Link.
Very nice.
Yesterday's Thomas Frank column in the Wall Street Journal is also nice. I'm going to excessively quote it:
Just as the financial crisis has created toxic assets and "zombie" financial institutions, so has it transformed conservatism into a movement of the living dead. Its partisans cling to a now-toxic portfolio of discredited notions, rhetoric, gestures and strategies. They lumber comically on, their only goal being to obstruct efforts to save the economy from catastrophe.
These days the zombie right is rallying around CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, who won fame last month when he railed against a rescue of the economy's "losers."
Mr. Santelli ...called for a "Chicago tea party" to protest the administration's mortgage plan.
Next thing you knew, there were "tea parties" all over the land. When I showed up for one last Friday in Washington's Lafayette Park, however, my suspicions were immediately raised. A fellow in an expensive-looking pinstriped suit came hustling into the gathering knot of the discontented, handing out pink pig balloons.
...
Banks are insolvent, asset prices are falling, GDP has taken a nose dive, but what exercised this bunch was the possibility that government -- understood as a force of pure evil -- might get too big.
...
As the event wore on, the speakers began to repeat, zombie-like, some version of the famous line from "Network," the 1976 movie, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore."
...
They're not going to take it anymore? I guess it's supposed to be obvious that conservatives are history's real victims -- that their imagined suffering at the hands of that Big Deficit to Come trumps the global systemic economic crisis and all the upheaval it may unleash.
Frank also notes that Lew Uhler, who heads the National Tax Limitation Committee, claimed the current economic crisis was being "overblown".
Wow.
It's amazing how backwards this is. So many people who profited during the buildup to the current recession (which began in 2007) are either still saying it is "overblown" or are trying to stoke fears about a coming "lost decade", in which incomes and markets are painfully stagnant. These people are actually trying to suggest that 1999-2009 was part of the golden age of growth, and the thing we really need to fear is how much worse the coming years will be.
For example: in concerted fashion, Bobby Jindal and David Vitter recently trotted out the idea that the Bush years exemplified strong "job growth" and some of "the best economic times and prosperity" in American history. Are they insane?
Labels: Cons, GOP, Jindal, Markets, Vitty-cent
