Exactly what it says on the tin. With a lot of piss and vinegar, to boot.
Are they necessarily in government? No. But more than anyone, these three have brought this country so low such that hostage-taking is the new normal. And they deserve to be specially singled out: the unelected kings that would rather see America a smoldering heap than to abandon their "cut cut cut" ideology.
How 'bouts going past the Kossquigglie?
Updatex1: Thanks to suggestion, now with polly goodness. I should also say that I really wanted this to start only during the current term, so Cheney the foul-mouthed Dick isn't included.
1. Peter G. Peterson
He calls himself "Pete" Peterson, but I refuse to call him Pete Peterson. Pete Peterson is an old friend from back in my grad school days, a proud gay man, and great to be around. I refuse to let the real Pete Peterson share a name with one of this country's worst monsters.
The seed of "killing Social Security to save America" idea begins and ends with Peter G. Peterson.
http://motherjones.com/...
A fiscal conservative, Peterson has long been issuing dire warnings about the the nation’s skyrocketing debt. The key cause of the problem, in his analysis, is that entitlement programs--primarily Social Security and Medicare, but Medicaid as well--are out of control; the only solution is to cut them. Peterson's longstanding attack on Social Security has been most extensively documented by William Greider in The Nation. At this point, Peterson has emerged as the self-appointed head of what some people have begun to call the “granny bashers,” who argue that greedy geezers are ruining the lives of younger generations with their unconscionable demands for basic healthcare and a hedge against destitution. (Peterson himself is in his eighties--but of course he’s too rich to worry about such things.)
That's right - we must cut the only thing that's been running a consistent surplus for the last 75 years. And it's all the fault of those greedy old coots collecting less than $1200 a month.
For more rockin' disingenouousness (read: lying)...
For the first time in my memory, the majority of the American people join me in believing that, on our current course, our children will not do as well as we have. For years, I have been saying that the American government, and America itself, has to change its spending and borrowing policies: the tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded entitlements and promises, the dangerous dependence on foreign capital, our pitiful level of savings, the metastasizing health-care costs, our energy gluttony. These structural deficits are unsustainable.
So what does he do? Ignore the healthcare costs and energy gluttony (and the fact that we were running a general surplus just 10 years ago) and concentrate on the one thing that isn't a problem, the pile of T-Bills bought by Social Security that aren't making any money for anyone on Wall Street. (Did I say thaaat?)
For scapegoating the group that has paid into the system for their entire lives for a sum that won't pay the rent, Peter G. Peterson, I give you this...
2. Rick Santelli
You remember Rick Santelli. The original Teabagger. The spontaneous rant heard 'round the world. Or was it?
http://www.ritholtz.com/...
But his rant somehow felt wrong. After we’ve pissed through over $7 trillion dollars in Federal bailouts to banks, brokers, automakers, insurers, etc., this was a pittance, the least offensive of all the vast sums of wasted money spent on “losers” to use Santelli’s phrase. It seemed like a whole lot of noise over “just” $75 billion, or 1% of the rest of the total ne’er-do-well bailout monies.
From the Playboy (!) article that Barry Ritholtz excerpted...
What we discovered is that Santelli’s “rant” was not at all spontaneous as his alleged fans claim, but rather it was a carefully-planned trigger for the anti-Obama campaign. In PR terms, his February 19th call for a “Chicago Tea Party” was the launch event of a carefully organized and sophisticated PR campaign, one in which Santelli served as a frontman, using the CNBC airwaves for publicity, for the some of the craziest and sleaziest rightwing oligarch clans this country has ever produced.
As a media person, Rick Santelli with a fake rant told the media that complete lack of compromise in order to take the President down was going to be how it was done. And it was a whole month into the Presidency, long before anyone here got just so disappointed. The media is playing you, and Rick Santelli made it OK for them to play you. Soooo...
3. Grover Norquist
Probably the pick that won't necessarily be controversial here, but might make the paid shills at other sites get all squawky. Grover Norquist is really an old hand at damaging America from back in the Clinton days. I'd cite his ties with terrorists, but that's a Frank Gaffney toy horse on a stick, and he's really lacking in the reality department.
You might recall that it's his "pledge" that no revenues must be increased ever. (I know, he says "taxes", but since the hooey supply-side mantra that the media still buys of "lower taxes increases revenues always", taken to the logical extreme by moron Herman Cain who managed to find a way to multiply by zero and get a nonzero number, he really means "revenues".) It's his pledge that leads the the corporate jet tax break over seven years as opposed to five being sacrosanct. Even messing with that gets a Norquist-funded primary challenge from someone even further to the right.
Thanks to conservative politicians' abject fear of this one unelected individual, they used the "take hostages and wait for time to run out" method of negotiation that our media allowed to work by passing it off as normal as opposed to being obviously morally awful. It worked in Minnesota, (where Mark Dayton was praised for standing firm) and it worked for tying a deficit deal to a hostage (debt ceiling) nationwide.
So for making hostage-taking the new normal...
Special mention - state level: Tim Pawlenty
Minnesota has less than 5 and a half million people. Yet new governor Mark Dayton had to deal with a 5 billion dollar shortfall - worse than those in Illinois, Texas, and California - thanks to Tim Pawlenty's tax cutting and budget gimmick shenanigans. The 23,000 state employees that were out of work because someone got taken hostage to fix TPaw's massive black hole would like to give you this...
The TPaw Memorial Bridge. Because when you see the result of budget malfeasance, you should always remember the name of Tim Pawlenty.