04.10.11

Bred to be sociopaths

Posted in Permanent Fail at 11:51 am by George Smith

Obama’s toady, David Plouffe made the morning rounds of the news shows explaining how last week’s debacle was a victory for the President. His face a fixed smile, Plouffe repeated “win the future,” “come together,” “act like grownups” and “for the American people” so many times. robotic or ‘on message’ didn’t do it justice. He was the very essence of trafficking in BAD.

You come to the conclusion that to work for the President you have to be a sociopath.

Take a look at this video of White House spokesman Jay Carney evading questions about Jeff Immelt of GE and you’ll see what I mean. It’s the same type of person, young and glabrous, whose job it is to lie professionally. A well-balanced person, if asked to do this, would have regular nightmares and a nervous breakdown after a couple weeks of it.

Not these guys. They’ve been made for it.

From Ezra Klein on declaring victory after you’ve just lost a major decision:

The Democrats believe it’s good to look like a winner, even if you’ve lost. But they’re sacrificing more than they let on. By celebrating spending cuts, they’ve opened the door to further austerity measures at a moment when the recovery remains fragile. Claiming political victory now opens the door to further policy defeats later.

Echo’d by Krugman:

It’s one thing for Obama to decide that it was better to give in to Republican hostage-taking than draw a line in the sand; it’s another for him to celebrate the result. Yet that’s just what he did.

The judgment was apparently that it was OK to move policy in the wrong direction, because the economy was strong enough to weather the shock, and that it was more important to look centrist than to defend good policy.

Of course, that didn’t work out too well last year, did it?

Earlier in the week, Matt Taibbi derided Paul Ryan with a particularly savage characterization.

It applies to these guys, too:

“All of these smug little jerks look alike to me [insert three or four Republican star names including Ryan’s]… they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups … They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.”

While their political views are radically different, down deep in the genes there’s very little difference between the David Plouffes and Paul Ryans.

I can’t take any more defeats fake gift-wrapped as wins or behavior as transparently reptilian as it gets.

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