SO UTTERLY, UNBELIEVABLY TYPICAL

As many of you I'm sure have heard by now, one of the recipients of The Nobel Prize for Economics this year, Peter Diamond, was nominated by President Obama to the Federal Reserve Board, but a Republican on the committee responsible for clearing the nomination has been keeping it from going through all this time using an obscure Senatorial procedural loophole to hold it up on the basis, he says, that Diamond hasn't got enough experience(!) in "macroeconomics" even though Diamond's speciality is JOBS! (Which he's been working on since THE SEVENTIES!)!

Hello? Anyone think we can use a Nobel economist whose specialty is unemployment and the jobs market?!

This is so utterly, unbelievably typical of rightwing Republicanism in this country today, where the lockstep followers of the rightwing line ala Rush/Hannity/Beck/Palin et. al. refuse to acknowledge reality, refute logic and reason, and declare anything that threatens their (the right's) political power to be its opposite, so long as it serves the interests of their corporate masters (though of course that too is turned on its head and projected as its opposite, e.g. "real Americans" etc.).

So you have Tea Partyers demonstrating against the government and the party that gave them Medicare and Social Security, screaming that the government leave their Medicare and Social Security alone but also that government is the problem and needs to be eliminated except for defense, etc.

Almost any argument I have read or listened to from the right contains at its core contradictions that wouldn't have made it past third grade logic and reason, let alone university level. And this is the most egregious example anyone could imagine. It should be the top story in every outlet of the media, just for the sheer absurdity and dark humor of it.

But it won't be, because the right will change the subject to some new lie that'll frame the top political news stories in their favor and the media will go along because the media is a part of the corporate interests that the right's positions serve. Ad nauseum.

[PS: Just found this editorial on the subject in today NY Times.]