OK, class, let’s match the name with the number. The numbers below represent how many new jobs the Keystone XL pipeline is predicted to create… according to whom?
A. 20,000 1. John Boehner
B. 100,000 2. John Huntsman
C. 6,500 3. Keystone XL company
OK, we made it easy. The answers are A-1, B-2, and C-3.
Just one in a long, long series of examples of Fact Free Politics (nod to Chris Hedges for coining the term). Who’d a thunk that the Speaker of the House would make up a number, entirely fictitious, about the number of new jobs President Obama might not be creating if he hesitates to approve…much less vetoes…the XL Pipeline proposal? Would any serious candidate, much less a former ambassador to China and governor of Utah, exaggerate the number by a factor of SIXTEEN?
Well, in the latter case, yes; and in the case of Boehner, that’s just what he did. The estimate of how many temporary jobs would be created in construction of the pipeline should … and has … come from the company proposing to build the thing. In this case, 6,000 – 6,500.
The fact (if I may use that word in the context of governance, much less politics) is that our political dialogue has left the realm of Reality and entered the World of Make-Believe Entertainment. The latter is a world of mythology (“America Is Still Number One” … in what isn’t specified; “America Is the Land Where Anyone Can Make It, with Enough Gumption, Guts, and Grit!”, et cetera). And wild, wild lies (“Obama is a Marxist,” “Obama hates America and wants to turn it into a European socialist state where the gummit will tell you want you can eat for dinner and will take your chillun away from you at age 3 months to be turned into robots…”) … not mere misrepresentations, not mere forgetfulness (that’s Governor Oops), not mere confusion. Deliberate lies.
The emergence of unmediated media, e.g. blogs, facilitates the process, even as Old Tyme media news freely acknowledges (in the product) its final transformation into Early Entertainment, including tonight’s Warm and Cuddly Pix of kids looking happy after their parents both lose their jobs, and the house, and their savings, and their childrens’ futures….
And not just to pick on the Right, although they are the more egregious. How ’bout a candidate of “Hope” and “Change”? Didn’t happen, and ain’t gonna happen!
Addendum from Tuesday (Jan. 2) TPM’s Josh Marshall:
Mitt Romney is now repeatedly saying that he created a net 100,000 jobs in his tenure at Bain Capital. But there seems to be no evidence to substantiate this claim. In fact, in previous campaigns the Romney campaign has been pressed on this number and to the best of my knowledge never been able to offer any evidence.
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And in ’12, it’s embodiment is still Obama and the American people.
Change has to come from the bottom and from within. Change is embodied in America’s people. In some it’s misdirected. In some it’s latent. In some it’s embodiment is proudly controlled by avarice, dishonesty and cowardice, to which you allude.
It’s up to us. To waken the discomfort, sorrow, loss, indignation, even rage, within ourselves (difficult, but it’s happening). To articulate positive solutions (difficult, but some are doing it). To motivate others to listen, then join the fight — and it will be a fight (difficult, but some are trying pretty effectively). To perservere (perhaps the most difficult of all). And once we’ve won, to hang on to what we’ve achieved, decade in and decade out so generations to come don’t face the bleak and terrifying prospects that we now face.
About Obama and the Dems: Short run, they’re all we’ve got. Long run, they’re only a small part of the entire system that has to be, if you’ll pardon the expression, repealed and replaced. That’s where perserverence is going to count the most.
PS: Good to see you posting again, JO, even though you do confuse the shit out of some of the folks here.
One notion of “liberals” is ‘conservatives who fear the consequences of untrammeled greed.’ Whereas the pure corporatists are quite happy to pursue their narrow economic goals without regard to the social consequences, liberals recognize that this is, or might become, a formula to incite an uprising. Thus, the liberal supports unemployment insurance to prevent the newly unemployed from raiding the corporate grannery, whereas the cruder corporatist believes in paying thugs to protect his accumulated wealth. Both ensconce what is essentially the very same underlying social philosophy [“Money talks, everyone else walks”] in slightly different fairie tales and, recently, bald-faced lies.
Both sides … and this was part of my point … absolutely support the separation of wealth and state, i.e. they reject the notion, for example, that non-shareholding workers should have a voice, in the form of a vote (much less a controlling vote) on corporate policies, such as whether to shift manufacturing to the lowest-wage country that can be found. Conservatives fret that workers’ voices might be heard in the form of government actions. Liberals admit this, but promise to protect the basic system of self-interest-uber-alles enshrined in the writing of Adam Smith.
Are nominal liberals better than arch conservatives? Well, they believe in benefits paid by government to keep non-property owners vaguely content while they beg for new work at lower wages, but they do so in large degree (a) to bribe propertyless voters and (b) to forestall real change, sometimes referred to as revolution.
Do liberals hold out hope for change? Not really, and I suspect that is the source of a good deal of disillusionment with Obama, who benefitted from a good measure of self-delusion by his supporters in 2008.
As evidence, I would point to the eight Clinton years. Was there a slowdown, fuggedabout a reversal, in the aggregation of wealth at the very, very top from 1993-2001? If so, I haven’t seen the figures. Clinton, as you will recall, was a Southern Democrat who figured, after 12 years of Reaganism (which, after all, was merely rewarmed Goldwaterism), “If we can’t beat ’em, let’s join ’em, only let’s put on a facade of moderation.”
But my larger point was that in order to keep this particular game of charades going, the professional marketers, especially but not exclusively on the Right, have taken to wholesale fantasy, no different at all than Spiderman vs Invading Latin Aliens, showing at Dot’s Des Moines Diner today, opening nationwide in February.
PS Appreciate the kind words.
whoever heard of any company ever over-promising on the jobs that their government subsidized and abetted project will produce?
I mean, in Colorado alone — based on just the industry promises I’ve heard made before our legislature — we must have added at least twenty or thirty million “high paying jobs, all with excellent benefits” this past decade.
How much was the Amazon tax bill going to bring in again?
99% of your post is a surprisingly logical criticism of the lies about Keystone.
But then, at the end, it must have occurred to you, “whoa, I haven’t taken a big smelly crap on Obama yet,” so you had to dump that out-of-place little turd at the end — your last 14 words. Way to stay true to yourself, JO!
http://www.truthdig.com/cartoo…
… Obama is EXACTLY like GW Bush. It’s geniuses like you whose teenage-level cynicism gave us the “Gore and Bush are the same” meme in 2000 that led to Nader votes handing Bush the election. Wanna argue this country would be the same if Gore instead of Bush were elected in 2000? Go tell that to anyone who’s done a budget calculation showing the debt traces to the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq war; better yet, go tell the kids who died in Iraq. The differences between a Dem you don’t like and GW Bush are too serious, and cost too many lives, for you to indulge your falsely oversimplist declaration that any mainstream Dem is a sellout who’s interchangeable with an R
…the cartoon notwithstanding, Obama is not running against Bush this year. He wasn’t running against Bush in 2008 either, although it didn’t seem like it sometimes. Take Bush out of your equation(s), and where are you left?
Are we out of Iraq because of Obama, or because Iraq refused to grant immunity from prosecution to U.S. troops who might remain there?
Is there some evidence you can point to that says Obama jumped on serious reformation of Wall Street, e.g. separation of commercial and investment banking, as a MUST DO to avoid a rerun of 2008? Is that why he appointed, and stayed with, his economic team?
What’s greater, the ideological distance between Ron Paul/Santorum [your choice] and Mittens, or the distance between Mittens and Obama rhetoric notwithstanding?
OK, my time’s up on this point, which wasn’t even the subject of my original comment.
Word of the Day: Notwithstanding. First known use: 14th century. Most recent known use: here and now. Present participle of not + withstonden. Will all participles please signify their presence?
Please don’t forget that there are people who think your creepy stalker BS with other pollsters is forgotten.
Please don’t forget that there are people who think your creepy stalker BS with other pollsters is forgotten.
Unfortunately I forgot this. What are you referring to? I remember creepy stalker BS but not JO’s involvement.
has been absolutely rotten to one of our front page editors. I hope he knocks it the fuck off.
has been an ass in general. If there are any unique and informative insights in his/her posts, they’re buried under a mountain of bullshit which JO seems to think is wit and style. I can’t stand to read anything he/she writes.
And are we supposed to understand that “creepy stalker BS” refers to being “absolutely rotten to one of our front page editors,” whomever and whatever that’s supposed to mean?
“Be nice and polite, or else you can’t have one of the 12 chairs pulled in close around our pot-bellied stove! We have standards to maintain!”
Oh.
“You can’t get rid of ignorance by giving people a keyboard.” J. P. Beserk
I haven’t read your other bits of mental masturbation currently cluttering the diary column.
As far as the creeper BS goes, I’ll cede that to ellbee – I honestly can’t recall that incident, either, but I trust that ellbee is telling the truth.
May I assume you’re inferring an equivalency between Dems and Repubs in a context where they together are compared to something else? Otherwise, just betweeen the two of them, there are real differences not only in goals but in outcomes.
If my assumption is correct, and I hope it is, to what better alternative are you comparing them both. In other words, how about a path toward solution?