What would a “Smarter Ross Douthat” read like? Just blank, white paper?

As usual Ross adopts a muddled position. He appears to agree that Wall Street has been a bad boy but that the OWS-as-Paris Commune is a failure. Of course, the response of the French Government to the Paris Commune, which was partly a response to the defeat of the recent war with Germany resulted in many thousands of deaths in the 1870s. So we are now more sophisticated than that now, right? Um, maybe not. Remember that the current GOP wants to wrench the country back to the late 19th century before any of our current economic and regulatory agencies. Their ultimate aim is a national security state with few or now free speech rights, highly restricted freedom of assembly, no redress of grievances at all and freedom of religion restricted to fundamentalist Christians

Mind you, when the GOP and Blue Dog Dems got rid of Glaass-Steagall in 1999 that was it for the financial system – directly leading to bubble that caused the crash of 2008. So if the GOP takes over altogether, expect to see a) a next Great Depression and b) the erection of an authoritarian police state (as above).

Then they will have achieved their real goal: a fundamental Christianist version of Communist China.

What would a “Smarter Ross Douthat” read like? Just blank, white paper?

I’ve been feeding my old HP960 Ross’s best stuff?

No wonder it throws up ink most Saturday eves….

The Wisconsin protests didn’t defend American workers’ right to bargain for their fair share of company profits, as traditional union protests have. They defended government employees’ right to negotiate with elected officials over the division of taxpayer dollars — a recipe for profligacy that even liberal icons like Franklin Roosevelt and the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s George Meany once opposed.

Apparently government workers are all young bucks and welfare queens, just trying to bleed the gubmint for ill-gotten gains so they can buy big-screen TVs and cellphones. I expect that Douthat will soon support Newt’s plan to turn poor black children into school janitors, so they can learn the value of low-paid work, rather than deal drugs in their impoverished neighborhoods.

Does it make me a bad person to wish that Ross would learn what it was like to be a “profligate” government worker, rather than the well-paid fluffer to the 1% that the NYT pays him to be?

No – I feel the same way about Newtie. Let him spend six months as a janitor at one of those schools full of poor children, working for a janitor’s pay, and then maybe he’d be qualified to talk about poor children.

But don’t you know? Gummint em-poly-eez ain’t human! Ross sez so!

Does it make me a bad person to wish that Ross would learn what it was like to be a “profligate” government worker, rather than the well-paid fluffer to the 1% that the NYT pays him to be?

Nope, not at all. Make him a GS-7 in the Washington, DC area, where he’ll find that because of lobbyists and overpaid media fellaters driving up the cost of living, he won’t be able to find anyplace livable on his salary unless he’s willing to room with a few other folks.

Douthat:

Occupy Wall Street earned by far the most attention, while achieving the least in terms of actual policy… …haven’t even settled on concrete political objectives… …more interested in founding a kind of Paris Commune or Oneida Community in Zuccotti Park than in actually participating in public-policy debates.

Frank Luntz:

“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and one of the nation’s foremost experts on crafting the perfect political message. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

“I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market,’ ” Luntz said. “The public . . . still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”

Republican politicians are starting to worm “inequality” into their smarmy talking points, and recent negotiations in Congress have clearly been affected.

This is great really, OWS has become like this blank movie screen with everyone trying to project their ideas all over it and take credit for the movie. Obama supporters spend time debating how the Administration can capitalize on it best, Republicans try to discredit and coopt it at the same time, and on and on. It turns out that just staying true to your essential message without getting into specifics or choosing sides gets everyone completely confused and seeing what they want to see, and you actually move the conversation to the subject of inequality while Republicans like Douthat blather on that you’ve had no effect. Works for me.

Luntz & Co. are afraid? They should be.

Historically, real unemployment running at 20% for more than two years leads to violent revolution. We’ve been sitting on 16- to 18% for three years now, and the current GOP drive to end benefit extensions while slashing food stamps and AFDC could push that number above 22%.

We’ll see how well Ross, McCardle, Goldberg and the rest of the corporate flacks fair if the streets fill with truly desperate mobs.

There are a lot of places in this country where an unemployment rate of 20% would be an improvement. None of them are visible to guys like Douthat.

A “Smarter Russ Douthat” would write comedy sketches for OWS drum circles. Probably call himself “Homey Don’t Douthat.” :-P

Ross earns giant honking buck$ for providing Santorum moments for his 1% paymasters.

Is the Douchebag smart or dumb? You be the judge.

But one thing’s not questionable: Ross is a skeevy lying POS whoring dirtbag scumpod. The end.

Ahem…

Stephen Pacala, director of the Princeton Environment Institute, calculates that the world’s richest half-billion people — that’s about 7 percent of the global population — are responsible for 50 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile the poorest 50 percent are responsible for just 7 percent of emissions.

Here’s some fucked-up bullshit from our virtuous rejector of Chunky Reese:

“The Wisconsin protests didn’t defend American workers’ right to bargain for their fair share of company profits, as traditional union protests have. They defended government employees’ right to negotiate with elected officials over the division of taxpayer dollars — a recipe for profligacy that even liberal icons like Franklin Roosevelt and the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s George Meany once opposed.”

- So this ass is suggesting that our public servants are not American workers? Hey- Fuck you, Ross. When they’re processing your parents’ Social Security checks and ensuring they gain their full Medicare benefits, or ensuring that your food and water are not poisoned, or seeing to it that the Internet, mass communication and transit systems (including the airlines and roadways) are functioning, and a thousand other things they do, they have direct value to YOU, Ross. Others who see to it that more Americans can keep themselves nourished, clothed, and with shelter, they also provide a direct service to me, you, Ross, and the rest of us. I don’t want to see their jobs, hours, or compensation cut, not when there are numerous alternatives to balancing our governmental budgets.

- Ross hasn’t been a defender of private sector “..workers’ right to bargain for their fair share of company profits..”. Unless he cares to entertain as his next column subject former American Airlines CEO Gerald Arpey, who opposed the company’s needless filing for bankruptcy this week, saying “I believe it’s important to the character of the company and its ultimate long-term success to do your very best to honor those (labor and creditor contractual) commitments,” then fuck Ross there, too, also.

- There were no meaningful private or public funding crises for pensions or healthcare until massive deregulations of the financial, health care insurance, and pharmaceutical sectors allowed sociopathic fucks to destroy the economy and increase health care costs at a completely unsustainable rate. Nor was there a major public outcry over compensation for the rank-and-file public sector worker until decades of outrageously untruthful propaganda was followed by the crashing of the economy by our Randian enemies. Does Ross mention this? Of course not. Fuck him.

- “..even liberal icons like Franklin Roosevelt and the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s George Meany once opposed (public worker collective bargaining)..”. Yes, circumstances have not changed over the last 70 years, and as a supporter of both FDR and the AFL-CIO I have no right to oppose, say, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the corruption that existed in the AFL-CIO under Meany’s leadership, and their positions on public sector workers. Ross enters clownish support for his anti-worker premise here.

I could go on with this column, but fuck it, and fuck Ross.