TIME FOR SOME PERSPECTIVE

I watched the Tea Party supporter who made the film about Sarah Palin (that's flopped) on the Bill Maher show last night and it was as frustrating as the rightwing illogic and unreason I have to delete repetitively on this blog which is just parroting the rightwing media machine.

This guy last night would be confronted with logic and reason and facts by the other guests, one of them an astrophysicist the other a woman who I think they said runs Salon.com. Every time they refuted his incorrect assumptions based on rightwing talking points, he'd respond with the same talking point. (He would sometimes say something factual and of course in those cases there'd be no argument, but I've written about that tactic before, it's a well used and often successful one in propaganda).

One of those talking points was that what they were calling "Obama's stimulus" package "failed." Which is equal to the right saying that any economist, no matter how many Nobels they have among them, is wrong if they say anything that goes counter to the Koch brothers and their other rightwing billionaire masters' interests. Because if you take pretty much any indicator the right wants to use, the facts speak clearly that the only problem with "Obama's stimulus" program, was that it wasn't big enough, and that it ended.

The great drop in the stock market this week was partially caused, as the head of S&P (the ratings company that lowered the US rating from triple A to double A plus—but also gave triple A's before the Bush/Cheney Recession began to the very financial institutions that caused it!) said yesterday, by the intransigence of the Republicans to allow any kind of "revenue" increases (i.e. getting rid of loopholes and exemptions in the tax code that favor millionaires and corporations making historical profits, like oil companies, etc.) as well as the Dems not making bigger cuts to programs that help the poor and middle class.

But here are some obvious facts. Jobs have been added to the economy every month since "Obama's stimulus" plan kicked in but not enough to offset the enormous job losses under Bush/Cheney. The obvious conclusion there is a bigger stimulus would have saved more jobs (it's a no-brainer, since many of those jobs relied on either some government support or consumer spending, but if you cut government spending then jobs that depend on that support disappear and those out of work or forced to take low-paying service industry jobs don't have money to spend so consumer spending drops etc.).

It is clear also if you take the stock market for an indicator. It fell off a cliff under Bush/Cheney and when Obama took over was heading for another Great Depression style debacle when the "stimulus plan" kicked in and suddenly it started climbing back up and has been climbing ever since on average. But as soon as the Congress passed a bill with no stimulus but only spending cuts, it went off the cliff again. Pretty clear ain't it?

Not to rightwingers. Who overwhelmingly believe untruths (studies cited in earlier posts, or linked to, show that left-leaning pundits get their facts right a high majority of the time while rightwing pundits don't) dictated to them by their corporate and billionaire masters (though it's only fair to point out that they take their orders often unwittingly, just responding emotionally to people like Rush and those on Fox News etc. because they speak to their fears and what their followers think are their own interests, because they can't see through their fear and prejudices what is really going on—e.g. the rightwinger on my blog constantly thinking he's discrediting Paul Krugman by calling him names or claiming Krugman doesn't know what he's talking about when the facts show that Krugman has been correct about his analysis and even his predictions more often than almost any other economist and so way more than rightwing economists and pundits it's like comparing Michael Jordan in his prime to your eight-year-old daughter's attempts to play basketball).

There is no refuting the reality that rightwing Republicanism has turned what was once a great country, with problems but attempting to address them, into a failing behemoth—with an economic gap between the rich and the rest of us bigger than any other advanced country and many "developing" (or what they used to call 'third world") countries, a failing healthcare system (until "Obama's" healthcare plan began implementing some changes that have actually improved the system), decaying infrastructure (as some said on the Baill Maher show last night, when they go to other countries, some even in "the developing world" they are "embarrassed" for the US because these other countries are not only doing better with infrastructure but have up-to-date technology improving their infrastructure while the US lags behind or completely stops, etc.), the loss of jobs and revenue to outsourcing and offshore scams, et-endlessly-cetera.

When the rightwing terrorist did his destruction in Norway recently, one of the interesting things for me was hearing Norwegians in news reports referring to their country as "the greatest country in the world" or "the richest" etc. (which it is if you base comparisons on  health, longevity, per capita income, many economic indicators, etc—and where another country beats them in one or another category, that other country also has universal health care and paid six week vacations and government subsidized programs that have eliminated poverty etc. etc. etc. in other words, is equally 'socialistic").

The right's economic policies and politics have proven over and over again that they don't work, and yet with the help of rightwing "think tanks" putting out talking points and position papers that misrepresent, misinform and lie about reality in order to serve the greed of their benefactors (ala the Koch brothers) and the rightwing media repeating those talking points and their rightwing followers parroting those points all over the Internet and through talking heads on news programs frightened by their own corporate masters into presenting a false equality between "all points of view" as if facts don't matter etc. the right continues to hold a disproportionate influence over the public discourse and political policy (ala the horrible "deal" struck by Obama and the Dems over the "debt ceiling" and deficit just to avoid an even worse outcome, which default would have caused).

It's like the Dems and most reasonable people are now living and working under the restraint of not "first, do no harm" but "first, limit the harm done by the right as much as possible lest they destroy the country completely"—which they are obviously on the way to doing, if people give up and let them.