The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Liberal Mind

I haven't made much comment on recent economic developments, partly because I have to admit, the current moment is economically confounding. I think things are terrible - as I usually do - but I have to admit a number of things don't look as bad as they did... but I think it's folly to suggest that "we're out of the woods" or things are "on the right track."

On a day when the Euro yet again is losing value, the mess in Greece is looming as a problem for us all, the stock market is sinking and gold is reaching stratospheric highs, I'd remain silent, but looking at this today gives e an opportunity to do something I've been wanting to do for a while: point out that Steve Benen, the current blogger for Washington Monthly, is an Obama-apologizing joke.

Since taking the Washington Monthly spot over from Kevin Drum, Benen has pretty much run what was one of the most interesting, less doctrinaire DC-centric blogs into the establishment ground. Nothing - and I do mean no thing - in Benen's estimation even seems to make the Obama Administration or Democrats more generally look bad. Whatever happens, Republicans are either fools or liars or idiots -and preferably all three - wrong in their views, wrong on the facts (when they bother to nitice them), and hopelessly poltically divisive. As opposed to, you know, liberals like Benen, who just happen to be right that conservatives are lying, evil hypocrites.

Which brings us to what, really, is pretty much par for the course for Benen - and generally not worth even passing along, but as I said, it dovetails with a feeling that I should write about economic conditions - an attack on conservatives for, my goodness, suggesting that the Greek debt crisis might have implications for other countries with large debt, including the US.

To get there, Benen cites - as he, and many others often do - Paul Krugman's latest column in which Krugman defends a point no one, really has argued against: that the Greek crisis is as bad as it is because Greek debt is especially large, while America's, relative to GDP, is not. And that's true. It's just not, necessarily, the whole of the problem.

The problem, as a number of people, not all politically conservative, have pointed out, is that the Greek debt crisis and the cross-European attempts to fix it, do parallel a problem we actually have here: that many states, especially our largest, are facing enormous financial and budgetary crises and there just isn't federal will or money to solve those problems. And, like Greece, the potential for imminent collapse and need for large financial rescues is not as unimaginable as some would like to think. And more like the Central European financial authorities, and less like Greece specifically, our financial forces can't stand many more large hits.

With Arnold Schwarenegger and David Paterson set to leave the stage (and Jodi Rell come to think of it), and Chris Christie just getting started, there are plenty of examples of the painful dilemmas, hard choices, and bad public reactions to the state level financial crises. It's these crises, more than the national debt, which probably inform a lot of what's driving election season, and public perceptions of where and why our economy is still hurting. And there's been a distinct lack of leadership,from the President or Congress - and both left and right - on how to deal with the depth of our financial messes.

Benen is a good exmple, hardly the only one, and hardly the most thoughtful, on how to turn all of this into a simplistic, partisan exercise while willfully ignoring the harder, more complicated aspects that shouldn't, and can't forever, be ignored. It's true that, surely, some Republicans are overstating the parallels between the Greek mess and American government budeting issues and debt. And it's truer that most of the Republicans in question don't have any serious comprehensive plan to address the issues they themselves raise. But there is, in their assessments an honest attempt to raise the question no one wants raised: what we have is unsustainable. And something needs to change... or we will be in much worse shape very very soon.

All of the economic roiling is one reason I find myself watching the unfolding of this year's political season with both wonder and dread, too stunned and dismayed to dive in with a lot of my own commentary: as long as no one's going to discuss the economic elements of our crisis, and neither major party (nor, as I like to remind my friend J, the small minor ones) offers much in the way of credible proposals to deal with trhem, we're having political discussions made of air. There's anger, there's frustration, there's fear... and most surely, there's the sense that almost none of our options, in terms of political candidates, represent a great answer on how to move forward.

Benen's sunny, "this just proves how, yet again, liberals are awesome" type posts annoy me because of the willful disregard to admit, even in passing, that our biggest problems are being poorly addressed by everyone, not just some easy-to-vilify assemblage of the Usual Conservative Types. And it reminds me that, as much as I bristle at the suggestion that many bloggers don't know their subject matter, it is depressingly true that a good number of the "Big Blogger Boiz" are especially hack-tastic in their drive-by acquaintance with basic economic theory, in depth understandiong of our healthcare system, a working understanding of issues realted to poverty... and on and on. I don't claim to be any sort of expert, either...but at best, I think a blogger owes it to himself, if not his readers (speaking for myself), to to be informed and do more than offer "here's why I want people who already agree with me to see, yet again, why their previously held views are so fantastically correct." I'm not sure what's going to happen with the economy... and it may not all be bad... but I could use a lot more discussions that dealt in the complicated realities we're dealing with... and not the eternal sunshine of the spotless liberal mind.

Comments

[Kelly]

Liberals tend to see things through rose-coloured glasses....so do conservatives. You can't expect either to be impartial for the team they're batting for. But I will say this - Obama has not been the saviour that so many thought. He has broken to many promises and set the U.S. back a decade if not more by bailing out big business. He's like Bush in a sense that he serves his masters first and foremost and the people second.