The Zen of the American Public

What's right is wrong, what's true is false. We can cut taxes and not make any cuts to programs like Medicaid. We're Americans, and we can have our cake and eat it too!

The Slate's Jacob Weisberg, at least, thinks we're full of shit. Take a look at the article. His point is that Washington's gridlock has nothing to do with Obama's shitty salemanship or political ideologues. It has everything to do with the fact that we as the public, exhibit "the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large."

Some gems from the article:

One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it.

Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business.

Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There's another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

He brings it home with this quote, and I tend to agree:

I don't mean to suggest that honesty is what separates the two parties. Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public's delusions, on the other. I would put President Obama and his economic team in the first group, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans are more indulgent of the public's unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

Go figure. We get our opinions fed to us in 25-second sound bites generally from one single source. It is easy for politicians to play to our basest sensibilities when we don't collectively know enough to call them out on their own glaring contradictions.

Wake. Up.

[readers and contributors to this blog are not subject to this criticism...we're fucking brilliant]