We dunno nuttin bout wut Obama beleevs, just if hes for it its the end of the wurrld

Today's "Daily Cartoon," by David Sipress,
from NewYorker.com

"Remember -- talk about how the President
has done a fantastic job with the economy, but
whatever you do don't mention the President."

“A man in Oklahoma was exposed to Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Fox for over three minutes. We hope we’re not too late."

-- a CDC spokesman quoted in the Borowitz Report
"Man Infected with Ebola Misinformation Through
Casual Contact With Cable News" (see below)

"[H]ere is the conundrum of the 2014 campaign. In 2010, House Speaker John Boehner's battle cry that helped Republicans win their landslide was, 'Where are the jobs?' Obama and the Democrats are now in a position to reply: 'Here are the jobs!'

"But Boehner isn’t asking that question anymore."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washington Post column
"Why Democrats aren’t getting credit for the economy"

by Ken

I had been meaning to write about the E. J. Dionne Jr. column I've quote from above, and digging it out again without resorting to a paid click meant slogging through WaPo "Today's Opinions" e-mails. What strikes you when you do that is how commitedly the cadre of right-wing jackasses structure their entire "thought" (for want of a better word) process consists of seeing every phenomenon that crosses their gaze as either proof that everything in the universe is the fault of Barack Obama. Their brains are now so thoroughly degraded that what passes for "thought" in there apparently has no other functioning principle.

By contrast, the Dionne column, which tackles the question of why good job news isn't of help to Democrats, addresses the question not propagandistically but factually, starting with the question itself:

A party controlling the White House could not ask for much more from economic numbers than the Democrats got in Friday’s jobs report, issued a month and a day before the midterm elections. Unemployment fell to 5.9 percent, the lowest it has been since July 2008. The nation added 248,000 jobs, more than the forecasters had projected. What’s not to like?

Facts, of course, are persona non grata on the Right, where actual reality -- not to be confused with the kind they just pull out of their stinky butts -- is now regarded as a left-wing conspiracy. However, until the very end of the column E.J. doesn't even go there, doesn't address the right-wing campaign of all-lies-all-the-time which the president and scared-witless Democratic candidates have to contend with, which I would argue is the first reason why the Democrats can't get any mileage about good jobs news.

Basically, E.J. sees two reasons. First, "the very improvement in the economy means that it is a less central concern to voters than it was when Obama took office — or in 2010. And second, " voters who are still concerned about the economy tend to be focused not on its successes but on what it is failing to do for them." Unemployment is "still not low enough to create rapid and widespread wage growth." He notes, "Many of the forces that have been driving up inequality since the 1980s are still with us," and adds that "this tension is far more difficult for Democrats to deal with than it would be for Republicans, were they presiding over exactly the same recovery."

Democrats, going back to those happy Roosevelt days, have made their living as the party that lifts up the many and not just the privileged few. Republicans have traditionally said that growth is everything and if the rich get richer, their success will eventually work its way down to everyone else.

Democrats can’t (and shouldn’t) echo conservative bromides. They are right to point to all that still needs to be done to end income stagnation in the middle class and among the poor. In his Northwestern speech, Obama advanced his proposals on education, job training, college loans, a minimum wage increase, infrastructure investment, equal pay and work-family balance. All would help matters, if only they could get by Republicans in Congress.

At this point E.J. really can't withhold comment on the Right-Wing Noise Machine.

[W]hen progressives raise the problem of inequality, their conservative opponents turn around and blame that on Obama, too. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, which practically invented trickle-down economics, headlined an editorial on Friday “The President of Inequality.” The paper’s sudden solicitude for the downtrodden was rather jarring. Imagine an editorial in the Vatican’s newspaper extolling the virtues of atheism.

E.J. argues that in the month to go to Election Day there's still "enough time to develop a sustained argument that highlights both how much better the economy is and how much we still have to do to spread prosperity more widely." He adds that this is "more challenging than bragging," but "has the virtue of making clear that if today’s obstruction had been the rule in 2009, we’d still be in the soup."


MEANWHILE IN RIGHT-WING SICK-FANTASYLAND

Understanding that the only right-wing "thought" process is "How can we dump on Obama?," it's not surprising that this is the operative principle whether it's what Leon Panetta has to say in his book about Obama and the Middle East or, now, a Gallup poll reporting unfavorable American attitudes toward Obamacare.

So naturally we find the Right's most dedicated screecher of lies and imbecilities about, well, everything poltical, but the president in particular, washingtonpost.com's hired right-wing hatchet creature "Jackass Jenny" Rubin, blithering moronically about health care, a subect about which she clearly knows absolutely nothing, in a column called "The GOP's post-election Obamacare strategy." And when I say she knows absolutely nothing about about health care, I mean not one single thing that apart from the right-wing spin of the politics of health care, which is almost as ignorant about health care as JJ is.

JJ of course is looking forward to an Obamacare field day. It never occurs to her that American attitudes about Obamacare are in any way related to the dragnet campaign of lies she and her fellow hatchet creatures have waged. But even a creature as utterly bereft of brain function as Jackass Jenny knows that Republicans have to exercise a wee bit of caution, and she offers three such cautions. On the whole it's so moronic as to be not worth talking about, exept when it exceeds the bounds of normal right-wing-pundit moronitude. I direct attention to her second caution: that "it is absolutely essential for Republicans to have a vote on an alternative that is better than Obamacare" (the italics are the author's).

"Considering how poorly Americans regard Obamacare," says JJ, "it should not be hard to come up with a non-compulsory option that is cheaper, protects pre-existing conditions, allows a wide range of plans, does a better job of controlling costs and covers just about the same number of people."

Sorry, I had to put that in boldface. [T]his is a life form that has -- and again I mean this literally -- absolutely no knowledge of any kind whatsoever, again excepting right-wing political spin, about any of the things she mentions:

• compulsory or noncompulsory options;

• the cost of insurance;

• what's involved in coverage of preexisting conditions;

• what's involved in controlling costs -- of anything on the planet, probably, but I mean specifically health-care costs;

• what's involved in covering any particular number of people

This is truly staggering. "It should not be hard to come up with" a plan that fits her insanely delusional prescription? It should not be hard? Has she ever read or heard anything, and again I mean anything at all other than the right-wing political fantasies, about health care, health insurance, the U.S. (or any other) health-care delivery system, or the U.S. (or any other) health-care payment system? I really don't believe that with any amount of effort it would be possible to come up with a statement as utterly brainless.

But go back to the beginning of the statement: "Considering how poorly Americans regard Obamacare." Let's forget for a moment the extent to which the way Americans regard Obamacare has been shaped by batallions of pathological liars and degraded imbeciles like Jackass Jenny. What does "the way American regard Obamacare" have to do with any single word that follows? I'll answer that one: absolutely nothing. JJ has taken her own pathological lies and now pretended that they can in some fashion be diddled with reality.

They can't be. When you've committed your being to delusions and lies, you can certainly attempt to apply those delusions and lies to the deluding of large numbers of people who are perfectly happy to be lied to. What you can't do is pretend that any of this has anything to do with reality.


THIS RECENTLY REPORTED BY THE BOROWITZ REPORT

Speaking of the Right-Wing Noise Machine's cultivation of American ignorance --

OCTOBER 7, 2014
MAN INFECTED WITH EBOLA MISINFORMATION
THROUGH CASUAL CONTACT WITH CABLE NEWS
BY ANDY BOROWITZ



CANTON, OH (The Borowitz Report)—An Ohio man has become infected with misinformation about the Ebola virus through casual contact with cable news, the Centers for Disease Control has confirmed.

Tracy Klugian, thirty-one, briefly came into contact with alarmist Ebola hearsay during a visit to the Akron-Canton airport, where a CNN report about Ebola was showing on one of the televisions in the airport bar. “Mr. Klugian is believed to have been exposed to cable news for no more than ten minutes, but long enough to become infected,” a spokesman for the C.D.C. said. “Within an hour, he was showing signs of believing that an Ebola outbreak in the United States was inevitable and unstoppable.”

Once Klugian’s condition was apparent, the Ohio man was rushed to a public library and given a seventh-grade biology textbook, at which point he “started to stabilize,” the spokesman said.

But others exposed to the widening epidemic of Ebola misinformation may not be so lucky. “A man in Oklahoma was exposed to Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Fox for over three minutes,” the C.D.C. spokesman said gravely. “We hope we’re not too late.”

#