Once More, for the Remedial Class

Today's Object of Ridicule and Scorn is Leonard Pitts of the Chicago Tribune, who feels compelled to mistakenly point out Bobby Jindal's hypocrisy over the Oil Spill.

Regular readers (of which there is precisely one) will recall I already took a look at the very issue of defending laissez-faire capitalism in the context of the Gulf Oil Spill earlier this week, (Thursday’s Object of Ridicule and Scorn was E.J. Dionne Jr. of the Washington Post) but I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to savage my hometown newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, which is a stiff breeze away from tumbling into complete insolvency.

Leonard Pitts presents an even less compelling argument than Dionne did. No, the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico does not underscore the need for increased federal power and regulation. Precisely the opposite, it shows how ineffectual and inefficient power can be when it is congealed within the grips of a massive bureaucracy.

FREE-MARKET RELIGION LOST IN OIL SPILL by Leonard Pitts 

"There has never been a challenge that the American people, with as little interference as possible by the federal government, cannot handle." — Bobby Jindal, March 24, 2009

That was then. 

Wow. Three words that are both a sentence and a paragraph. The simplicity of the sentence and the short paragraph break really draw me in to the tension of the writing and underscore the starkness of the comparison.

This is

 …Spinal Tap? …Sparta? …how we do it?

now: 

Boo. You had at least three better options.

Re-Fighting the Cold War

Today's Object of Ridicule and Scorn is The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne Jr.

GULF OIL SPILL OFFERS A LESSON IN CAPITALISM VS. SOCIALISM by E.J. Dionne Jr. 

So who is in charge of stopping the oil spill, BP or the federal government? 

It’s not really a question. British Petroleum is the only one even trying. At this writing, the Top Kill method to plug the leak—an idea generated and executed solely by BP—appears to have worked.

The fact that the answer to this question seems as murky as the water around the exploded oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico 

There’s absolutely no murkiness in the answer. It’s clear as day. But admitting clarity would deny Dionne the chance to use that clunky simile.

suggests that this is an excellent moment to recognize that our arguments pitting capitalism against socialism 

Less than twenty years after defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, Dionne is actually admitting that capitalism and socialism are battling it out for the future of America. This is akin to the United States having “arguments pitting capitalism against fascism” in 1964 or "arguments pitting monarchy against a republic" in 1802. Socialism is a defeated and discredited ideology. If there are large-scale arguments in the United States between capitalism and socialism, who exactly is arguing the virtues of socialism? Conservatives have been blasted from the left for suggesting that Barack Obama and other members of the Obama Administration were socialists. Is this vindication?