A comment on the debt crisis that the NY Times censored

Curious about what sorts of comments on the debt crisis the NY Times censors out?


Here's mine, a response to an op-ed piece by Paul Krugman ("The President Surrenders"), excoriating the Republicans for extortion and President Obama for giving in to it:

I generally agree with Dr. Krugman's analysis of the Republicans, but he rarely acknowleges all the ways the Democratic Party has shoved so many Americans into the eager arms of the GOP. That aspect just seems invisible to him.

Illegal immigration is high on that list--pundits in the Northeast seem to have no idea what the impact has been here in the Southwest. In California, illegal immigrants, their children & grandchildren now comprise a majority of all students in our public school system. They're a majority of Los Angeles residents. This isn't multiculturalism--it's the supplanting of one society with another. For people like Dr. Krugman it's unthinkable to even complain about this--since only \"those sorts\" of people would object to their society being replaced by that of another country.

Especially when American blue collar wages have sunk below the poverty line due to competition from illegals. But Dr. Krugman probably doesn't have any blue collar acquaintances...

Nor does it help that in amongst the flagrant lying of the Republicans, nonpartisan factchecking sources like the CBO and factcheck.org also find Democratic politicians shading the truth.

I hate propaganda apparatchiks like Sean Hannity getting to have even the slightest element of truth in their vicious tirades.

And yet they do have a kernel of truth in some of their accusations.

Plus, I wonder whether Dr. Krugman's central thesis here is correct--that President Obama should have stuck to his guns on the debt ceiling. Viscerally I wanted him to do so, but we had 8 years of a visceral prez and that didn't turn out so well.

It may be best for him not to have let the US default on its debts, even though the Republicans' credible threat to do so was treasonous. It may yet be that the voting public will see through the Democrats' many missteps to the fact that the Republican alternative actually endangers the Republic.

Aaron Burr's starting to get real competition.

Why the Right is Wrong: excess nostalgia

The New York Times' Young Turk conservative columnist (don't you love conservative pundits with beards? They're so individualistic), Ross Douthat, did a column on how Big Gummint's to blame for durn near everything, and how unenlightened right wingers and the Democrats all share the blame for this.

Here's my riposte (#32), which the NYT highlighted as an editor's choice:

Like most conservatives, Mr. Douthat reveals his ideal implicitly. But it's clear here that he longs for the life of the gentleman farmer ca. 1800: a man beholden to no one, and only threatened by foreign invasion or perhaps an Indian raid.

In such a milieu, a federal government--apart from being needed to provide military defense--is kind of a luxury...a hobby for wealthy citizens with time on their hands. Jefferson's ideal--not Hamilton's.

Mr. Douthat said none of this in so many words, of course, so one could accuse me of creating a straw man argument.

But the biggest clue is Mr. Douthat's conflation of corporatist government (the Republican reality) and regulatory government (what the Obama presidency is trying to do). To Mr. Douthat it's all the same, apparently.

Not to Democrats, fortunately.

I think what Mr. Douthat's ideals prevent him from grasping is that today we need a huge--yes, huge--federal government, because the forces arrayed against the individual are too big and too geographically spread out for even state government to protect us adequately.

Russian gangsters in direct collusion with the Russian government practice sophisticated ID theft and various forms of commercial fraud from thousands of miles away. National or multinational corporations pollute your water table and threaten to bury you in lawyers if you try to sue them by yourself. Complex world-scale money manipulations that throw the world economy into a tailspin. I can't believe I even have to give examples of what's arrayed against the individual today that the Framers couldn't have imagined.

Whatever our ideal, today's environment requires a powerful federal government and less personal privacy than ever--including, I believe, a national biometric ID database.

You don't have to love this. You just have to realize that the alternative is getting squashed like bugs. That's just how it is, and wishful thinking--especially delusions of rustic autonomy--won't change things.