Trifecta!

ONE more big score and I can retire from blogging:

"And when I look at what Obama calls his 'Propellerheads'..."

--David Brooks, News Hour, February 20

Not sure how much I could have gotten for doubling down on "...and he'll do that simpering little half-smirk when he says it, as though he imagines the audience is wondering why a colossal intellect like David Brooks is sullying himself with a pop culture reference, and his answer is, 'Hey, I'm embarrassed about it myself, but it's the job.' "

And I'm no economist, and I've got no idea if this sort of thing could be made to work on a national, or global level, even, but it certainly looks like the surest investment one can make in our present environment is to gamble that careerist poltroons like Brooks, who've had the last twenty-five years to urge, to assure, to fucking guarantee that unfettered marketeering and unalloyed Republican rule would lead us all into Eternal Light and Great Deals on Consumer Electronics, will continue to say stupid shit. Apparently the idea is that their ability to nit-pick plans to clean up the horrific mess they are personally responsible for will at least keep them in the game until such time as they can Tell Us They Told Us It Wouldn't Work, and by then things'll be so bad we'll all have forgotten why we had to grasp at whatever desperate plan floated past in the first place. Brooks in particular, perhaps, or maybe it's just because he was forced into pretending for a living that he's a sort of personally tolerant version of David Frum. At any rate, he seems to be operating under the assumption that our current disaster means anyone ill-bred enough to bring up the cosmological certainty of his lifetime of previous economic pronouncements will be too busy scrounging for food to do so. Last night he found it necessary to mention twice that Obama "didn't have enough advisors in place" to handle the Crises, like a man who's just doused your vehicle with gasoline and set it afire pointing out a spot you missed last time you waxed it.

Bet on Stupid; that's my advice. Bet on David Brooks, "reasonable" "conservative", to keep saying shit like this, right up to the point where it doesn't look like it'll work in 2012, at which point he'll try to sound reasonable again, until they nominate Palin anyway:

"We have no consensus on the New Deal...how much it helped or to what extent it helped."

Because your bank may be a blasted pile of rebar tomorrow, but Stupid is eternal.

(Admitted, that one may be more Lie than Ignorance, but at this point for Republicans it amounts to the same thing.)