– MuddyPolitics
Insanity isn’t a condition that should be taken lightly, especially when the subject of the discussion is a 68-year old ideologue who’s accuracy ranking among the nation’s most prominent political voices is…dead last. Rest easy. I’m not going to talk about insanity. I’m going to talk about inanity instead.
Specifically, I’m going to talk about Cal Thomas, a syndicated columnist whose career as a rightwing cheerleader should be drawing to a close any day now. Conservatives who care about the future of their movement can’t afford to have apologists like Thomas speaking for them anymore. It’s not his shyness of accuracy that matters (facts are to most conservatives what flies are to asses: annoyances). What matters is that Thomas seems to have lost whatever overrated ability he may once have had to think deeply, or at all, about…anything. His latest rant about President Obama demonstrated that Thomas can no longer perform the most basic function of a nationally syndicated columnist: that of formulating anything even slightly resembling a coherent sentence.
For example, Thomas states, “Like the floodwaters that have devastated the northeast, the federal government has overrun its constitutional limits.”
Now, we know what he’s trying to say here, but what he’s trying to say and what he’s actually saying are two completely different things, sort of kind of like the comparison of floodwaters and constitutions. Rather than just pushing the keys on the keyboard and writing, “The federal government is a disaster,” Thomas pulled an obscure simile out of his ass and ended up writing about floodwaters having limits – constitutional limits. (Rivers may have limits – we call them “banks” – but the intention of floodwaters is to flood, hence the name.)
The image Thomas depicted is that of the Founding Fathers of Floodwater rolling in their graves for the modern floodwaterers’ failure to accurately interpret the Floodwater founding document. Perhaps it got water damaged? Now, in his defense, it’s very possible that if bubbling brooks started violating the Constitution, we’d have to indict them on charges of treason. But what if it was a Canadian bubbling brook that crossed the border legally?
It gets a little confusing, and that’s the point. (If he’d written a column condemning Toyota for killing people, he’d have said, “Like the meteors that destroyed the dinosaurs, Corollas have faulty gas pedals,” and we’d all have laughed – until Rick Perry came forward and revealed the truth: that faulty gas pedals are a Ponzi scheme!)
All joking aside (mine, not his, although any confusion is understandable), Cal’s anti-Obama rant is so full of holes it’s…“Like an ice cube that melted, then refroze with a lot of holes in it.”
He starts the column by quoting Bill Clinton to give Obama some advice: “If you live long enough, you’ll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you’ll be a better person.” The purpose of Cal’s column, then, is to warn Obama not to fuck a second intern after getting caught fucking the first one. It’s sound advice, and I’m sure Obama appreciated it.
From there, though, it veers.
Immediately after the quotation, Cal claims that there’s a connection between Obama’s speeches and “bad things happen(ing).” Citing the most recent example he could think of (but no previous examples), he blames the Sept. 9 drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Obama’s Sept. 8 speech about the American Jobs Act.
Even on the surface this sounds asinine. Obama calls for small business tax cuts, investments in infrastructure projects, and new funding to hire teachers, and suddenly the Dow plunges 300 points?
I took a risk here and checked out The Wall Street Journal, owned by none other than Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch (not an Obama supporter, to say the least). In a video report, John Shipman, the news editor of the Dow Jones Newswire, said the 300-point drop “is really all tied to what’s going on in Europe.” After citing the abrupt resignation of European Central Bank executive board member and the renewed threat of a default in Greece as the two biggest reasons for the drop, Shipman quickly dismissed the insinuation that Obama’s speech had anything to do with it.
“I would say that’s minimal, really, because going into this speech we pretty much knew what he was going to put on the table,” he said.
Why would McDonald’s, Caterpillar and IBM all take a hit from Obama’s talk about jobs? Did America suddenly stop eating Big Macs because they feared unemployment might fall below 9 percent? Did the value of stocks in construction equipment companies drastically plummet at the prospect of billions of dollars in new construction projects? Did IBM change its name to DIE?
That these are all international companies might explain it. It would definitely explain why stocks in Paris and Frankfurt got “hit hard,” as Shipman put it.
What boggles my mind is why the Dow Jones “plunged” 380 points in March immediately after the season finale of “The Bachelor.” Was America just that sad to see it end?
I don’t know. Cal’s prophecy only goes so far. What I do know is this: if Cal Thomas could predict that the stock market will plunge every time Obama speaks, he’d have made an easy million after the 2011 State of the Union Address. (Who knows, maybe he did.)
It’s not even correlative, let alone causal. But let’s give Cal a pass on this one. It was his second sentence, after all, (second to a quote, so really it was his first sentence) so maybe he wasn’t warmed up yet.
Obama 0, Cal -1
Next, Cal calls Obama “such a prisoner of his leftist ideology” that he can’t “get something done that motivates the private sector to hire workers and spur economic growth.” He actually parrots what House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has been saying for the past two years, that “economic uncertainty” is inhibiting job creation. Interestingly enough, it was Republicans in April who were threatening to shut down the government if Obama didn’t agree to their spending cuts proposals. It was the same Republicans who, in July, threatened to let the government default on its debts (money Congress had already allocated and spent) if Obama didn’t agree to trillions in additional spending cuts. In both cases, Obama capitulated. In both cases, his “leftist” base was enraged. In both cases, Obama was about ready to sell the farm just to avoid the very “economic uncertainty” – the “catastrophe” – that would have resulted from a shutdown or default. And in both cases, Republicans were the ones holding the economy hostage in order to convince the Tea Party base that they weren’t “Republicans in Name Only.” In short, Republicans created the “economic uncertainty” while Obama was begging for a compromise that never manifest. And they’ll do it again over the 2012 budget. (Bet me.)
That’s a clear loser for Cal, so let’s move on.
Cal cites a Washington Post “factchecker” who said Obama’s claim of creating “the biggest middle-class tax cut in history” was “ridiculous.” Here are the facts. Obama’s tax cuts totaled $282 billion over two years, while Bush’s tax cuts cost $174 billion in 2001 and $231 billion in 2004 and 2005. Obviously, Obama loses. What these raw numbers don’t explain is that under Bush, 25 percent of Americans didn’t receive any tax cut at all and 60 percent went to the richest Americans. Obama’s tax cuts targeted the middle class. The claim wasn’t quite as “ridiculous” as the right would like to think given that Cal’s source admitted that it very well may have been the “broadest” tax cut in history.
Republicans think tax cuts for millionaires create jobs. If you exclude the recession, Bush created 3 million jobs over eight years, with tax cuts in place from the beginning. Obama’s stimulus bill created 3.6 million jobs, according to a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office. This all leads us to our next point.
Cal says that, “In 2009, in another speech, the president promised his stimulus policies would create 3 million to 4 million jobs,” when in fact, “jobs were lost, leaving a net deficit of 6.7 millions (sic) jobs since the recession began, according to Heritage Foundation calculations and U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics figures.”
First of all, the recession began in December, 2007, more than a year before Obama took office. You can’t say Obama’s a liar for not creating “3 million to 4 million jobs” after a 2009 stimulus bill when the net “6.7 millions (sic) jobs” lost started accumulating 14 months before the bill became law. Comparing total jobs lost to jobs lost on Obama’s watch is like comparing constitutions and floodwaters. I can’t say what Cal Thomas was doing throughout 2010, but a million jobs were created that year alone.
Secondly, Cal’s sources are a bit questionable. In the “according to” citation in his column, he pulls “calculations” from a conservative think tank and “figures” from the Department of Labor. I won’t dispute the “figures,” but I will say that the “calculations” miss a pretty important point. If the economy lost approximately 8 million jobs throughout the recession, but the net job loss is now 6.7 million, that would mean at least 1.3 million jobs have been created since the recession began. I’m no math whiz. Apparently Cal isn’t even a smarter than a 5th grader.
I don’t mean to split hairs here, as all these numbers are estimates, however precise. I just don’t get the point. Cal’s pissed off because Obama said he’d create 3 million to 4 million, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that his stimulus bill created or saved between up to 3.6 million jobs, and so he’s going to make that look worse by pinning a year of job losses on a president who wasn’t president when those jobs were lost? If he really dislikes Obama, why not just say, “Wish you’d have created more jobs.” Again, Thomas makes it so complicated you almost get lost in the rhetoric. (Not that that’s the point, of course…)
For the record: if you include the recession in the last year of Bush’s presidency – and why wouldn’t we if Obama has to take responsibility for the first few months of his first year – then Bush created only 1 million jobs. That’s 1 million to 3.6 million. In eight years versus three.
Obama 1, Bush 0, Cal -2.
Next up: Thomas says Obama’s “like a lost man who refuses to ask for directions” – because he has a really big crush on similes. “That’s because he has never worked in the real world with people who create jobs.”
This reminds me of…something an idiot would say. “You don’t know nothing about mowin’ lawns because you ain’t never lived in at 5622 SW Grassy Crest Dr., where the real grass is grown!” In an attempt to match Cal’s wits on this one, here’s how deep my analysis will go: First, Obama is the president. The presidency is a job. It exists in the real world. Therefore, Obama has worked in the real world.
Secondly, he works on a daily basis with the members and staff of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors. This council exists in the real world. These people helped create 3.6 million jobs. Therefore Obama has worked with people who create jobs. Furthermore, he is one of those job creators.
Obama: 1, Cal: -5,622 SW Grassy Crest Dr.
I won’t address his unfounded, un-cited and repeatedly debunked claim that “Obamacare” is killing jobs. This is a product of Republicans believing they have to oppose every law Obama has signed or else risk being called RINOs by the Tea Party. (Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann vows to overturn everything Obama has signed, even Wall Street reform, if elected president.)
Cal got a pass on a lot of these statement because they were inane. Kind of like Cal. But rather than every newspaper reader in the country having to give him a pass for every misstatement, I propose we all get a pass on Cal. Which is to say, spare us, Cal Thomas.
Retire already.
Post-script:
Before I go, though, I want to mention something completely unrelated. It has to do with President George W. Bush and the one positive quality the world eventually came to appreciate in him.
When Dubya’s second term ended, he went away. He tried writing a book and going on tour, but he was quickly reminded how loathsome the world finds him, so he returned shortly thereafter to his safe, hermitic lifestyle. Only on the anniversary of 9/11 did Junior reappear, and only for a day, even then. After bowing his head in silence (shame) throughout the memorial ceremony, he went away again, probably never to return (although he may come out on 9/11’s 20th anniversary). America loved him for this.
The moral of the story: know when your time is up, recognize when you have nothing else to contribute to society, accept that incompetence, whatever its source, and shut the fuck up, because nobody wants to witness you embarrass yourself (or your party) anymore.
The end.
– via MuddyPolitics