Here's your daily dose of irony:
Jon Chait correctly calling out Politico's Village Cool Kids Club for its awfully insular chumminess...
The subject of the piece is Allen and VandeHei’s report that
broad agreement exists on the correct policy agenda, as revealed to them
through “conversations we have had over the past three months with top
lawmakers, officials, their senior aides and the CEOs who advise and
lobby all of them.” The story proceeds to describe the obviously
sensible agenda agreed upon by these sources: It is vital to reduce the
deficit through tax reform and stingier entitlements, along with more
free trade, resource extraction, and liberalized immigration.
This is far from the Randian paranoia that has spread among so
many millionaires in the Obama agenda. Indeed, I find most of it fairly
sensible as policy. What makes the consensus so astonishing, and even
nauseating, is the degree to which those who share it show no awareness
of their own insularity. Their shared sense of a smart economic growth
strategy excludes any monetary or fiscal plan to bring down unemployment
through higher consumer demand, a position that commands strong support
among economists. Their list of ailments also excludes skyrocketing
income inequality and out-of-control carbon emissions. (Though, at the
end of a passage extolling the glorious possibility that American oil
production will exceed that of Saudi Arabia within a decade, VandeHei
and Allen do note, “No doubt, there are environmental concerns,
especially for drinking water.” Well, yes. Also for the future of the
human race.)
...while
Chait whistles past the graveyard of his own chummy, insular piece last March of how Obama failed liberalism so badly in 2011 by extending the unemployment benefits and payroll tax cut (and putting the House GOP in its current bind) that he got re-elected by liberals, the cad. I pointed Chait's nonsense out back then:
Chait argues that
President Obama wanting a deal -- any deal, mind you -- led him to treat
the GOP as good faith partners when they were clearly not.
Republicans, he goes on to say, were going to screw POTUS and the country no matter what Obama did.
This is where Chait's argument turns into purist whining: There was
nothing President Obama could have done that would have changed the
outcome of the GOP screwing us over (indeed, the GOP is now signaling
that it will simply ignore the debt deal), and at the same time he
didn't do enough to change the outcome. It's just meaningless
stupidity, brought about by the "liberal" Washington Post unloading this
hit piece on the President, and Chait absolutely takes the bait,
re-fighting the same arguments we had in 2010 and 2011 about "but if
Obama had done THIS and LISTENED TO HOW SMART I AM..." five minutes
after saying there was nothing he could have done.
Funny how
that works, Jon. There's really not too much difference between you and Politico on that issue. Check a mirror next time you want to complain that the inside baseball game is turned up too loud.
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