Who knew? There are people farther out of touch with reality than the traditional Beltway dopes!

FRANK OBJECTS TO REPUBLICAN EFFORTS TO MAKE WIDESPREAD CHANGES TO U.S. GOVERNMENT IN ONLY THREE DAYS OF DEBATE

by Ken

No, don't bother trying to click on anything in the above image. There actually is a clip, somewhere. Yesterday a colleague sent me a link to what I presume was this clip, but the link didn't work. So I went to the congressman's website and found the above in sort-of-clip form, but I didn't get any sound, so I was less distraught than I might otherwise have been that I couldn't find any way to embed the clip. I'm sure there are a lot of Republicans, and probably not a few Democrats, who've wished for years they could kill the sound on Barney Frank. I don't think any of us is keen on watching Barney gesticulate silently for several minutes. So I settled for the above screen grab.

In any case, I'm going to assume we've got the gist of it in that descriptive blurb: "FRANK OBJECTS TO REPUBLICAN EFFORTS TO MAKE WIDESPREAD CHANGES TO U.S. GOVERNMENT IN ONLY THREE DAYS OF DEBATE." I thought of this even more when I read this Washington Post e-mail alert this morning:

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Breaking News Alert: House approves dramatic cuts in federal spending in 235-189 vote
February 19, 2011 4:51:18 AM
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In a rare early morning weekend vote, the House approved an aggressive plan Saturday to eliminate dozens of federal programs and offices while slashing agency budgets by as much as 40 percent, drawing out more than $60 billion in deficit savings.

Setting up a showdown early next month with President Obama and Senate Democrats, House Republicans pushed the legislation through after a marathon debate capped off by an all-night session Friday that spilled into Saturday morning. During the bleary-eyed final roll call at 4:35 a.m., 235 Republicans were joined by no Democrats in support of dramatic spending reductions that they said were needed to address a soaring annual deficit of $1.6 trillion; 189 Democrats -- as well as three Republicans -- opposed it, accusing Republicans of writing the bill with a "double meat ax."

http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/SFBD1U/IYSYUB/ZBUAH4/4SFZBZ/7RL9J/QR/h

In a grim way I suppose you could say they had it coming, those clueless Beltway insiders Howie's been screaming about since DWT came into being. (I'm proud to say I've done my share of screaming too.) Unfortunately, the price those cynical pols are being invited to pay now for their proud tradition of turning their backs on the outside world is actually going to be paid by all of us.

Because the American Voter, understandably put out by the "service" rendered by those Beltway dopes, again understandably turned their backs on them. Lots of them, triply understandably, simply stayed home on Election Day, but that unfortunately left an opening for a gaggle of loons even farther out of touch with reality, difficult as such a thing is to believe. At least the traditional Beltway dopes mostly knew where to look for reality in the event that they ever felt any curiosity. Of course they rarely did.

Because of the way those traditional Beltway dopes have been operating, there's unquestionably a sizable chunk of spending waste in the federal budget which could be eliminated with no inconvenience except to the beneficiaries. Well, not just the immediate beneficiaries, because one of the universe of things the new class of Beltway know-nothings doesn't know is the way spending actually generates economic activity. Let me quickly add that this doesn't justify wasteful government spending. It means, though, that especially in times of economic distress you really do have to keep in mind

The lucky thing is that, according to the consensus of economists untainted by the Chicago Virus, the kinds of pork-ish government spending most favored by Beltway dopes, notably the military kind, actually tend to have the least effectual "multiplier" effect, so that slashing that kind of spending would tend to have the least economically damaging effect. Naturally those kinds of spending cuts aren't on the table.

Just because a band of self-made simpletons who have chosen to live their lives as brain-dead morons have learned to parrot the phrase "job-killing" doesn't mean that any one of them has the ghost of a shadow of a hint of a clue as to how even a single job is created. And yet these people living in the shadow world of their self-made imperviousness to reality have the effrontery to impose their bottomless ignorance on people struggling to eke out a living in the real world. They should be ashamed, or whatever comes the next infinity worse than ashamed.

And let me be clear: I don't disparage these people because they're stupid, or ignorant, or insane, but because they've chosen -- actively or passively -- to live their lives as if they're stupid or ignorant or insane. That, in my book, is not only dangerous (the more immediate concern) but utterly inexcusable.

Nothing could be easier than to pull a spending item out of context and ridicule it. It's a favorite trick, of course, in "debunking" funded scientific research projects. And it's "win-win" for people who have adjusted their shut-off brains to function in "anti-understanding" mode, where even the effort to understand anything at all that goes on in the world of reality that surrounds (and oppresses) them is regarded as one of mankind's supreme sins. "Understanding" has been targeted as a liberal and probably faggish plot, to be dealt with accordingly. These anti-decency militants have taken a solemn vow to beat the crap, metaphorically or if necessarily literally, out of anyone who tries to insinuate any whisper of understanding of reality into public discussion. Now the reality-defying Far Right, in addition to controlling the infotainment noozemedia and the Supreme Court, have seized control of countess statehouses across the country in addition to the U.S. House of Representatives.

In fairness, it may be that goons like the governors of Florida, Wisconsin, and Ohio -- taking their cue from the Right's economic "guru," Paul Ryan, who based on his public pronouncements understands less about actual economics than any living being on the planet -- aren't so much ignorant of the realities of economics as they are cynically poised to impose an unstated economic agenda: to assist the country's privileged elites, who caused the economic meltdown and in many cases turned it into a boomtown bonanza built on the rest of the country's misery, in using that very economic meltdown as cover to remake the country's political reality to establish uncontested control of the political and economic agenda for those elites.

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