	2,640	1,428	64	4,132
2002	2,630	1,456	66	4,152
2003	2,666	1,478	65	4,210
2004	2,650	1,473	64	4,187
2005	2,636	1,436	65	4,138
2006	2,637	1,432	63	4,133
2007	2,636	1,427	63	4,127
2008	2,692	1,450	64	4,206
2009	2,774	1,591	66	4,430

under which government spending on goods and services grew more slowly than during the Bush years,

Google can neither confirm nor deny. OECD data not available after 2008. Damn you, Google. That said, total spending isn’t a pretty picture.

hardly constitutes a test of Keynesian economics.

Now, maybe it wasn’t possible for President Obama to get more in the face of Congressional skepticism about government.

Does this guy even pay attention to politics? In 2008 Obama had 70% approval ratings and massive majorities in both houses of congress. He could have had whatever he wanted.

But even if that’s true, it only demonstrates the continuing hold of a failed doctrine over our politics.

Except that it’s not true, which must mean that it demonstrates the continuing fear of putting the largest economy the world has ever known in a lab with pointy-heads like Krugman who will use our debt capacity like it’s Christmas morning.

It’s also worth pointing out that everything the right said about why Obamanomics would fail was wrong.

I’m starting to imagine Paul Krugman as that Britney Spears defender sobbing uncontrollably and the unfairness of the harsh attacks on Keynesian economics. “Leave Keynesianism alone! LEAVE IT ALONE!!!”

For two years we’ve been warned that government borrowing would send interest rates sky-high;

You’ve been warned that will happen well after you’ve broken the economy. Interest rate spikes in Greece, Iceland, and Ireland didn’t happen until after the point of no return. Why? In a highly liquid market like government securities, there’s very little marginal of being the first person out of the market versus the 8^th, 10^th, or hundred thousandth person out of the market, so once people start leaving the market, it snowballs almost instantaneously. This is even expedited by automatic trading systems and pre-set triggers for trades. The only question is who gets stuck holding the bag. (Hint: it’s us.)

in fact, rates have fluctuated with optimism or pessimism about recovery, but stayed consistently low by historical standards.

This is asinine. Rates are low because of Federal Reserve open market activities. Krugman knows this. I know this. You know this. The dim-witted social worker down the street knows this. Your elementary school child knows this. It remains unclear whether a wood beam knows about the open market activities, but even with the massive injection of money into government securities that came with FOMC and quantitative easing, the government’s still having problems keeping interest rates low.

For two years we’ve been warned that inflation, even hyperinflation, was just around the corner;

Still is, if the economy ever starts growing again.

instead, disinflation has continued, with core inflation — which excludes volatile food and energy prices — now at a half-century low.

But still above zero (in fact, .9% above zero as of Nov. 24), which is the definition of “not deflation.”

The free-market fundamentalists have been as wrong about events abroad as they have about events in America —

This is about the three hundredth dash in this article. Am I going to have to revoke a permit for those too?

and suffered equally few consequences. “Ireland,” declared George Osborne in 2006, “stands as a shining example of the art of the possible in long-term economic policymaking.”

Ireland was always a marginal economy. It grew to moderate success under free market ideas, and failed because its rapid growth did not address structural problems with the economy, notably that it was being used as a tax shelter by companies like Google, whose marginal investment in facilities dwarfed the colossal gains of American taxes avoided.

Whoops. But Mr. Osborne is now Britain’s top economic official.

And in his new position, he’s setting out to emulate the austerity policies Ireland implemented after its bubble burst.

Irish austerity measures were like telling a patient in the middle of a coronary to eat a salad. Of course the austerity measures didn’t work for a country in the grips of crisis. That  doesn’t mean that eating a salad is bad for you.

After all, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic spent much of the past year hailing Irish austerity as a resounding success. “The Irish approach worked in 1987-89 — and it’s working now,” declared Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute last June. Whoops, again

Amazingly, Ireland is the only place in Europe I don’t recall seeing riots over austerity measures.

But such failures don’t seem to matter. To borrow the title of a recent book by the Australian economist John Quiggin on doctrines that the crisis should have killed but didn’t,

Keynesian economics?

we’re still — perhaps more than ever — ruled by “zombie economics.”

Holy crap! Zombies! Call Bruce Campbell! I knew it. Never let down your guard against zombies.

 Why?

Don’t blame me. I’ve got my chainsaw and shotgun handy and an escape route to a defensible position with plenty of food and water all mapped out. That defensible position? Australia.

Part of the answer, surely, is that people who should have been trying to slay zombie ideas have tried to compromise with them instead.

They can approach the zombies as non-threatening co-inhabitants, because zombies are only interested in eating people with brains.

And this is especially, though not only, true of the president.

So true.

People tend to forget that Ronald Reagan often gave ground on policy substance — most notably, he ended up enacting multiple tax increases.

$275M of tax cuts vs. $132.7M of tax increases. Plus he negotiated the tax increases for cuts to domestic discretionary spending. Big win. Huge. I’m a fan. Call me, Ronald. We’ll do lunch. Wait…is he a zombie?

But he never wavered on ideas, never backed down from the position that his ideology was right and his opponents were wrong.

Of course, he had the added benefit of being the standard-bearer for an ideology that was right, and had the notable bonus of opponents who were wrong.

President Obama, by contrast, has consistently tried to reach across the aisle

Pre-election 2010: [data not found].

by lending cover to right-wing myths. He has praised Reagan for restoring American dynamism (when was the last time you heard a Republican praising F.D.R.?),

Have you ever read David Brooks’ column?

adopted G.O.P. rhetoric about the need for the government to tighten its belt even in the face of recession,

Because that’s the stuff that leaders are made of: rhetoric!

offered symbolic freezes on spending and federal wages.

Reduce spending and wages to 1988 levels and we’re talking.

None of this stopped the right from denouncing him as a socialist.

He is.

But it helped empower bad ideas,

His own.

in ways that can do quite immediate harm.

No argument here.

Right now Mr. Obama is hailing the tax-cut deal as a boost to the economy — but Republicans are already talking about spending cuts that would offset any positive effects from the deal.

Unless, of course, you’re a reasonable person who knows that economic growth comes from production and innovation, not from hollow spending.

And how effectively can he oppose these demands, when he himself has embraced the rhetoric of belt-tightening?

Excellent point. I think he should capitulate to the Republicans or face being branded a hypocrite.

Yes, politics is the art of the possible. We all understand the need to deal with one’s political enemies.

No snark necessary here. Can’t you just feel the disdain dripping from his pen?

But it’s one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it’s another to open the door to zombie ideas.

Unless you have the proverbial “Shotgun of Truth.” No, you can’t have it. It’s private property. You can nationalize it when you pry it from my cold dead brain matter.

When you do that, the zombies end up eating your brain — and quite possibly your economy too.

That’s the best zombie reference you’ve got? I’ve made three references to shotguns and one to Bruce Campbell. Stop embarrassing yourself, Paul Krugman.