If poor Willard Inc. really can't stop himself from lying, isn't it time to consider institutional care?

Once the Incorporated Man and his cohorts in the superrich decide how much of the nation's wealth to allow to trickle down to the merely rich, there isn't likely to be much left for the rest of us.

by Ken

Welcome back to "You Can't Make This Stuff Up."

I kept meaning to write about the delirious ravings of Louisiana Gov. Booby Jindal, the archrival for intellectual supremacy within the Republican Party of Wisconsin Rep. Paul "Atlas Shrunk" Ryan. Governor Booby's blithering about President Obama ("Jindal: Obama 'Most Liberal, Most Incompetent' President Since Carter"; oh yeah, that Carter was some kind of liberal) earned him a dressing down the other day from self-styled policy wonk Ezra "Takes One to Know One" Klein in a washingtonpost.com "Wonkblog" post, "For such an anti-business president, Obama’s got a pretty pro-business record."

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is considered among the most wonkish of the Republican Party’s class of rising stars. Most politicians get involved in policy after getting involved in politics, which is why they know so little about it. Jindal took the opposite path. As a Rhodes Scholar, he focused on health policy at Oxford and then served as assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for planning and evaluation in George W. Bush’s administration. Then he ran for office. He is, in other words, the rare politician who can work a spreadsheet.

Bobby Jindal (Darren Hauck - Getty Images) Which is why it’s so disappointing when he says things like this: “I suspect that many in the Obama administration really don’t believe in private enterprise. At best, they see business as something to be endured so that it can provide tax money for government programs.”
You can explain it away with all the normal excuse-making and curve grading. Jindal was speaking to an audience of rabid partisans at the Chicago Conservative Political Action Conference. He’s trying to show the Romney campaign he can play the role of attack dog, a crucial qualification for any vice president. It’s just a throwaway applause line.
But that’s why it’s such a shameful display: He knows better. Or, at the least, he should know better.

Thanks for that, Ezra! For the record, he went on to do some wonk's-eye chapter-and-versing of the Obama administration's pro-business record. It seems staggering that this case needs to be argued, but the fact is, it's unknown either to the broad range of infotainment noozers or to the "Reality? Hell No, We Won't Go" cohorts of the Right. In case anyone had any illusion that mere wonkery could penetrate the protective core of unreality encasing the right-wing delusionals, this column set off a firestorm from the kind of people who regularly denounce Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz for failing to treat their lies and delusions with the respect that sane people reserve for facts and other artifacts of reality, prompting a follow-up from Ezra, "Obama's business record, cont'd," but really, you might as well be talking to an Irish setter riding on top of a car.

I mean, to not know that the president has "a pretty pro-business record" (or more accurately has been fundamentally a captive of the business world), you have to be either a mental defective or a pathological liar. And so that's really the most pertinent question for Governor Booby: "Governor Booby, do you think of yourself as more of a mental defective or a pathological liar?"

As I keep pointing out here frequently, if you tip an already rabidly pro-business government any more in that direction, you get stuff like the Enron debacle, the giant invisible (to commonly wise delusionals) housing-bubble explosion, and the depression-scale Wall Street meltdown. The greed of the business elites has become so psychotically consuming, and so wholly without check, that these loathsome vultures are truly incapable of relaxing the pressure as long as there's a red cent floating around that they haven't bled out of the economy for their private gratification. Given the mayhem that follows inevitably from letting these raging sociopaths have their unfettered way, the fact remains that they are always, always in need of a standard-bearer for reality to protect them from themselves. Needless to say, President Obama has not been that standard-bearer for reality.

What lifts this whole story into the category of the surreal, where I suspect most of the 2012 election will be conducted, is the dropping of the other shoe.

Romney says Obama’s policies are most ‘anti-business’ in modern history

By Philip Rucker, Published: June 13

Mitt Romney on Wednesday castigated President Obama, telling the chief executives of 100 of the nation’s biggest corporations that the president has ushered in “the most anti-investment, anti-business, anti-jobs series of policies in modern American history.”

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee ticked through a series of proposals that he said would foster a friendlier business climate — repealing Obama’s health-care law, authorizing more oil and natural gas drilling, halting all Obama-era regulations and lowering corporate and individual tax rates. . . .

Why doesn't the Incorporated Willard just come out and say that, while the superrich debate among themselves how much of the nation's wealth they should grudgingly share with the merely rich, it's not enough to tell the rest of the country to go to hell, that those of us left behind in the New Permanent Underclass (Incorporating the Former Middle Class) need to be fitted with dog collars to facilitate proper obedience training?

Is this truly to be the shape of the election campaign? Every time we think we have gauged the true level of vileness of this overprivileged pile of puke, he plunges to new depths?

The common wisdom is that Governor Booby's ravings represented an attempt to showcase his attack-dog cred for President-in-waiting Willard Inc., to establish himself as a candidate to be chosen as (gasp!) vice president-in-waiting. So maybe the Incorporated Man is just trying to return the favor, trying to impress Governor Booby. Maybe deep down he has the unsuspected ambition to someday somehow impress somebody. Somebody who isn't a billionaire.

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