If You Were Really A Liberal, You'd Kneecap The Poor, For Liberalism

Back when I wrote that the neoliberal slogan was "[i]f you really were a liberal, you'd hate liberalism and hate Democrats", it was meant as kind of a joke. Mickey, though? He's *living* it:

Preserving Clinton's biggest domestic achievement isn't something you should want "even" if you're a liberal who believes in affirmative government. It's something you should want especially if you're a liberal who believes in affirmative government.

(This is the point when liberals who believe in affirmative government should check to make sure their wallets are still there.)

On behalf of liberals who believe in affirmative government, allow me to excerpt the relevant portions of our wish-list:

1) A job and a pension for young and old (or at least some federal expenditures to pull us out of our current tailspin) ...
356) Mickey jumping out of a plane, realizing that his parachute is a knapsack, and then falling slowly out of view until we hear a thud and see a cloud of dust rising from the bottom of a canyon ...
2114) The federal government continuing the incentive for states to keep welfare caseloads low (Bill Clinton's biggest domestic accomplishment!) in the middle of a rising wave of unemployment and economic contraction ...

See? Liberals do want the survival of the caseload reduction credit. We just gotta get to a few other things first. Thanks for the concern, though.

[Isn't this where Mickey cites the First Law of High Contrarianism -- liberalism can be neither created nor destroyed -- and argues that you can't have #1 without #2114, much like you can't help unskilled workers without a border fence and you can't redistribute wealth without killing the UAW? -- ed. Yes, increasingly shrill voice inside my head -- history has shown that you just can't expand unemployment benefits in tandem with successful federal investment in jobs creation. Except for, you know, that one time.]

*******

Besides the sheer volume (can you tell that Mickey's been looking for an excuse to write about welfare reform since 1996?), there's not a lot to Mickey's thesis here. You can even play along at home. First, take a look at this unemployment chart:



Now, ignore that chart. Assume it's 1996 and we're still right in the middle of Clinton's economic expansion, with jobs a-plenty. The only thing that would lead people to go on welfare is having one of the 598,000 jobs lost in January alone a culture of dependency!

The next step is to assume completely-inexplicable-yet-entirely-nefarious motives ("the Dems would like" caseloads to "soar"!; Money Liberals want "[l]ots of new people on welfare"!). Why on Earth do Dems and "Money Liberals" (a term destined to go viral) want these things?

/crickets chirping
/tumbleweed rolls by
/lone audience member coughs

Finally, assert that stopping liberals will be ... great for liberalism! Hooray?

[T]he now-undermined welfare reform was the key to rebuilding confidence in (liberal) affirmative government.

I'd ordinarily say that this is the kind of unprovable, ridiculous assertion that Mickey throws in between two data points, hoping that his readers won't see the scotch tape holding it together, but he's got it totally right.

The Confidence In Liberal Affirmative Government Metric (CILAGM) is at 7.2, its highest level in decades, and a Gallup poll taken right after the 2006 election credited "Rebuilt Confidence in Affirmative Government due to Welform Reform of 1996" as their reason for returning Democrats to power.

It's just science.

*******

Bonus Tip: If cornered by actual economic reality, pull the ol' switcheroo:

But lack of jobs isn't a reason to loosen work requirements. It's a reason for the government to provide the jobs.

"Lack of hair isn't a reason for you to refuse to sleep with me. It's a reason for you to buy me a toupee."

Here's how Mickey -- a closet Keynesian, apparently -- plans to enact his federal jobs-providing legislation:

Step 1: Crawl into bed with the truly insane anti-stimulus crowd and scream incessantly that the stimulus (and not, you know, the economic disaster that the stimulus is supposed to alleviate) is going to put people on welfare again.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: The New Deal.

*******

Judging from his blogging -- and it's not so much blogging as it is rewriting "The End of Equality", the second time as farce -- Mickey's preferred course of action is to use red state animus over welfare to cajole Democrats into creating a new Civilian Conservation Corps, to be run by the Heritage Foundation for the good of the working poor.

If only the world was ready for you, Mickey.

A Honest Explanation For The Long Delay

My cat is sick.

I'm working on Fire Mickey Kaus: The Novel.

I've spent the past forty-one hours stuck in an elevator.

Reading Mickey is goddamn exhausting.

But fear not, loyal reader -- if Mickey can write about the same five things over and over again, I can write about Mickey writing about the same five things over and over again, over and over again.

Until my head explodes.

More tk.

Lying Down With Dogs

Mickey -- a Democrat, remember -- continues his jihad against expanding help to the unemployed in the midst of a massive recession by citing to the following reliable sources:

- The Cato Institute (pegging the welfare expansion as $3BN);
- The Heritage Foundation (which has the cost at -- hold on to something -- $787BN);
- Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner (unspecified "billions"; he also calls Mickey a "journalist"!); and
- The New York Post ("His "stimulus" bill is not change we can believe in. It's a return to big-government welfare that we will choke on").

In fairness, he does link to two articles in the New York Times. Unfortunately, he does so to prove the existence of a new "larger liberal campaign" to roll back work requirements and get everyone back on the dole (because Democrats hate it when people have jobs -- it's true!).

[Uh, are we sure welfare isn't back in the news because the country is hemhorraging jobs? -- ed. Please, we all know it's because the unemployed and destitute have a powerful cabal of lobbyists and PR men!]

The best link of the bunch is Heritage's article, which arrives at their massive figure through a combination of wild speculation ("both Congress and President Obama intend for most of these increases to become permanent") and definitional sleight-of-hand (the EITC, Head Start and Pell Grants (!) all seem to be counted as "welfare"). After redefining reality to match their imagination ("the goal of the bills is spreading the wealth"), they accuse Congress of having untoward motives:

The claim that Congress is temporarily increasing welfare spending for Keynesian purposes (to spark the economy by boosting consumer spending) is a red herring. The real goal is to get "the camel's nose under the tent" for a massive permanent expansion of the welfare state.

Well, grants to low-income college students do discourage hard work and early childhood education clearly encourages a culture of dependence. Only the Heritage Foundation has the guts to say what we all know ...

You'd think Mickey might notice that a few of his cites have red flags (seriously, John, a "journalist"?), but Mickey's gone native:

If a state somehow succeeds at placing would-be recipients in jobs, it's out of luck under this provision. To get the extra federal money, it has to get more people on welfare.

Ah, he's referring to New Kausland, the state that would actively prefer to have high unemployment, just so it can get its hands on some federal money (federal money in New Kausland is worth three times as much as regular money, and smells of sweet perfume).

The best part about all of this is that Mickey seems to believe that the Heritage foundation -- currently endorsing the insane "more tax cuts" plan while citing to discredited-and-inaptly-named hack Amity Shlaes as proof that government just doesn't work -- and their ilk really have the best interest of the country at heart, as he approvingly repeats their call to arms ("better to whack off the camel while you're outside the tent", or something). Meanwhile, he just assumes that the Democrats are subversively trying to permanently expand welfare because ... well ... because they're evil! That's why!

Hey, wait, I forgot another one of Mickey's links:

Today, only about 40 percent of families eligible for cash assistance under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program actually receive it.

Goodness. Maybe that's why people think removing the state's incentives to decrease caseloads is necessary in bad economic times? And maybe conservatives are not actually making good faith arguments about the moral hazard of incentivizing unemployment, but are, in fact, pathetically trying to revive the demagoguing that dominated the "welfare reform" issue for nearly two decades (recipients = shiftless and lazy; proponents = sinister socialists) because stoking hate and fear is the only thing they know how to do?

No, no ... I must be overthinking things.

Raison D'Etre

[What do you have against Kausfiles? -- ed.]

Okay, you sit down to read your Slate, and you're enjoying your Daniel Gross and Fred Kaplan and Dahlia Lithwick, right? And then there's Mickey fucking Kaus, bottom right hand corner, just waiting to suck. And it's the last thing you read, so it spoils everything you read before it.

[You could just not read it. -- ed.]

I hate it, yet I'm uncontrollably drawn to it.

... And That Was Quick

Man, as soon as I put up a post saying how tolerable Mickey had become (6 in a row!), he throws up a missive about how awful it is that the least of us might stand to get benefits from the stimulus package.

The less fortunate get all the breaks!

Better to use the money (and more) to create public jobs*** for these would-be recipients if private sector jobs have dried up, even if that upsets municipal employee unions (which don't want welfare recipients doing jobs their members might do)?

Oh, it's all there: grammatical problems (why, precisely, is that sentence a question?), ridiculous assumptions (municipal employee unions -- and not, say, Senate Republicans -- are the true enemies of progress!), and unrealistic alternative outcomes (the return of the WPA is apparently on the table -- who knew?!?) employed in an attempt to shame Democrats into supporting Republican positions and politicians.

Of course, it's all to settle ancient scores for the good of the nation!

It's good to have you back, Mickey.

Stock Up On Canned Goods

Don't look now, but Mickey has posted six (6!!!) largely unobjectionable posts in a row, including a defense of the pro-card check nominee for labor secretary (the daughter of a Mexican union organizer, no less!) and an always-enjoyable reminder to an amnesiac Iraq war supporter of where they were six years ago.

[The good bloggers know to bury their final conclusion under mounds and mounds of vacillations --ed. "Vacillations"? A desk fan is known to vacillate; Mickey flailed wildly from one conclusion to another. He had so many "on the other hand" caveats that by the day of the invasion he looked like Vishnu.]

Also, something he wrote actually came true!

Yesterday's CW: This Daschle business stinks. He has to withdraw!

Today's CW: He sure withdrew easily. Weird.

Tomorrow's CW: Obama sure gave up on him easily. Wimp!

It's like the media's version of the Madonna/Whore complex. If you give in too quickly, they lose respect.

Not quite three days later:

I can't figure out what's more upsetting, Mickey's hot streak or the fact that I'm here mocking a blogger that not even paid employees of Slate bother to read.

It Would Have Been Called: "Oh yeah? Well, why don't you marry the AFL-CIO? Huh?"

Here I was, all ready to level my own criticisms of Mickey's latest self-defeating anti-union post, a "you're not hardcore unless you LIVE hardcore" charge of hypocrisy aimed at Arianna Huffington because she has thus far failed to pre-emptively unionize her workforce herself [Wait, Mickey won't even wait for her to actively oppose unionization efforts before calling her a hypocrite? -- ed. He doesn't have time to wait -- he's already lost Bangle! He needs a new hobbyhorse ...].

I had a link ready to Pajama Media's hilarious collapse, and was coming up with some pithy comment about how it looks like a few of them could have used a jobs bank.

Maybe I would have played compare-and-contrast with Mickey's own ten-percent-pay-cut-on-demand arrangement with management (with all proceeds going to an MSM Dinosaur, no less).

Alas, some other blog beat me to it:

But, hah, the fact that a rich person wouldn't want their company unionized and that such a unionization would basically be impossible to accomplish at the moment and the fact that the end result of such a unionization would be that good workers like Linkins would be better-compensated is basically the argument for the terrible scary Card Check legislation, so good for you, Mickey, you are doing the lord's work.

Clearly, bloggers need a union -- only legalistic work rules can prevent this kind of duplicative Kaus-bashing.

Blue Wards Are Like This ... Red Wards Are Like This ...

Okay, that wasn't all. More notes on the idiocy of David Brooks:

- Is it only people in Northwest D.C. that hate "dumb people who are richer than they are"? Isn't hatred of these people pretty much universal?

- I understand that D.C. policy wonks are famously ugly, but how does Wall Street represent "people with good bone structure"? Have you been to Wall Street? I guess John Thain kinda looks like David Hasselhoff with a shirt on, but still ...

- Apparently, there aren't any "lawyers, TV producers and senior civil servants" in New York. Just can't find a lawyer anywhere in Manhattan! (My theory w/r/t his belief that the center of the media world is D.C.: he's way too boring too dumb too ugly his bone structure is too poor to get on TV in New York, and so the only TV producers he knows are on the Sunday morning "two conservatives for every half a liberal" political shows.)

- Another one of the three things people in Northwest D.C. disdain: "cleavage." Really? Was there a poll?

- Also, doesn't New York disdain "hunting", too? Probably even more so that D.C., right? Isn't this one better suited to some manufactured "Upper West Side vs. Wasilla, Alaska" hate-off? ("Wasillans despise three things: non-Second Amendment rights, phonies, and restaurants with unlaminated menus.") It's pretty clear this one's on the list just so the right-wing anger bears can reminisce about the good times, when Brooks' Jeff-Foxworthy-channels-the-culture-war routine allowed the rank-and-file to pretend that the corrupt oligarchy they were abetting was (surprise!) actually a populist movement.

- Is there a more perfect encapsulation of David Brooks than his statement that -- in the midst of two wars, an enormous financial collapse, a recession, climate change, and any number of actually important policy disputes in Washington -- he's "become increasingly concerned about the rising number of rich people who are being caught unawares by shifts in the sumptuary code"? I say no.

Newspaper of Wrecked Word

David Brooks, in the opening paragraph of a typically asinine column, says this:

Then there was John Thain, who was humiliated because it is no longer acceptable to spend $35,000 on a commode for a Merrill Lynch washroom.

Back on Sunday, Deborah Solomon and J.D. Trout, in one of Solomon's usual Russert-level dialogues, had this exchange:

[JT:] When you’re spending lots of excess money — money that wouldn’t make any difference to your subjective well-being — you’re spending the money on a hedonic vomitorium of sorts.

[DS:] You’re comparing piano lessons to the apocryphal vomitoriums into which decadent Romans supposedly regurgitated their dinner?

[JT:] The vomitorium image is just the idea that you’re consuming something that can’t be used by other people, and it gets wasted on you.

A commode is -- and I believe we went through this with Duke Cunningham, didn't we? -- a set of drawers (h/t). You don't put it in a washroom.

A vomitorium is a tunnel in an amphitheater. (Solomon almost avoids the error, but the vomitoriums weren't "apocryphal" -- the Roman vomit parties were.) Vomitoriums allow actors to come onstage, and aren't actual conduits for purging.

These people are paid to use words correctly. That is all.

Always Darkest Before The Dawn

First, Sen. Judd Gregg disappoints Mickey by choosing to have a job post-2010 instead of defending the nation from the tyranny of the wicked (card check).

Then, Sen. Kristen Gillibrand disappoints Mickey by choosing to have a chance at winning a statewide election instead of waging war against the forces of evil (education benefits for children of immigrants).

Thus -- stabbed in the back by politicians acting in their obvious self-interest (who could have seen that coming?) and refusing to advance the agenda of some random dude in Southern California waiting for the Know-Nothing Party to return and merge with the Pinkertons -- a disillusioned Mickey opens his web browser and wearily scans the news ...

!!!!!!!!!

Smile, Mickey! The day is yours!


Yikes ... on second thought ...