My WordPress problems don’t alter the fact that Alter’s a wussy.

Posted on August 26, 2011 by wormme

Dadgum! Everytime I try to hyperlink something here WordPress fails to do it and goes to the generic “posts” page. Never seen this screwup before, but rebooting didn’t help.

So, rather than linking to my text, let’s see if this is clickable for you:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-26/you-think-obama-s-been-a-bad-president-prove-it-jonathan-alter.html

How long did it take you to rebut that argument? Let me see…200 mph propagation speed…

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2002/DavidParizh.shtml

…perhaps as far as 9 inches through my ginormous melon…

…about 2.7 milliseconds? Hmm, no, that can’t be right. It didn’t take that long. Because the reflexive rebuttal was accurate, as usual:

Practice what you preach, lil’ Johnny.

Show me how it’s done. How did you prove Dubya was a bad President? That horrible 5.6% unemployment? The $4 trillion debt it took him 8 whole years to amass?

Both Reagan and Obama “inherited” horrible economic problems from the other party. Both said their policies would work. One of them was right. The one who was right was a good President, the one who wasn’t is a bad President. QED, ut a res jack.

And quit the whinin’, J.A. Your Altered Y chromosome is not an improvement on the real thing.

About wormme

I've accepted that all of you are socially superior to me. But no pretending that any of you are rational.

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4 Responses to My WordPress problems don’t alter the fact that Alter’s a wussy.

MG says:

August 26, 2011 at 11:31 am

Erudite idiocy.

The bankrupt, setup, arguing style is boring and overly common now. No one could say anything to convince him on any point. He’s made up his mind, and in his mind, explained why anyone disagreeing is wrong.

He has also committed a crippling error: placing religious level faith…in a man, a mortal.

Reply
- MG says:
  
  August 27, 2011 at 1:03 am
  
  Angry days make bad ‘discussion’ styles very annoying.
  
  Tell me again why Barack Obama has been such a bad president?
  
  Tell me why he hasn’t? Circular, declarational-tautologies are hard to use correctly; or more importantly, safely.
  
  I’m not talking here about him as a tactician and communicator.
  
  Wait, now he’s not god’s gift to oration? How times change! And, whatever happened to his Bin Laden killing, legendary tactical sense?
  
  We can agree that he has played some bad poker with Congress.
  
  Oh, sorry! I thought this was about ‘the wonder’ of the current President and not some droll mishmash about the irrelevancy of political theatre marred by bad negotiating tactics. After all, changing to un-stated demands after an agreement was supposedly made isn’t really most people’s idea of leadership.
  
  And let’s stipulate that at the moment he’s falling short in the intangibles of leadership.
  
  Err… With tactics and communication down (smart man to avoid bringing up the dreaded ‘strategy’) we’re not exactly talking about intangibles here…
  
  Your mission, Jim (and readers named something else), should you decide to accept it, is to identify where Obama has been a poor decision-maker.
  
  Remember that circular, declarational-tautology thing above? Yeah… Where has he been a good decision maker?
  
  What, specifically, has he done wrong on policy?
  
  Again, how about right? This is the problem with this accusational style of ‘discussion’; it gets nowhere; it’s a cheap assault on the other party to shame them into not answering.
  
  What, specifically, would you have done differently to create jobs?
  
  I didn’t run for the Presidency declaring myself ready and knowing what to do. With that said, a lot; it’s not like there’s a shortage of ideas around, tiger.
  
  And what can any of the current Republican candidates offer that would be an improvement on the employment front?
  
  Here we go again, another one of the simple stunts, found so commonly, in this style of ‘debate’. Guilt by declared, associational accusation. Forcing someone else to justify their view by grouping them with someone not necessarily related to it. Interesting aside: this is a common theme among emotional abusers, they force their victims to answer for other people and their actions.
  
  I’m not interested in hearing ad hominem attacks or about your generalized “disappointment.”
  
  Generalized acceptance is all you offer; why shouldn’t people offer generalized disappointment?
  
  I want to know, on a substantive basis, why you think he deserves to be in a dead heat with Mitt Romney and Rick Perry and only a few points ahead of Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann in a new Gallup Poll.
  
  Why doesn’t he? This is America, not some petty, one party banana republic. And there’s that whole circular, declarational-tautology thing again.
  
  Is it just that any president — regardless of circumstances and party — who presides over 9 percent unemployment deserves to lose?
  
  That’s the tradition. Got a real good reason it should change? And don’t make the Star Wars people go Yoda on you with something about ‘trying’.
  
  Every day you’re pummeling him from the right, left and middle.
  
  What do you know! He is a uniter!
  
  Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham even attacked the president for letting Libyan rebels take Tripoli instead of burying Muammar Qaddafi under American bombs months ago.
  
  Don’t look at me man, I’m against the whole Libyan thing, entirely. Kind of on topic though… Where did that President assassin go? Kinda weird to thug Bin Laden but not Qaddafi.
  
  Here we have the best possible result — the high probability of regime change for about one-thousandth of the cost of getting rid of Saddam Hussein and no bad feelings from the locals — and Obama gets savaged anyway.
  
  Careful with that ‘Mission Accomplished’ poster, champ; it kinda bites everyone who puts it up. Declaring you’ve made no bad feelings is a different thing than actually making none. Besides, who was it saying regime change to try and make democracies was bad a few years ago?
  
  Like everyone else, I’ve got my list of Obama mistakes, from failing to break up the banks in early 2009
  
  … Yeah … Great Idea … Throw a big government, anti-trust bomb into the middle of shaky banks. That’ll sure help… Please, can someone who actually understands the problems in the system step up and do something?
  
  to neglecting to force a vote on ending the Bush tax cuts when the Democrats still controlled Congress.
  
  Regarding leadership… How, when you are President, and your party has both houses, do you not get things like that…? This is not exactly helping the case being argued here.
  
  He shouldn’t have raised hopes with “Recovery Summer” and “Winning the Future” until the economy was more durable. I could go on.
  
  ‘Raised hopes’? Funny, some elements insisted these had nothing to do with hopes but were fact now; are you saying they were merely calculated, political showmanship? Interesting defense strategy.
  
  But do these miscalculations really mean it’s time for him to go?
  
  Why don’t they? Besides, to poison the readers’ thinking: You said above ‘I could go on’. We all know the worst is left unsaid by someone’s apologist, so the unsaid must certainly justify your question! (See! I can do this crap too!)
  
  Most of the bad feeling goes back to the first year or so of the Obama presidency. And in hindsight, those decisions really weren’t so bad. To prove my point, let’s review a few areas where he supposedly messed up.
  
  Oh hey, here we go, the minimize and deflect portion. The keywords: ‘goes back to’, ‘hindsight’, ‘weren’t so bad’, ‘prove my point’, ‘review’ and ‘he supposedly’, all tell us this. With a wife abuser they do this to the wife to relocate blame; I’ve noticed it a lot in this type of ‘discussion’ lately. It’s effective because so many people are abused. Let me rephrase the above quote: “This is all old stuff that you shouldn’t be mad about. Besides, you took it wrong anyways, it was for your own good.”
  
  From the left: “He should have pushed for a much bigger stimulus in 2009.”
  That’s the view of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, now gospel among liberals. It’s true economically but bears no relationship to the political truth of that period. Consider that in December 2008, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, a hardcore liberal Democrat, proposed a $165 billion stimulus and said he would be ecstatic if it went to $300 billion. President- elect Obama wanted to go over $1 trillion but was told by House Democrats that it absolutely wouldn’t pass. In exchange for the votes of three Republicans in the Senate he needed for passage, Obama reduced the stimulus to $787 billion, which was still almost five times Rendell’s number and the largest amount that was politically possible.
  
  The discussion about the size of the stimulus leaves out the most recent papers suggesting that the New Deal extended the length of the Depression. At least some of those were available at the time the discussion was happening.
  And again, for the President, it is not good news that while his party held both chambers he was negotiating so much; you’re not saying Republicans told him it wouldn’t pass, you’re saying Democrats!
  
  From the right: “The stimulus and bailouts failed.”
  When Obama took office, the economy was losing about 750,000 jobs a month and heading for another Great Depression. The recession ended (at least for a while) and we now are adding several thousand jobs a month — anemic growth, but an awful lot better than the alternative. How did that happen? Luck?
  
  Unemployment has increased while he has been in office, the numbers are there, unemployment is up; beyond the White House’s published worst case lines. Our participation rate is terribly low. Some of the drop off in the unemployment report is from people giving up entirely; that’s not a healthy job market. And finally, several thousand isn’t enough, IIRC we require 150k a month right now to keep up with population growth.
  
  All the bellyaching ignores that the Federal Reserve’s emergency policies stabilized the financial system,
  
  After 12 trillion in national wealth was lost in housing; without using any of the existing rules and laws to stop runs, preferring to give money to the banks for failing.
  
  and that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the stimulus increased economic growth and saved or created millions of jobs.
  
  Ah here we are again. He can use estimates, guesses and feelings, but, anyone disagreeing cannot!
  
  According to the Treasury Department, taxpayers will end up actually making money on the bank bailouts under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Obama inherited from the previous administration.
  
  Convenient, leaving out the part of Obama going back to DC to vote for TARP. Inherited indeed, from his own vote.
  
  The Republican alternative for job creation wasn’t tax cuts (the stimulus contained almost $300 billion in tax cuts) but deficit reduction and rolling back regulation. I’ve yet to see a single economist convincingly argue how either would have reversed the catastrophic job losses.
  
  Then you don’t know many, or, the ones you do are too ideological. If the deficit becomes too large it is depressive on economic growth; if regulations become onerous they also suppress growth. Further, this is a bait and switch question; you’re sliding times together and making people answer for them as if they’re a single moment.
  
  From all sides: “He took his eye off jobs by pushing health care.” Not really.
  
  Give it up, the polling is there, a majority don’t like it, stop the browbeating over it.
  
  Health care consumed enormous time and political capital in late 2009 and early 2010.
  
  With the Presidency and both houses under his party… This isn’t a glowing leadership recommendation.
  
  Sure, he should have rhetorically “pivoted to jobs” earlier, but substantively it wouldn’t have made much difference.
  
  Please no. He’s pivoted enough. If our lasers focused like he does the whole planet would be blind.
  
  And Republicans have offered no evidence for their claim that the Affordable Care Act (which includes tax credits for small businesses) has contributed to current levels of unemployment. How could it?
  
  The program hasn’t even fully begun yet.
  
  Yeah, and that’s the bad part. CBO estimates of 1 trillion per year deficits around 2020 aren’t good news!
  
  The all-purpose explanation from the business community is “uncertainty.” We’re told that people, and enterprises, won’t invest because they aren’t sure about future taxes.
  
  The market has an index for uncertainty! It affects what happens every day. Of course, mentioning things like that ruins the wedge comment to try and make uneducated people fall into an ‘us vs. them’ mindset.
  
  This is a crock. “People invest to make money,” the noted lefty socialist Warren E. Buffett recently wrote in the New York Times, “and potential taxes have never scared them off.”
  
  Again, as linked above. Also, people with money have to invest it; the exact way they invest it has ramifications and directly affects whether that investment will make opportunities for others. This is a semantics game, of course the rich invest, but if they are punished for investing in a way that makes jobs they don’t do so in a way that makes jobs.
  
  Again, from all sides: “He looked weak during the debt- limit debate.” Yep. And if you were president and a group of extremists was pointing a gun at the head of the American economy, what would you have done?
  
  Huh? Twilight zone here? I thought that was the macho moment in traditional scripts. Besides, way to demonize someone to avoid having to make a cogent point.
  
  Invoking the 14th Amendment sounded satisfying, but a constitutional crisis layered on top of a debt-limit crisis would have been a fiasco, and probably would have ensured default as world markets spent months wondering who in the U.S. had the authority to pay our bills.
  
  Did you miss the part where Lawrence Tribe said that didn’t work, it wasn’t constitutional?
  
  Elections involving incumbents are inevitably hire/fire decisions.
  
  So?
  
  With foreign policy mostly off the table,
  
  You hope.
  
  hiring a Republican means buying his or her jobs plan.
  
  Or giving up on one that isn’t working and looking for another solution.
  
  Firing Obama means rejecting where he has come down on big decisions.
  
  Little specious here, try being “specific and rational”; which ones?
  
  He and Romney will unveil their jobs plans in September.
  
  Because, you know, laser like focus. It could wait a month more.
  
  In the meantime, I’d like to hear from Democrats, Republicans and especially independents who voted for Obama the last time but have given up on him now. Why?
  
  Why not? Aren’t circular, declarational-tautologies fun!
  
  Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it, is to be specific and rational, not vague and visceral.
  
  Good for the goose…
  
  Seriously, Obama needs to get some new shills; these guys suck, and are making it worse.
  Also, I am so tired of this writing style; it’s so base. People want to know what’s wrong with our politics? Look at this tripe; it isn’t details, it isn’t information that can be used. And with that I close by pointing out that I have insulted tripe; at least it has nutritional value.
  
  Reply
  - wormme says:
    
    August 27, 2011 at 11:14 pm
    
    Wow, that’s one of the most brutal fiskings I’ve ever seen. Bravo!
    
    Reply
wormme says:

August 26, 2011 at 8:43 pm

Almost as big as Obama’s in letting it happen.

Reply