The willfully blind debating the clueless

I should probably go back and look at some of the PBS Newshour's Political Wrap segments to see if they were once notably better than they are now. That's the way I clearly remember it. But maybe I was being too generous back then.

Mark Shields has been the liberal part of this two-commentator discussion team since I guess about the time radio was invented. These days, he practically sleeps through them. But he does wake up occasionally and applies some actual thought to what he's saying. And at least he remembers from the dim past how to draw a coherent contrast between Democrats and Republicans. His syntax is slipping, but you can normally understand what he's saying.

David "Bobo" Brooks has been his verbal sparring partner for the last decade or so. Bobo's specialty in live commentary is to frame even the goofiest Republican ideas as something that any sensible person can understand is cautious and well-thought-out. He has a "tell". Whenever his voice gets notably softer and takes on a careful, deliberative tone, that means he's delivering some particularly ill-founded Republican talking point.

That's Quality TV political commentary on the Political Wrap these days. When Bobo is out, they usually bring in some forgettable dweeb from National Review to take his place. When Sleepy Mark is out, for the last few years his main replacement has been Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, who for reasons that are completely opaque to me is considered a liberal by contemporary Beltway Village standards.

Alleged Liberal Ruth seems to get worse over time. She was on Friday with Bobo (Brooks, Marcus on Coming Economic 'Chaos,' New Recession Fears, Bain Debate 05/25/2012):



One of their topics was the economic/currency/debt crisis in Europe. Bobo clearly knows next to nothing about the topic. But he's practically a scholar in it compared to Alleged Liberal Ruth. Her syntax also seemed to be having some serious issues. They started off talking about the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Alleged Liberal Ruth's first contribution:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Congress going to come to its senses?

(LAUGHTER)

RUTH MARCUS: Well, I don't think anybody should ever bet on that.

But David said that Republicans seem chastened. You certainly couldn't tell it from the comments of Speaker Boehner, who seems more than willing to do a replay of the disastrous, from my point of view, economically, and also disastrous politically for Republicans, replay of the debt ceiling showdown last time around, a year ago.

And what's going to happen is, all of this Taxmageddon, as we are calling it, is going -- because of the timing of it, we will probably kick the can down the road from the lame-duck, for maybe six months into the next Congress. And guess what? That is going to coincide with, collide with hitting the debt ceiling yet again.

So the CBO -- I just -- quick thing on the CBO report. CBO used the R-word, which is very, very scary, recession. If all of these things come to pass, they said, the economy would be in recession in the beginning of 2013.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Which is what got everybody's attention.

RUTH MARCUS: Which got everybody's attention, but in some ways, that wasn't really the message that CBO wanted to send, because, yes, that would be a very bad outcome.

But the second thing they said is that the alternative, if you filled that entire fiscal cliff and cushioned it, and you just dug the debt deeper, the debt hole that much deeper, that would also be a terrible outcome, just later.

And so they have been begging in their very quiet-sounding CBO language, please, members of Congress, you need to both avert the fiscal cliff now and come up with a plan that markets can understand that you really have to fill the debt hole later on.

Whether Congress can manage that ...

So if we avert and fill the fiscal cliff, then later you can fill the debt hole, and, you know, the Taxmageddon debt ceiling, but the CBO at least uses polite language and that's nice. Or whatever, Boehner disaster.

Oooo-kay, then!

When they got to the Europe issue, Alleged Liberal Ruth should have said something like: "Honey, I don't have the faintest clue what you're talking about. And I would just embarrass myself if I even attempted to say anything about it."

Instead, she said this:

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, meanwhile, Ruth, you have got in Europe this week, became clearer that there really are serious disagreements on what they going to do to get out of their own debt crisis.

What -- is there a consensus on what effect that could have here?

RUTH MARCUS: Yes. The consensus is bad.

(LAUGHTER)

RUTH MARCUS: And the only question is how bad.

And that really, in a sense, though CBO didn't talk about it in their report, that just adds to the scariness and the height of the cliff, because what happens in Europe doesn't stay in Europe. We know that Europe seems -- the European problem just seems to be like a chronic disease now that we have been living with, and Europe doesn't seem to be getting well.

And as it's not getting well, and you see questions about economic growth in China, all of that has an impact on growth here, or lack of growth.

I have a wild hunch that Alleged Liberal Ruth was very impressed at some point with some presentation she heard on economics that used a lot of cliff metaphors, and that made her happy because she could think about pretty mountains and stuff while she sat there listening. Oh, and China, my, don't they have some nice cliffs in China!

This is Quality TV political commentary in the Age of OxyContin and Boehner debt filled cliff holes.

Maybe PBS should add Talking Tom animation that would repeat what the commentators just said but in a cute, high cartoon voice. That would at least make the segment entertaining.

Tags: david brooks, ruth marcus

Krugman takes on his Times colleague Bobo and Ruth Marcus

New York Times columnists aren't supposed to directly criticize each other in their columns. But Krugman seems to be pushing the envelope on that matter with David "Bobo" Brooks in his column No, We Can't? Or Won't? 07/10/2011, which should be read together with his blog post The Long and the Short of It 07/10/2011.

The Bobo commentary in question is from the PBS Newshour Political Wrap segment of 07/08/2011, in which the insufferable Ruth Marcus substituted for Sleepy Mark Shields, who was presumably taking an extended nap that day. I get grumpy about the Political Wrap, because it preserves the tone of Serious Commentary but is often little more than a clown show. Bobo delivers his version of that day's Republican Party talking points in a calm and soothing tone. Shields at least snaps awake occasionally and says something perceptive. The main effect of having Marcus on with Bobo is that she makes him sound like a profound intellectual. If Marcus has ever offered any perceptive political observation or analysis, it's not one that I ever recall encountering.

Here's the video:



Bobo offers his deep thoughts on the economic situation:

And so one of the lessons I take away is, we don't know much about the economy. And the second lesson I take away...

JIM LEHRER: Nobody knows very much.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Nobody knows very much.

DAVID BROOKS: And I think most economists would concede that.

JIM LEHRER: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: And the second thing I take away is that we're just not really good, the government is not really good at manipulating quarter-to-quarter growth.

The government can create the terms for long-range growth with human capital policies and good structures and good tax -- but boosting the economy from quarter to quarter, month to month, we just -- especially with fiscal policy, just don't have that within our power.

Anyone who has been listening to actual economists was probably surprised to learn that most of them think they are as clueless as Bobo pretends to be. I get the impression that Lehrer is occasionally poking fun at Bobo like when he summarized his comment as, "Nobody knows very much."

Fortunately, Ruth Marcus is there to show that some people know even less than Bobo:

JIM LEHRER: All right.

Ruth, the president -- one of the things the president said today was that maybe one of the reasons for the fact that private business has not been hiring is that they are all worried about the debt limit vote. Do you buy that?

RUTH MARCUS: No, but I -- any -- any argument that can get to an agreement on the debt limit, I give some tolerance to.

One of the things that's fascinating about the job numbers is that how you react to them and how you understand them within the context of the debt limit depends on what your preexisting conceptions are, so that Republicans saw the terrible job numbers and -- which are terrible -- and said, well, this just shows that the last thing on earth that we can do is raise taxes and squelch the prospect of job creation.

And Democrats saw it and said, this shows that we need to make sure that, whatever we do in the short-term, it doesn't -- you know, we can't cut spending and, therefore, cut growth, and we need to think about further stimulative things.

So, each side is going to take these numbers and use it to just make the same arguments that they would have made absent those numbers.

Why doesn't she just answer "present" and spare us the nails-on-the-blackboard moments of hearing her pretend to have something to say?

Anyway, Krugman was perhaps more charitable in the way he put it, but he rips them both in his blog post:

A number of people have been telling me about David Brooks and Ruth Marcus agreeing that there’s not much government can do about short-run economic performance, that we need to focus on long-run solutions. It’s a common sentiment inside the Beltway.

If you want to split hairs, Marcus didn't explicitly agree with him in that portion I just quoted; she only babbled incoherently and sounded like she was agreeing. But don't miss the later portion where she gushes about the Big Deal - the one that seriously cuts Social Security and Medicare benefits and begins the phaseout of both programs - saying, "And there is the big deal. The big deal is what gets David and me actually really revved up and excited."

Krugman continues:

And it's also utterly, utterly backwards. Changing the economy's long-run growth rate is hard. We’ve had almost 25 years of "new growth theory" research, with every possible regression run, looking for the keys to faster growth; my sense is that we’ve basically come up dry.

Meanwhile, policy can have huge short-run effects. Monetary policy for sure, in normal times. In a liquidity trap, that's harder — but fiscal policy does indeed work, if tried.

In the column, he discreetly avoid naming Bobo and Marcus. But he writes:

Yet a destructive passivity has overtaken our discourse. Turn on your TV and you'll see some self-satisfied pundit declaring that nothing much can be done about the economy's short-run problems (reminder: this "short run" is now in its fourth year), that we should focus on the long run instead.

And he explains, "Our failure to create jobs is a choice, not a necessity — a choice rationalized by an ever-shifting set of excuses." And goes on to deconstruct some of the favorite excuses.

In the blog post, he writes, "Politically, stimulus turns out to be hard to do. But commentators who spread fatalism are part of the problem." In the column he concludes with:

Listening to what supposedly serious people say about the economy, you'd think the problem was "no, we can't." But the reality is "no, we won't." And every pundit who reinforces that destructive passivity is part of the problem.

They say Krugman is shrill.

Tags: david brooks, paul krugman, ruth marcus

Videos on Obama's Afghanistan War speech and on the real existing Afghanistan War

Shorter Obama Afghanistan War announcement: We're never leaving Afghanistan so long as I'm President.

The full address of around 13 minutes from the White House 06/22/2011:



The transcript is here.

Here's a shorter piece narrated by Vice President Joe Biden, also from the White House 06/22/2011:



Biden mentions that the US in "engaged in two wars." Libya, of course, doesn't even count as "hostilities" in the war language of the Democratic White House.

Aljazeera English 06/23/2011, on Afghan responses to Obama's speech:



I don't know how long it will take corporate interests to corrupt Aljazeera into being as sloppy and uninformative as US broadcast and cable news. But while their doing solid work, it's worth taking advantage of it. This is a 25-minute "Inside Story" 06/23/2011 on the state of affairs on the Afghanistan War:



PBS Newshour 06/22/2011 report on Obama's Afghanistan speech, about 15 minutes with the first six being excerpts from the speech:



The video features Ruth Marcus, Washington Post columnist who counts as a "liberal" among the Beltway Village for reasons difficult to fathom, who the Newshour for reasons even more difficult to fathom thought might have something useful to say in the way of analysis. Her fellow analyst in this segment is Bill Kristol, who has the distinction of being spectacularly wrong and often dishonest about every significant question of foreign affairs for the last two decades.

And you wonder why we've been fighting in Afghanistan for nearly 10 years with no end in sight?

Tags: afghanistan war, ruth marcus, william kristol