For the record, I do not necessarily consider
Politico to be the blight on humanity that many others consider them to be. If a news outlet ostensibly seeking to be informational spends their time wallowing in the morass of What A Politician Said, as opposed to the plain reality of the world, that is indeed extremely blight-ish, but the
Politico defense is right there in the name and the concept; a one-stop shop for all the pointless bullshit that political figures demand they be allowed to say, neatly cordoned off into a section of internet that you can go to if and only if you have the possibly-unhealthy need to hear contrafactual bullshit from the nation's most highly paid bullshit artists. It would be even better if the name of the site was
professional political whores spouting unsubstantiated bullshit dot com, but that is what the word
politico has meant since it was invented, and the shorter version is easier to type.
That may sound like damning with faint praise, but the notion of creating a specific place where all the professional crooks and charlatans can dutifully get quoted saying the phrases some think tank is writing them big checks to say? That has potential. That even has value. All we have to do is put a fence and a moat between that zoo exhibit and all the rest of the actual news, i.e. the actual damn facts, and we'd be getting somewhere. Maybe there will someday be a world in which you will receive the actual facts of a news story from, say, CNN (again, this is purely hypothetical; I realize putting "the actual facts" and "CNN" in such close proximity makes the premise seem particularly far-fetched or nonsensical, as if I had said "in the future perhaps the Ebola virus will cook your breakfast", or "in the future monorail Don Lemon flapjack"), but consumers would be required shuffle off to separate purely politically-minded place like Politico to hear Heritage Institute fellow George P. Syphilis angrily shout that regardless of what you or I or several generations of scientific research might conclude, the sky is in fact green if he and his personal financial backers damn well say it is. There is value in allowing politicians and their associated hangers-on to spout whatever they might feel like spouting, because it is only then that we can do the democratically necessary thing, which is to hold it against them.
On other days I despair of even this small amount of optimism, because our little plan of sequestration and demarcation here relies entirely on being able to separate out the bullshit artists and not treat them as respectable or particularly knowledgable members of society, or at least not as people whose thoughts on sky coloration should be taken seriously or met with chin-stroking contemplation. That in turn would require the societal ability to make note of when certain people were Always Goddamn Wrong—there would have to be a public unit of wrongness, and it would have to be named after Bill Kristol for very obvious reasons, and the people who continually top that scale would have to lose the "expert" label dutifully appended to their self-advertising chyrons and instead be more properly labeled "advocate" or "paid propaganda-peddler" or "unsuccessful psychic" or "sad clown painting come to life and with chip on shoulder, entry seven in a series" or what have you.
And that, below the fold, leads to our current problem.
For this plan of Politico being a valuable-if-cordoned-off playground for the professional liars—aka the "respectable" brothel that cleans up the rest of town—to work, Politico has to cut this particular shit out right now.
“After so many years of sluggish growth, we’re finally seeing some economic data that can provide a glimmer of hope,” McConnell said during a floor speech on Wednesday. [...]
But does the new Republican Congress deserve any credit, even though it just got here? POLITICO asked a wide range of economists to weigh McConnell’s claim. Their answers:
Taking the most transcendentally silly thing any political voice has said in the last month, an explanation of world events that relies on time going forward and backward and being a five-dimensional cube with puppies for corners, and applying a
he-said, she-said veneer to it, something that looks superficially akin to "fact checking" but which is actual execution
the exact opposite, is doing the world no favors. Nope, that's genuine A-grade despair fodder, right there. A reader who is not fond of McConnell might take some joy in seeing the resulting two pages of opinions narrowly avoid calling Mitch's comments the likely product of a liquid lunch, but that's beside the point. The PuppyCube theory must have its day, because the whole premise of politics—and this very piece—is that bullshit and expertise are interchangeable and equal things.
Which of these economists are trustworthy? Which are not? Which have a longstanding and deeply partisan agenda that colors their every last sodding scribbled word? That would seem to be the key element underpinning the value of the entire piece—the thing that allows the reader to actually judge PuppyCubism as scholarly endeavor or Drinky-Drinky Napkin Stain. Or, alternatively, To Hell With That.
It'd be tempting to single out, say, the solicitation of a response from the Heritage Foundation. So let's do that, because those embarreled fish aren't going to shoot themselves.
Stephen Moore, chief economist, Heritage Foundation:
“I do think that the Republican Congress is a bullish thing for the economy and I think [...]
All right, we can stop there. The rest doesn't matter. While Politico did indeed ask a
wide range of economists, ranging from
actual to
you're kidding, right?, the inclusion of the Heritage Institute as economic experts points to a bleak national future. The Heritage Institute is to economics what Bill Kristol is to everything else. An entire section of Stephen Moore's current too-spartan
wikipedia entry may be devoted to the things he has been
flatly wrong about or
misled on, but he was still considered a prime "get" intended to prop up the credentials of an increasingly incompetency-riddled and insincere institute that even the most
stubborn of movement conservatives recognized had lapsed into "rubbish" needing "salvage." Asking the Heritage Foundation their thoughts about the world of economics is like asking your dog what you should have for dinner. Your dog may indeed have a ready answer (
that dead squirrel I found in the culvert has been fermenting nicely, master—I suggest pairing it with a nice Chardonnay or water from the downstairs toilet), but that doesn't mean it was clever of you to ask, or clever of you to let on to the rest of us that you asked. Don't be the crazy person who asks their dog what to eat for dinner, Politico. At least aspire to more than that.
So at the moment I am despairing again. Perhaps Charlie Pierce is right to have taken up the jug of antifreeze; perhaps once again I have been punished for having a fleeting rotten speck of optimism about something, as I have been every other time I have not thought the worst about our prospects as a democracy. I still think there may be some value in collecting all the various charlatans and crooks and scoundrels in a single opinion-having location, a sort of zoo for the professionally insincere, but that requires keeping the animals and the caretakers separate—not putting a keeper's uniform on a tiger and telling him to go clean the alpaca cage—and I suppose it would all go Jurassic Park in short order anyway.