Tuesday Mashup Part Two (9/7/10)

(Part One is here.)

Ross Douthat of the New York Times tried to be clever yesterday (here – basically, this post deals entirely with “The Old Gray Lady”)…

To some extent, partisans persist in these arguments — “your side encourages extremists!”; “no, your side encourages extremists!” — because America really is rife with wild and crazy sentiments. The belief that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim (apparently held by nearly 20 percent of the country) gets the headlines. But as the George Mason law professor Ilya Somin has noted, national opinion polls reveal support for numerous far-out or noxious-seeming notions.

There’s the 32 percent of Democrats who blame “the Jews” for the financial crisis. There’s the 25 percent of African-Americans who believe the AIDS virus was created in a government lab. There’s support for state secession, which may have been higher among liberals in the Bush era than among Republicans in the age of Obama.

Gee, that’s a new one.

I will give Douthat a bit of credit for bothering to link to a poll supporting his claim about liberal support for secession (it’s a crap Zogby poll, but still a poll, giving us a number of 22 percent), but he doesn’t bother to link to a poll about Republican support for secession under Obama.

Well then, allow me to do so here.

Now I will grant you that it’s a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll, so it’s probably as incorrect as the Zogby poll. And the number turns out to be 23 percent support for secession among Repugs under Obama.

So it’s basically a wash, people (of course, I don’t recall any stories such as this under Dubya, but that’s another matter…and by the way, Governor “Goodhair,” I’m still waiting for you to deliver on your threat).

Next, John Harwood tells us the following (here – more Dem doom and gloom, of course)…

"...the economic arguments for allowing the top rates to return to Clinton-era levels have weakened amid rising anxiety about potential impediments to a recovery."

In response, I give you this, telling us the following…

The latest CNN/Opinion Research poll shows that 69% of Americans support ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy--they like the idea of higher taxes for people earning more than $250,000 a year. Go figure.

See you later, Harwood.

Finally, The Moustache of Understanding concocted a doozy of a column on Sunday (here)…

…America has gone from being the supreme victor of World War II, with guns and butter for all, to one of two superpowers during the cold war, to the indispensable nation after winning the cold war, to “The Frugal Superpower” of today. Get used to it. That’s our new nickname. American pacifists need not worry any more about “wars of choice.” We’re not doing that again. We can’t afford to invade Grenada today.

Sooo…Tom Friedman’s example of an American “war of choice” is…GRENADA??!!

I wonder why he didn’t cite the obvious one: you know, the place where President Obama just announced the official end of combat operations.

Do you think it could have something to do with this?

And as long as Friedman is telling this country, basically, to get used to eternal debt and a standard of living eroding before our very eyes, maybe it’s time that we listened once more to two individuals who were ridiculed in some quarters for claiming that the war would cost at least $3 trillion (if anything, that was a conservative estimate, if you'll pardon the expression – here)…

There is no question that the Iraq war added substantially to the federal debt. This was the first time in American history that the government cut taxes as it went to war. The result: a war completely funded by borrowing. U.S. debt soared from $6.4 trillion in March 2003 to $10 trillion in 2008 (before the financial crisis); at least a quarter of that increase is directly attributable to the war. And that doesn't include future health care and disability payments for veterans, which will add another half-trillion dollars to the debt.

As a result of two costly wars funded by debt, our fiscal house was in dismal shape even before the financial crisis -- and those fiscal woes compounded the downturn.

…

The global financial crisis was due, at least in part, to the war. Higher oil prices meant that money spent buying oil abroad was money not being spent at home. Meanwhile, war spending provided less of an economic boost than other forms of spending would have. Paying foreign contractors working in Iraq was neither an effective short-term stimulus (not compared with spending on education, infrastructure or technology) nor a basis for long-term growth.

Instead, loose monetary policy and lax regulations kept the economy going -- right up until the housing bubble burst, bringing on the economic freefall.

Saying what might have been is always difficult, especially with something as complex as the global financial crisis, which had many contributing factors. Perhaps the crisis would have happened in any case. But almost surely, with more spending at home, and without the need for such low interest rates and such soft regulation to keep the economy going in its absence, the bubble would have been smaller, and the consequences of its breaking therefore less severe. To put it more bluntly: The war contributed indirectly to disastrous monetary policy and regulations.

It is beyond belief even for a neocon simpatico Iraq war cheerleader like Friedman that he can say anything at all about this country’s current dire financial straits and utterly ignore the mess in Mesopotamia. However, he continues to do so with impunity, and is handsomely rewarded by the “newspaper of record” for it, I’m sure.

Friedman concludes with this (aside from his characterization of Europe as “rich but wimpy”)…

An America in hock will have no hawks — or at least none that anyone will take seriously.

Though, when it comes to warmongering corporatist politicians and their imperialist designs, I’m sure Friedman will do his very best to make us believe that we should continue to take them seriously anyway.