Monday, January 16, 2012

Great moments with Mr. Linkin

  • John Sides: Martin Luther King, Jr., was actually once a controversial figure.
  • Matt Glassman: Why libertarians should support civil rights laws.
  • Mark Schmitt: Super PACs are sustaining undead presidential candidates.
  • Jonathan Bernstein: The Senate is not in recess, something senators will be happy to prove once they're back from recess.
  • Andrew Sullivan: The left and the right are similarly deluded about Obama's presidency, which has been remarkably successful.
  • Matt Yglesias: The public sector shrunk shrank by more than a quarter million jobs last year. Step 3: Profit?
  • Erik Klemetti: If you fell into lava, you would float rather than sink. The experience would still be unpleasant.
  • Oh, and it turns out orcas eat great white sharks' livers. As a palate cleanser.
Note: Must credit Rob Rushing for noting my incorrect grammar.

1 comment:

Rob Rushing said...

Shrank, sir, not shrunk. Have you been watching Rick Moranis movies from the late 1980s? (For the record, shrank is the past tense, shrunk the participle, to be used only with helping verbs, such as "Obama has successfully shrunk the number of government jobs," or as an adjective, as in "pre-shrunk jeans.")

I'm more than dubious about the argument that Obama's been a huge, but unrecognized, success—isn't part of being successful giving people the impression you've been… successful? My impression is that the left—not the Democrats, but the left (whereas you naturally see things from a party perspective)—that the left has completely failed to capitalize on the financial and moral ruin Bush II left us in, allowing the country to drift farther to the right even as we were massively disenchanted with Republicans. Indeed, everything Sullivan points out as examples of "moderation" are precisely the kind of thinking that the left is pissed about: Obamacare as a massive windfall for insurance and Big Pharma, Obama as a tax-cutter, etc. Sullivan has the gall to cite, as examples of the "unhinged left" critique, that "torture was ended" (Guantanamo still open, indefinite detention with no habeas corpus now law, assassination of American citizens without due process de facto legal and official policy), and the Supreme Court, where every single new justice has been more conservative than the justice they have replaced. For decades. Moderate Democrats may like Obama just fine, but for those of us who hoped that a swing back after the worst President ever would mean more than just "moderately right of center"—well, we are quite right to be disappointed. Assassination and permanent detention alone are unforgivable.