Monday, February 07, 2005

Ditto, kiddo

Kevin Drum, who is known to have been a little "even-handed" in the past himself, blasts what he calls looking-glass journalism, the same phenomenon I described in the last post.

It's a progressive disease among America's commentariat. I particularly enjoy this little gem from Allen Sloan:

I'm in favor of private accounts constructed along the lines that Bush suggested. But the accounts ought to be in addition to the basic benefit, not as a replacement for about half of it. Democrats are crazy to oppose private accounts. They really do empower you.


Yep, Sloan's in favor of the same thing as Bush, except totally different. It really does take a radical sort of stupidity to pound out this kind of column. The bottom line is that the punditocracy simply doesn't get it: Bush doesn't want to fix Social Security, he wants to destroy it.

If the pundits would actually look at the man, what he does, what he does and doesn't stand for, they would stop being snowed by flowery rhetoric about freedom, not would they continue to treat his policy proposals as if they had a resemblance to real policy, ie. intending to solve problems instead of create them.

Bush and his buddies have been sucking off autocrats for decades, deriding vital social programs like SS for decades, planning their idiot revolution for decades. Considering the outcome of the last election, perhaps we in our time deserve a fourth estate seemingly overflowing with rubes, but as a nation, as the United States of America, we do not.