"The Republican base hates this. So a lot of people are saying why anger the base in the name of good policy when it's going to happen anyway?" said Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), a senior member of the Senate Banking Committee.Klein wants Republicans to "stop playing games, things are just too serious."
Nate Silver also calls out conservative dishonesty here and again here:
The thing is that's really irksome is that Mankiw should know a lot better. This is not some random blogger at Townhall trying to parse a difficult economics paper and overlooking an important point of context -- this is one of the premier economists in the world. He knows very well what the Romer and Romer paper says -- and he's made a deliberate choice to misrepresent it.Bill Beutler makes similar arguments this week on bloggignheads.tv. Beutler's problems aren't so much that he should know better, because he shouldn't . He openly says, "I'm bad with numbers." Beutler's arguments are based off Mankiw and others like him who are good with numbers and yet they make ideological arguments by shifting or spinning the argument. Beutler's whole shtick is buying into the the conservative spin even when it proves false. For example, "businesses don't cause people to lose their homes" and "keeping money in the hands of businesses is best because they know how to spend it better than the government." If the current economic downturn has taught us anything businesses are just as fallible as the government, if not more, and businesses can cost people their homes. Hello Fannie and Freddie? This lack of intellectual honesty could lead Republicans being the permanent minority.
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I am inclined to agree with Joe Klein on this one. The matter of our country's well being is too important for the far right to continue in the vein they are in! Either they are part of the problem or part of the solution, there is NO more middle ground. I was discussing this in another community where a couple of repugnantcants were moaning and griping about the fact that President Obama was reaching out across the aisle, saying he needed to try harder, they didn't care, blah blah blah to which my response was:
ReplyDeletePatriotism, get you some!
All BS aside, they need to understand that their ideas and elitism nearly drove the greatest nation on the planet into extinction!
One can only hope and pray that they do not sabotage the only hope we have at this point for a measure of recovery.
great quote: "Patriotism, get you some!"
ReplyDelete