One of the nicest things about Franny no longer being part of the White House senior staff is that I no longer feel compelled to live and breathe politics. This has been especially helpful at the Y, that bastion of Fox News Republicans. Instead of politics, I've been talking to nice Bob about bee keeping, and grumpy Bob about the theater scene in Littleton, to Huns about refinishing basements, and to everyone else about the Broncos or the Nuggets. It has been refreshing and tension free.
But I couldn't resist a momentary plunge into politics today when I walked into my part of the locker room and heard Irv (a perfect name for this guy I might add) proclaim that Bloomberg News was a liberal rag. Bloomberg! Liberal rag? It seems that my friend Doug, devout Democrat and erstwhile president of the Aurora Teachers Association, was brandishing a recent report by Bloomberg comparing the deficit spending of presidents from Reagan to Obama as a percentage of GDP. Much to Irv's chagrin, the numbers showed that Obama has been less profligate than Bush II and especially Reagan. Irv, speaking for all his naked republican friends in the locker room, reached the only conclusion that made sense to him: Bloomberg is a liberal rag.
I quickly informed him that the term "liberal rag" was an oxymoron and the expression he was searching for was actually "conservative rag." (By the way Bloomberg is neither). He yelled something unintelligible that I ignored. How do you argue with someone who is that completely delusional?
Wait it gets worse. Doug, the liberal instigator of this whole thing, sidled over to me and mentioned that he was talking to some folks the other day about the state of the economy (what a fun conversation) and they "mentioned something about this thing called Keynesian economics." He then went on to explain John Maynard Keynes to me as if this was completely new information. C'mon man! Doug was a science teacher for forty years. He presumably went to college. He has been involved in Democratic politics for as long as he can remember. And he is passionate about today's issues. How is it possible that he had never heard of Keynes?
I know that I have something of a reputation as an intellectual snob, but this has nothing to do with snobbery. There are things an informed electorate should know. I think the crucial debate between the followers of Keynes and the followers of Milton Friedman is one of those things.
Ignorance like that has no excuse as far as I am concerned. The world would be a better place if the chronically uninformed would just keep their liberal or conservative mouths shut and their minds open.
Have a nice day.
1 comment:
An "informed electorate" I think that's part of the problem we don't have one of those here in the U.S.
It's nice to know that angry naked conservatives are running around the Y just like they are at the DAC, makes me think we have some sort of equality, although maybe not in a good way.
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