The Ragin' Man knows he has one subscriber to this blog. Let's face it, the Ragin' Man had a relatively popular Myspace political blog using a character for a while in 2006-2007, and he just uses this one to vent. The Ragin' Man would have to follow a lot of blogs and pimp his blog, and let's face it, he's got too much stuff going on. The venting helps make the Ragin' Man less raging because he sees blatantly obvious cases of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance and can't let it go. Here's a case in which the Ragin' Man going to ask my one reader and anyone else who stops by a question at the end.
The Ragin' Man was reading an article online and saw something that normally causes a ruckus occurred this last week. President Obama walked out of a briefing into a room full of campaign donors and spoke to them with his mic on. One CBS reporter was listening in on the feed and taped it all.
What is probably most notable about this "hot mic" is the President said almost nothing noteworthy to the press. This is most easily explained by the American press living on gossip and political ramification over detailed analysis and fact. What is often reported on were President Obama's statements about his refusal to allow the Republicans to mess with the Affordable Care Act in any budget deal.
What is not often reported is a sentiment the Ragin' Man has shared with his Congressman about his own sudden concern for the deficit. The Ragin' Man has even asked Tea Baggers about this very thing, because according to the polling they elected or supported these same policies. The quote that won the Ragin' Man was this:
"When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure, he's just being America's accountant ... This is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill -- but wasn't paid for, so it's not on the level."
This is the question the Ragin' Man is asking you. How can someone who never spoke out or voted against any of the above things without proper funding/cutting, supported a Vice President who said "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter," and in most cases demonized the one Republican who did, John McCain, for being a "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) claim to have any care about the deficit without sounding like a hypocrite?
The Ragin' Man has repeatedly attempted to get his own Congressman who has the same voting record to admit he was wrong at the time or is just a complete hypocrite now, but to no avail. The Ragin' Man has a horrible representative.
It should be noted that in 2000 the Ragin' Man was a Republican, and went independent in the following years because of the deficit issue and the Iraq war falsehoods that were fairly apparent to anyone watching at the time.
So what do you think? Is the Ragin' Man crazy, or are these people just massive fuckups who refuse to acknowledge anything they've ever done?
First off, yes, I think the Ragin’ Man is crazy, but I’ve always thought that.
ReplyDeleteI will say, though, that I wince every time you call them “Tea Baggers.” It simultaneously disappoints and disgusts me. Labeling them as such indicates you see them as a uniform entity, ignorantly decrying that which they do not understand, and you get that all neatly wrapped up in one pithy little homophobic smear. Well, in vilifying them, generalizing them as the least of what you see (or what you choose to see or are presented), and summarily disregarding their message accordingly, you become the same that you decry. Should I then disregard what the Ragin’ Man has to say, because he ignores the message for the messenger? Do you uncouple your lips from Chris Matthews's tea bag before repeating his ignorance? Are you the “chill” that he feels running up his leg? I thought the Ragin’ Man’s mission was to point out hypocrisy, not act it out!
But yes, the fact that politicians act like the public has no memory and (for the most part) the public lets them get away with it really pisses me off. I think one of the biggest problems with the system is that it's easier (and probably more cost effective) for political figures to use sound bytes to cater to the dumb than to actually use logic and sound policy to govern or legislate responsibly. I'll admit, I thought it very irresponsible to start two wars without paying for them, but the eye-opener for me was when we tripled the deficit in the course of a year. In that light, I can understand if a politician might have said, "ok, we can overspend this much, but three times that is WAAAAAAAY too much," but that politician should be able to admit to it and explain it. Ignoring it and/or pretending it never happened is another story altogether.
First, the Tea Baggers called themselves that first. I'm not into the whole "thought police" concept of political correctness and I wrote an article after the first polling came out that analyzed what they really were. The Tea Parties are the actual protests and the "Tea Partiers" are the PACs themselves that put on the biggest events. Tea Baggers was the only word I had left to describe the individuals who identify as attending Tea Parties. The most individualized thing the Tea Partiers encouraged their members to do was to "Tea Bag" the President by sending him a tea bag. This blog will always be a fan of self identification. http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=Mjk1YmRjNzIxNmUwMTI0ZWYxZWU4OWU2MzFiOWJmNDE=
ReplyDeleteThe majority of that tripling of the deficit happened because the economy failed.
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/08/img/pie_chart_deficit.bmp
As someone who took a single class in macroeconomics I know that you have to take in revenue during times of plenty to keep things going in a downturn. I guess my biggest problem is that someone who took one class in Macroeconomics knows this, John McCain knows this because you apparently learn it while being held captive by the Vietnamese, but John Shimkus (R-IL) who graduated from West Point and got an MBA from SIUC DID NOT know this, will not admit his failure to know this, and no one who attends a Tea Party I've ever been to, and it's been a couple, knows this more than to say "It's been a problem for 50 years!" I was unaware that the budget surplus we were on track for in 2001 before we started sending out checks happened 51 years ago. My bad.