The Hero Of Janesville, The Man They Call Ayn

For all my fellow Joss Whedon fans.

 

 

Ayn!

 

The Man they call Ayn!

He robbed for the rich and he stole from the poor,

He stood up for The Man and he'd give him much more

Our love for him now, aint hard to explain,

The hero of Janesville, the man they call Ayn!

 

 

Our Ayn saw Wall Streeters' backs breakin'

He saw the lawyers' lament

And he saw the lice and scum takin'

Every dollar and leavin' five cents

So he said, "You can't do that to my people"

"You can't crush them under your heel"

Ayn strapped on his lies

And before the ink dries

Steals everything the Boomers had to steal

 

 

He robbed for the rich and he stole from the poor,

He stood up for The Man and he'd give him much more

Our love for him now, aint hard to explain,

The hero of Janesville, the man they call Ayn!

 

 

Now here is what separates producers

From moochers like you and I

The man they call Ayn

He turned 'round his train

And let all his lies hit sky

He dropped lies onto conventions

He dropped lies into tv sets

And the man they call Ayn

He just rode that damned train

'Til he became a GOP star

 

He robbed for the rich and he stole from the poor,

He stood up for The Man and he'd give him much more

Our love for him now, aint hard to explain,

The hero of Janesville, the man they call Ayn!

Attention Must Be Paid

Wow. What did Willard Romney ever do (or not do) to David Brooks?

After his mission, he attended Harvard, studying business, law, classics and philosophy, though intellectually his first love was always tax avoidance. After Harvard, he took his jawline to Bain Consulting, a firm with very smart people with excessive personal hygiene. While at Bain, he helped rescue many outstanding companies, like Pan Am, Eastern Airlines, Atari and DeLorean.

And that's just a tiny sample. When the world's biggest authoritarian ass-kisser mocks the right's biggest authority, you know that nobody except for some tea-baggers and Ann Romney expect Romney to win. When you add on Maureen Dowd's evisceration, it's clear that Team Romney has neglected a very important aspect of political life: flattering the egos of the Villagers. He had better start holding press picnics and handing out free booze immediately or he's going to find himself in the same boat as the Clintons.

Added: And his arrogance is pissing off the tea-baggers and Ron Paul followers as well. Well done, Mr. Romney! He could not make it more clear that the only people he cares about are the 1%.

CouponCare

Great. The Republicans want seniors to have voucher-based medical care.

Paul Krugman:

So there it is: the draft Republican platform says of Medicare and Medicaid,

The first step is to move the two programs away from their current unsustainable defined-benefit entitlement model to a fiscally sound defined-contribution model.

That means that instead of Medicare as we know it, which pays your medical bills, you’d get a lump sum which you can apply to private insurance — they’ll yell when we call it a voucher, but that’s what it is....

Bear in mind that health expenses will still have to be mainly paid for by some kind of insurance; that’s in the nature of medical care, with its high but unpredictable cost. So what we’re doing here is replacing government insurance with a program that gives people money to buy private insurance — that is, adding an extra layer of middlemen. Why would this save money? I guess the answer is supposed to be the magic of the marketplace — but we have the experience of Medicare Advantage, plus studies of Medicaid versus private insurance, plus the raw fact that America relies more on private insurance than any other nation and also has by far the highest costs. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the record suggests that this will do anything other than make health care less efficient.

We are assured that any seniors who vote for Richie Rich/Ayn Rand this time won't lose his or her Medicare, just the rest of us. Of course some seniors have wives young enough to lose out on this deal, but they must be poor if they need Medicare so they don't count.

You'll Thank Me Later

There are two types of mighty soldiers who man the Vagina Watch, that perpetual duty to preserve and protect the nation's Fetus-Americans by policing vaginas. The first type is genuinely religious, and is fully embodied by Miss Kathryn Jean Lopez, who believes that abortion is evil and must be stopped because only God can take a life. As we can see by this post, Miss Lopez sees pregnancy from rape as a blessing, and her anti-abortion beliefs are consistent in this narrow instance.

Miss Lopez also believes that there should be no separation between church and state, no premarital sex, no birth control, and that the role of women is to serve God and men by bearing their children and taking care of their home, and live through men by supporting their endeavors. She is as nutty as a Megan McArdle nut cake, but she lives her beliefs.

The second type is the opportunist, who demands that everyone else live by his beliefs while holding different standards for himself. He is the leader while the Miss Lopezes are the followers, in his own eyes if nobody else's. Ross Douthat believes that pregnancies from rape are "exceptional circumstances" that produce "unique agony" and anyway forcing women to carry their rapist's baby to term is probably a "political impossibility." Despite his own political compromises, Douthat goes on to criticize Obama's, calling Obama an extremist for supporting his own party's platform.

Douthat's entire post is a work of art, as he attempts to convince Democrats that capitalizing on the Republicans' extremism is a terrible political mistake. He does not discuss the constitutional right to privacy, which is hard and boring and the only thing that counts. He tries to sway his audience emotionally, which is a mistake because not many people can empathize with an emotionally stunted misanthrope. Watching Douthat at work is like watching Monk, as Douthat tries to convince everyone else to live with his own personal quirks, foibles and compulsions. Just because Douthat wants to live in a narrow little world of arbitrary rules doesn't mean that we do.

Especially when those arbitrary rules are designed to preserve Douthat's personal power and career and their consequences are designed to affect only women.

The Rats are In The Corn

Reading about Willard "Mitt" Romney's little birther joke and the lack of respect he and his followers show towards women and minorities, I have to wonder why anyone on the left calls him anything but Willard. (Preferably while humming "Ben," the theme music to the movie "Willard."* There's no reason why we shouldn't try to enjoy this potential sexually repressed plutocratic nightmare a little.)

Remember, the Villagers and their minions want to be cool more than anything else on Earth. They have money and power but they can't buy what they want most of all--self esteem. Obviously the only way they could be cool is if they created their own reality in which they are cool, forcing everyone else to live in that fantasy as well. Destroy the fantasy and you destroy the authority.

Willard dresses up as an authority, plays leader and cop and bishop. While he was play acting, real men were being shipped off to war. Willard mugs for the camera, he does not lead. He can live in a fantasy world in which he is cool but nobody else has to play along.

From wonkette:

from The Raw Story:

There is something slightly creepy about Willard. It's not important compared to what he wants to do to the country but it affects his electability and makes him very uncool.


*See Correction in comments

Authoritarian Worship And Manliness

Oh, my. The Republicans are falling all over each other to prove that their entire self-image is based on living vicariously through their leaders. From The Corner's Kevin Williamson, via what will soon be everyone on the internet:

Elections are not about public policy. They aren’t even about the economy. Elections are tribal, and tribes are — Occupy types, cover your delicate ears — ruthlessly hierarchical. Somebody has to be the top dog.

Authoritarians are very happy to think about how rich their leaders are, how much power they have over their women conquests, the size of their property, their bank account, their car collections, their physical attributes. They think that worshipping another man makes them more manly, that watching another man consume makes them richer, that hearing about another man's exercise habits make them more virtuous. Let's take a little look at Mr. Williamson.

This is not the face of a man who will ever be top dog. This is the face of a man who depended on the wide and welcoming arm of the Kochtopus to make a living. A man who first worked for a conservative paper that folded, then conducted college seminars on journalism for the Koches' Institute for Humane Studies, the same illustrious organization that incubated Megan McArdle, transforming her from failed Wall Street consultant to elite journalist. Finally Williamson came to rest at National Review, capping a career as conservative propaganda-fed veal, gavage courtesy of those super-rich, super-endowed, super-superior Ubermenschen that he is now so eager to praise.

Reassuring arch-patriarch — maybe one with enough sons and grandsons to form a pillaging band of marauders? Hillary Rodham Clinton told us that it takes a village, and Mitt Romney showed us how to populate a village with thriving offspring. Newsweek, which as of this writing is still in business, recently ran a cover photo of Romney with the headline: “The Wimp Factor: Is He Just Too Insecure to Be President?” Look at his fat stacks. Look at that mess of sons and grandchildren. Look at a picture of Ann Romney on her wedding day and that cocky smirk on his face. What exactly has Mitt Romney got to be insecure about? That he’s not as prodigious a patriarch as Ramses II or as rich as >Lakshmi Mittal? I bet he sleeps at night and never worries about that. He has done everything right in life, and he should own it. And by own it, I mean put it on the black card and stow it in the G6 — or at least in first class, for Pete’s sake.

Yes, Mr. Williamson is telling Romney to throw his money and power in the faces of the shrinking middle class and flaunt his large Mormon family, which should be polygamous because Romney's just that fabulous. But, to be fair, this terrible advice would work just fine if all the other authoritarians are just as blindly worshipful of Mittens' masculinity as Mr. Williamson.

In a manly way, of course. He's a Republican!

The Smartest Girl In The Dorm

Poor Megan McArdle tries to pull her "Smartest Girl In The Dorm" act but flops miserably. And her "Wide-Eyed Innocent" act isn't working anymore either.

Bless her heart.

From the comments on a post at Outside The Beltway:

Megan McArdle says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 15:17

I think the attempt to draw a distinction between “legitimate rape” and illegitimate rape is loony, but IIRC, there was a study a few years ago that showed lower-than-expected conceptions from rape, indicating that women’s bodies might have some mechanism for shutting down unwanted conceptions. HOWEVER, even if I’m remembering right, it was one study, and it certainly didn’t show that no woman ever conceived after rape–just that they conceived at somewhat lower rates than you’d expect.

By offering "facts" that appear to support Todd Akin's stupidity, McArdle is supporting Todd Akin's stupidity. She does not seem to realize this; McArdle seems to think she is being an intellectual leader and is just correcting those silly liberals' criticisms of Akin. It's leadership like this that brought her to the attention of that bastion of excellence we call Newsweek.

Doug Mataconis says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 15:28

@Megan McArdle:
There may be any number of reasons for that, including the possibility that the perpetrator doesn’t necessarily, umm, finish the job. A friend who is an MD saw this today and told me there’s simple no medical evidence to support what he said notwithstanding the statistical oddity.
And, then there’s the question of what the heck he means by “legitimate rape”

rudderpedals says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 15:52

@Megan McArdle:

IIRC, there was a study

Link please or I’m calling shenanigans on the study.

McArdle's reputation precedes her.

Rick Almeida says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 16:04

@Megan McArdle:
Megan McArdle – on hiatus, but still making things up.

Kathy Kattenburg says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 16:30

And another face palm for Megan McArdle!

DRS says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 16:36

Please tell me this isn’t the “real” Atlantic Monthly Megan McArdle. That one is bad enough but she can’t be this bad, surely?

Oh ye of little faith.

Commonist says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 16:52

@Megan McArdle:
HOW CAN YOUR BODY NOT REJECT YOUR SOUL THE WAY IT REJECTS FOREIGN OBJECTS.

Heh.

A discussion ensues in which a commenter states that (s)he doesn't understand the animus against McArdle. "Are we liberals supposed to run away from science if it shows things that might require an extra sentence or two of explanation when we have an argument?" he or she wonders, the better to help his or her fellow liberals overcome their ideological biases and embrace science, which we all know is factual and therefore liberal, even when it is, um, hypothetical. Mr. Mataconis steps in to call the commenters to order, the commenters ask why Mr. Mataconis seems to have Megan-Only rules for internet conduct, and a good time is had by all except Mr. Mataconis. And the commentariat remains unconvinced.

Commonist says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 17:41

@Tano:
Because absolutely every single thing McMegan has ever written signals an absolutely fascinating contempt for facts, coupled with an unfailing disdain for the weak and admiration of the exploiters of the weak that is impressive even for a libertarian? She’s the urtype of the sort of bourgeois, self-compassionate, politically uncommitted yet consistently biased “commentator” that manages to be even worse than the republicans they refuse to call out for what they are. She is a nullity.
Whatever you do, don’t assume she is showing good faith or actually have read up on what she’s talking about.

Of course, when one is discussing a McFact one should always check that fact first.

MM says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 18:50

Megan McArdle is wrong. In fact it is more likely that a woman will get pregnant from a rape than from consensual sex.
Linky
Linky

legion says:

Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 18:56

Well, when I go to all the trouble of typing “rapist pregnancy study” into the finely-honed journalistic tool known as “The Google”, the first result is now about Akin, but the very next result is a 1996 study on rape-related pregnancies, which ends with this:

CONCLUSIONS:
Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency. It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies and is closely linked with family and domestic violence. As we address the epidemic of unintended pregnancies in the United States, greater attention and effort should be aimed at preventing and identifying unwanted pregnancies that result from sexual victimization.

rather directly contradicting Akin’s disgraceful idiocy. Although I suspect Megan is thinking specifically of a study I too recall from maybe a year ago (which I have had more trouble searching for) that specifically studied rapists and found that some significant percentage of them, when actually engaging in “the act” became physically unable to continue to orgasm; hypothetically because the reality of the rape was rather less satisfying than the fantasy in the rapist’s head. However, this has exactly nothing to do with the victim’s desires in the matter of rape and/or pregnancy…

Does she still feel smarter than both liberals and conservatives now?

Little Lord Bootstraps

Let's see what Little Lord Bootstraps, the man who managed to give birth to himself, educate himself, and rise to power purely on courage and pluck without any help whatsoever, is up to.

Paul Krugman:

Ryanomics is and always has been a con game, although to be fair, it has become even more of a con since Mr. [Paul] Ryan joined the ticket.

...

...[I]f we add up Mr. Ryan’s specific proposals, we have $4.3 trillion in tax cuts, partially offset by around $1.7 trillion in spending cuts — with the tax cuts, surprise, disproportionately benefiting the top 1 percent, while the spending cuts would primarily come at the expense of low-income families. Over all, the effect would be to increase the deficit by around two and a half trillion dollars.  

Yet Mr. Ryan claims to be a deficit hawk. What’s the basis for that claim?

      

Well, he says that he would offset his tax cuts by “base broadening,” eliminating enough tax deductions to make up the lost revenue. Which deductions would he eliminate? He refuses to say — and realistically, revenue gain on the scale he claims would be virtually impossible.         

At the same time, he asserts that he would make huge further cuts in spending. What would he cut? He refuses to say.

      

What Mr. Ryan actually offers, then, are specific proposals that would sharply increase the deficit, plus an assertion that he has secret tax and spending plans that he refuses to share with us, but which will turn his overall plan into deficit reduction.

      

If this sounds like a joke, that’s because it is.

Lyin' Ryan is like every other libertarian, long on theory and lies about the wonder of removing government assistance to the lower classes while increasing government assistance to the upper classes. It's their world and we just live in it. Why should the little people get something for free when the rich have worked so long and hard for everything they have?

For instance, we all know how young Paul Ryan worked at menial jobs to support himself after his father died suddenly. This is admirable, of course, but Ryan's entire professional career has been political, concentrating on fantasy-based supply-side economics and developing close ties with the Koches and their allies.

Betty Ryan reportedly urged her son to accept a congressional position as a staff economist attached to Kasten's office, which he did after graduating in 1992.^[26][39] In his early years working on Capitol Hill, Ryan supplemented his income by working as a waiter, as a fitness trainer and at various other side jobs.^[16][28]

A few months after Kasten was defeated by Democrat Russ Feingold in the 1992 election, Ryan became a speechwriter for Empower America (now FreedomWorks), a conservative advocacy group founded by Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and William Bennett.^[16][40][41]

And that was the end of menial jobs for Ryan. He worked for Kemp and Sam Brownback, and when those jobs ended he fell back on his large and successful family for assistance, who gave him a job in marketing. In 1992 1998 he was elected to the House of Representatives for the first time. While there he developed "close ties" with libertarians and the Koches.

When Mr. Romney announced that Mr. Ryan would be his running mate, his campaign emphasized the congressman’s detailed knowledge of the federal budget and his chemistry with Mr. Romney. Less well-known are Mr. Ryan’s close ties to the donors and activists who have channeled Tea Party anger into a $400 million political machine, financed by a network of conservative and libertarian donors that now rivals, and occasionally challenges, the Republican establishment behind Mr. Romney.
      

Mr. Ryan is one of a very few elected officials who have attended the Kochs’ biannual conferences, where wealthy donors sit in on seminars on runaway government spending and the myths of climate change.

      

He is on first-name terms with prominent libertarians in the financial world, including hedge fund billionaires like Cliff Asness and Paul Singer, and spent his formative years immersed in the Republican Party’s supply-side wing, working for lawmakers and conservative policy advocates like Jack Kemp.

      

He has appeared for years at rallies, town hall meetings, and donor briefings for groups like the Club for Growth, which spends millions to defeat Republicans deemed squishy on taxes and spending, and Americans for Prosperity, a grass-roots group focused on economic and budget issues that is now trying to channel Tea Party energy into a permanent electoral force. Its fourth chapter was founded in Mr. Ryan’s home state, Wisconsin.

Now Mr. Ryan could provide Mr. Romney with a critical political and intellectual bridge to the rising conservative counterestablishment represented by the Kochs and their allies, who are planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and deploy thousands of volunteers to defeat Mr. Obama. Should Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan win in November, a constituency that has for years fulminated against the failure of Republicans to live up to their own principles could soon have a close — and powerful — friend in the White House.

No wonder Megan McArdle favors Ryan. They both support obscenely wealthy libertarian sugar daddies who try to eliminate government regulation and taxes by lying about economics.

Libertarian Rex

Image from here.

ABC tells us:

After repeated denials, Paul Ryan has admitted he requested stimulus cash even after sharply criticizing the program.

[Ryan] “Regardless, it’s clear that the Obama stimulus did nothing to stimulate the economy, and now the President is asking to do it all over again.”

What does that remind me of...?

This is all technically true, and collectively nonsense. [re Matt Taibbi's article on Goldman, Sachs]
...

Or perhaps a better way to say it is that the facts are right, but the mini narratives are ludicrously wrong, which makes the meta narrative suspect.

Paul Ryan and Megan McArdle: sisters under the skin. Both so deep in denial to protect their fantasy world in which they are leaders and intellectuals that reality and truth don't even make them pause, and both seeming to expect everyone else to join along willingly.

But the right needs a a comforting Daddy-figure in these dangerous and impoverished times, not the political equivalent of Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute in The Oval Office.


ADDED: From the Washington Post:

Mitt Romney’s advisers are orchestrating a four-day Republican National Convention that is not so much designed to make Americans fall in love with the nominee, but rather to fall in like with the idea of him as the nation’s leader and a uniquely qualified businessman who can fix the economy.

The decision to focus heavily on Romney’s career background and economic policies is a departure from most conventions, which tend to mainly try to build a personal connection between the candidate and voters, especially for first-time nominees. It is also a tacit acknowledgment that Romney cannot win over enough swing voters by highlighting his personality and telling his life story alone.

Republicans are  going to demand that everyone obey their authorities and vote for the Mormon stiff and the Catholic brown-noser. Their followers will do it but their pain will be amusing palpable.

You Have To Be Kidding Me

You can try to stay away from Megan McArdle, for your own mental health if nothing else, but fate conspires against you constantly. She is absolutely incredible. She has utterly no sense of self-awareness and no shame.

Paul Ryan and Megan McArdle: Separated At Birth?

After much research and deep, deep philosophical thinking on the Republicans' new vice-presidential candidate, I have finally come to a conclusion about the contradiction that is Paul Ryan.

Mitt Romney just chose Megan McArdle to be his running mate.

Let's break this down a bit.

A person who is so ideologically blinkered that s(he) opposes the very policies that enabled his/her success, working feverishly to deny anyone else that assistance and vehemently denying that the assistance is beneficial.

A person who publicly denies allegiance to that ideology while basing his/her entire self-image on that ideology.

A person whose actions are and always have been coolly calculated for personal benefit and self-glorification while claiming to work for the public good.

A career greased by constant brown-nosing, a calculating, emotionally manipulative, and callous view of other people as something that exists only to be used for one's own advancement.

Ryan is a pretend economist, just as McArdle is a pretend journalist. They are both adept at disguising personal benefit and irrational ideology with numbers and charts and simply do not care about the effect of their actions on others when pursing their own course. 

But Mitt Romney is a pretend presidential candidate as well; he is pretending to be an authority--a fake leader at prep school who persecutes the vulnerable, a fake cop who can arbitrarily force others to do his will, a fake civic and business leader who guts businesses, a fake patriot who hides income abroad, a fake bishop who demonstrates a hollow ethical core. He does not engage with people because they are the audience, and their role is to pay their entrance fee, show up, and applaud. And Ryan is more of the same, a fake leader, fake businessman, and fake intellect.

We might be entering the Age of Libertarians, in which the DC blogging set finally reaches their inevitable seats of power and commence destroying everything they touch. But they are all emotional need, delicate nerves, and thinly-veiled hysteria, and it should be easy to take them down.  Nothing they do can bear close inspection, it is all patter and no substance. Yet they continue to gain power and control over the rest of us.

Future generations will find this utterly inexplicable. They will probably decide that we self-immolated because of something in the water, like the Romans' lead pipes.

The Unparalled Snark Of David Weigel

To ease myself back into blogging, let's look at a comedy piece by that sly wit David Weigel, who does a dead-pan mocking of Dinesh D'Souza's fuckumentary 2016: Obama’s America.

Twenty minutes into a new conservative documentary about Barack Obama, there’s a moment that’ll break a birther’s heart. Dinesh D’Souza, the star and narrator of 2016: Obama’s America, is telling the brief, encyclopedia-entry version of the president’s life. The camera zooms over a map like one of the travel scenes in Raiders of the Lost Ark—Kenya, Indonesia, Hawaii.

“On August 4, 1961,” says D’Souza, “Barack Obama II is born in the Kapiolani Medical Center in Honolulu. His birth is recorded in two local newspapers.”

When I hear that line, my head instinctively swivels to my right, where WorldNetDaily Editor-in-Chief Joseph Farah is sitting. His website has run hundreds of stories about Barack Obama’s citizenship and birth documents. WND books published Where’s the Birth Certificate?, which unfortunately was published right after the president released the long-form version of the record. You can still buy “Where’s the REAL Birth Certificate?” merch at the WND store. And now here’s a movie with a $2.5 million budget that’s made more than $80,000 in a four-theater run that tosses all the birther theories aside. 

Farah abides. He doesn’t walk out.

He's quite the brave little toaster. Or he's a cynical exploiter who plays on spite and racism to con his marks out of "donations." It may seem that Weigel is giving Farah his due, even comparing him to the unflappable Dude that Abides, but sarcasm is an elusive thing.

The movie is really too good to get pedantic about.

See? That actually seems sincere, which it cannot be. Now, watch this set up:

There are no conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth, religion, Social Security number, passport, or college transcript. Instead, there is a deep dive into Barack Obama’s known Communist associates, his late father’s avowed socialism, and his mother’s radicalism.

Ha! Weigel is saying that D'Souza's rejection of a conspiracy theory is proof that D'Souza's conspiracy theory is right. He's so funny.

The first and last stories are backed up with quotes from Dreams From My Father. “That’s Dinesh,” says co-producer Doug Sain. “He walks on solid ground.”

Let’s go with “mostly solid.” D’Souza’s documentary is based largely on his book The Roots of Obama’s Rage, which itself grew out of D’Souza’s Forbes cover story, one of the most influential of the decade. Obama, according to D’Souza, was an anti-colonialist. “He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder,” wrote D’Souza. “Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America.” Newt Gingrich recommended the theory to reporters—technically speaking, to Robert Costa and me. David Koch repeated it to a sympathetic Matthew Continetti.

The theory was Swiss-cheesed with logic holes. D’Souza found great significance in how Obama “demonizes his predecessor and his opponent,” as if only anti-colonialists did this. D’Souza insisted that Obama using the Gulf oil spill crisis to call BP “British Petroleum” is Anglophobia, revealed! But Obama didn’t call BP “British Petroleum.”

Yes, Mr. Weigel,  D'Souza sure does sound illogical. D'Souza's theory is that Obama hates America, more or less. D'Souza takes every politically-motivated critical utterance as proof and, McArdle-like, ignores any evidence that directly disproves his theory. For instance, D'Souza declares in Forbes that Obama does not not believe in American exceptionalism, when Obama has said the exact opposite. Here is the question and answer from the press conference:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. In the context of all the multilateral activity that's been going on this week -- the G20, here at NATO -- and your evident enthusiasm for multilateral frameworks, to work through multilateral frameworks, could I ask you whether you subscribe, as many of your predecessors have, to the school of American exceptionalism that sees America as uniquely qualified to lead the world, or do you have a slightly different philosophy? And if so, would you be able to elaborate on it?  

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. I'm enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don't think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.  

And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.  

Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that we've got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or recognizing that we're not always going to be right, or that other people may have good ideas, or that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise and that includes us.  

And so I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone.

Obviously D'Souza is so ridiculously (and renumeratively)  biased that he chooses to ignore the truth, twisting it into a self-serving (and profitable) lie. Weigel is not a babe in the woods; he has undoubtedly heard of that press conference, if he has not read it himself--which he probably has. He is being sarcastic by appearing to agree with D'Souza. He certainly is not so stupid and self-deluded that he believes D'Souza's easily disproved lies.

None of this makes it into 2016. We’re taught the controversy, with a montage of D’Souza defending his thesis in front of hostile interviewers.

See?

(There’s a sort of George Romero irony to these scenes, as D’Souza is filleted on shows like Countdown and Parker/Spitzer. They’re gone. He’s still here.)

Here Weigel appears to sympathize with poor, abused D'Souza, to thow those righties off the track. Hehehe, Weigel mutters under his breath. That'll fool them.

We’re shown just how deeply D’Souza researched this—shot of him thumbing through Dreams before boarding an Indonesian scooter, learning to hula in Hawaii, delivering three goats to buy an interview with Obama’s paternal grandmother Sarah. She turns him down. There is no Michael Moore-style waiting in the weeds to ambush a source.

Hahaha! Can't you just picture D'Souza putting on a fedora and assuming a Harrison Ford-ish expression as he pretends to scour Obama's bio for the accidentally revealed truth, earnestly running his finger over the text line by line, so as to not miss one misstep? And I might actually watch the movie if I get to see D'Souza hop around in an attempt to understand how the hula undermines Americanism and riding a scooter makes you a commie. I''d also like to see D'Souza tell Sarah Palin that growing up off the mainland makes you less American.

And I suspect Grandma Sarah thought D'Souza was offering marriage in exchange for goats, took one look at the gentleman in question, gently let him down by telling him to come back with more goats, and slipped out the back before he returned.




Indian Jones III

But there’s plenty of the Moore style. D’Souza is sold to us as a smart, patriotic innocent abroad, who just wants to piece a mystery together. Almost every clue fits the puzzle. An old associate of Obama Sr. says the son and the father are basically the same.

Stop it, Dave! It's too funny.

(Dad dreamed of 100 percent taxation; Junior dreams of a top marginal rate of 39.6 percent.)

Oh, no! Don't tell D'Souza about Nixon's 70% top marginal rate! He'll have a stroke!

D’Souza asks one of Ann Dunham’s professors if Obama’s mother had taught the son to idolize his father. “I hadn’t thought of that!” she says. “I think you’re right.”

I know just as much about Stanley Ann Dunham's relationship with Obama's father as the professor (nothing) yet I find her epiphany a little unconvincing. Weigel's a sly fox, isn't he?

D’Souza walks the grounds of Obama’s high school, where they teach “oppression studies, if you will.”

They also require students to attend chapel once a week, which must mean, by D'Souza logic, that they are all atheists.

You don’t travel that far without scoring some points. D’Souza gives considerable screen time to Paul Kengor, a (recent) scholar of Obama’s teenage mentor Frank Marshall Davis. Kengor’s bang-on right: Davis was an avowed Communist, and the media of 2008 didn’t care.  

Still, the Davis story is complicated. Becoming a Soviet dupe, as Davis did, meant something for midcentury African-Americans that it doesn’t mean today. Obama never pretended not to know Davis, or pretended that he was some Rockefeller Republican, or turned him into a composite character. He appears in Dreams as “Frank,” a “dashiki-wearing” friend talking “black power.” This is a movie, sure, and you can’t lard it up with every little detail, but D’Souza’s question-begging and omissions lead him to oversell what he’s got.

Weigel lists more of D'Souza's claims, stating that most of them (actually, all of them over here in Realityville) are wrong. This, Weigel says, proves D'Souza's good faith. Heh! And I thought I was good at sarcasm.

Give D’Souza some credit: He lets the audience see when he’s caught up short. There’s none of that teeth-grinding, aren’t-I-smart-didn’t-I-getcha interviewing that you catch in a doc like Inside Job.

Bravo, Dave! That is a pitch-perfect imitation of right-wing petulence when faced with liberal-biased reality.

D’Souza’s biggest journalistic coup is an interview with George Hussein Obama, one of the president’s Kenyan cousins, momentarily famous in 2008 when it was revealed that he lived in poverty. The Other Obama, it turns out, thinks that colonialists should have stayed in Kenya longer than they did.

Now, there's damning with faint praise. The "biggest coup" is a cousin who seems to favor financial redistribution, as long as he is the recipient.

“Do you really believe that?” asks D’Souza. “It’s true,” says George Obama. “They would have developed us. Instead, we were fighting over nothing!”

I think I found McArdle's bus rider.

Alas, D’Souza wants George Obama to be angry over how his famous cousin has treated him.  

He hasn’t been his brother’s keeper, has he?  

“Go ask him,” says George Obama. “He’s got other issues to deal with.”  

“He’s too busy helping the world?” asked D’Souza.  

“Yeah,” says the cousin, not really interested in badmouthing the president. “He’s taking care of me. I’m part of the world.”  

That’s it for cousin George. On to a re-enactment of the young Obama kneeling and bawling in front of his father’s grave. If you’re serious about re-arranging facts, hire a few actors.

Kudos to Mr. Weigel for appearing to support Mr. D'Souza while exposing the latter's bad faith, ineffectiveness, and just plain stupidity. I couldn't have done it any better myself. What could be more ridiculous than supporting the viewpoint of a person whom you have just proven wrong?

The Traditional Family

The Biblical definition of the family unit:

A man, his wives, his concubines, and his female slaves.

Accidental Vacation--Not Dead Yet

I did not mean to be gone so long; I had a lot of work to catch up on but, oddly, once I was caught up I became accustomed to getting work done and did not want to stop to blog. But all work and no play makes a frustrated blogger so I will try to do both.

I hear there were random shootings and Syrian violence, spending is slowing, and the boys are once again deciding if the girls belong in their club or not. So nothing has changed!

A Tiny Note On An Old Friend

It would be a crying shame to ignore Megan McArdle's reaction to the successful upholding of her bete noir, "Obamacare." Since her new little blog is up and running, let's take a peek.

McArdle states that the ruling didn't make much sense and didn't matter much anyway. Life goes on, tra la la. Her attitude is very different from her earlier views, in which Obamacare meant the death of millions and the end of the nation as we know it.

I'm not super surprised that they voted to uphold--though I suspect that Justice Roberts has ducked outrage from liberals only to now get just as much outrage from his own side. This is the political environment we now live in. The age when liberal academics could comfortably expect to see their dominance of the academy translate into a broad progressive consensus on the court are over. We'll be battling over the composition of the court for a long time—and if a liberal or conservative justice is forced to retire while the other party holds the presidency, I expect to see things get vicious indeed.

In McArdleland, the Supreme Court does not reliably side with corporations; it is progressive and, for some reason that McArdle does not share with the little people, a liberal academia directly leads to a liberal Supreme Court. McArdle is still bitter that academia cannot entirely be overtaken by conservatives and provide her friends and family with (magically lucrative) jobs. But she does find a silver lining in the Obamanation.

Some people, maybe including me, will be helped by the bill. Even if you think that this bill will, on net, make more people worse off, you should still be glad for the people who are being helped.

Odd. McArdle told us earlier that she wanted Obamacare gone even if she would suffer for it, as she has a pre-existing condition. Her job change (and therefore health insurance change) must have made her reconsider her earlier position. It's amazing how reality can turn a frown upside down. Other conservatives might disagree. They think people like McArdle should simply suffer and die if she can't buy insurance. True, Mr. Cowen was just thinking about the poor, not about a real person who actually counts like McArdle, but the general principle still holds--some die so the rich can be richer.

McArdle, however, chooses to make lemons into lemonade. McArdle now thinks the conservatives can crow about Obama's "tax increase" because evidently it never occurred to conservatives to claim that liberals want to raise taxes. My goodness, liberals sure will be sorry that they dangled that bait before conservatives. Republicans might not have thought of it otherwise.

The Lesser Of Two Evils

Authoritarians often do not realize that they make decisions based on the deeply-ingrained impulse to obey authority. These people do not say that there is an approved way and someone's else way and they choose the approved way. They say to themselves that there is only one way and it's foolish and wrong to refuse to follow it. There are always multiple options in any scenario although some of those options are desperate and final.
It is our responsibility, our duty, and in our self-interest to criticize the people to whom we have handed over our power/vote. We chose them, supported them, funded them, obeyed them. We are personally responsible for their actions.  They represent us and everything they do reflects on us. It is delusional to expect others to give us a pass for the actions of our leaders. We certainly don't do the same for them.

If our president, the leader of our nation and in this case the leader of our political party, kills foreigners with drones we will be held responsible. We will suffer the consequences of those actions, just as we hold Republicans responsible for voting for George W. Bush. They chose him because they wanted to be winners and Bush promised them that they would be able to use that power to grab more money, force the poor and minorities to show them more respect and obedience, and kill foreigners at will. Liberals chose Barack Obama and they do not just have ownership of some gay rights and health insurance reform, they have ownership of a lot more. From Jimmy Carter's op-ed, via Glenn Greenwald, we are also personally responsible for:

"top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens"

"our government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the [Declaration on Human Rights'] 30 articles, including the prohibition against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”

"Recent legislation has made legal the president’s right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organizations or “associated forces”

"recent laws have canceled the restraints in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications"

"drone attacks has turned aggrieved families toward terrorist organizations, aroused civilian populations against us and permitted repressive governments to cite such actions to justify their own despotic behavior"

And, via John Cole, Matt Stoller also points out our responsibility.

This alternative narrative is a hard truth to hear, because it carries with it an implicit rejection of American exceptionalism. Yes, American institutions are no better, and in many ways are more malignant, than those of many other countries. Yes, our political leaders, our press, our military leadership, operate in service to sociopathic aims. Yes, our freedoms are often an illusion, unless you fit a very narrow criteria. Yes, our banks are run to rob us, yes, our CIA spies on us, and yes, our government is fundamentally anti-democratic. Yes, our President is a con artist, and yes, nearly every reporter who writes about him participates in this set of lies, because of careerism, social financial reasons, or a simple lack of competence or imagination.

But, the idea that the king is always good, which is where the hope and change narrative draws its deep strength, is something we do not have to accept. We as people can break this spell, and speak to our own dignity, as citizens. We can learn our own power, if in no other manner than in saying at the voting booth and in public, “I do not accept your lies, and though you might take it by force, I will not grant you my consent willingly.” We can choose not to address our political officials by their titles. We can work to organize ourselves, and our lives, with those of us who understand that power is something that must be taken, with money, organization, but most of all, with moral courage. It is not something that politicians have except through our consent, consent we have been giving for decades, to a rotten political class. This is what they truly fear. This is why they spend tens of billions on propaganda, on advertising, on symbols and personalities and celebrity. This is why they hide the workings of our government and banks and institutions of power in the language of boring bureaucrat-ese. This is ultimately why they are weak. Because in order for them to do their work quietly, we must go about our day, and believe either the hope and change narrative, or the Kenyan socialist narrative, scoffing at the opposing “team” who thinks what we do not. Instead, we can choose an alternative narrative, that power and consent come from us, come from the choices that we make, as people, and as citizens. And we will no longer believe that Barack Obama, that cool, brilliant, self-aware con artist is anything but what he has revealed himself to be. (my bold)

Power is terrifying because it comes with responsibility. All we have to do to avoid this responsibility is refuse to use our power. The concept of power and responsibility seem very vague and far away. Most people are only concerned with their immediate world, the actions that directly affect them. But when you give away your power you can't keep the part you need and give away the part you don't need. You have given all of it away and it's no longer there when you need it. So you simply say that you don't need it. Obama's cool. He's got it. Let him handle it. Trust him to do his job. And then you go back to your daily life, and people die from bombs and joblessness is ignored and banks grow richer while we grow poorer. I am reading the same economic warnings that I read in 2008. It is terrifying. Which is worse--lose an election or lose a nation?

Mr. Cole and many of his commenters were very displeased by Stoller's words. Stoller was immensely insulting and disrespectful of their authority. They believe that Obama is better than Romney, which is undeniably true but short-sighted. They only look at what they might gain and ignore what they might lose. They do not weigh the long-term consequences against the short-term consequences or exercise their power for their own personal gain. They work only for the personal gain of their authority, a defining characteristic of authoritarianism.

If we will not be more moral or wise, let us be more greedy. We trade economic gains for social gains but money is power, and if we don't trade votes for jobs we will continue to be utterly powerless and dependent on the charity of our elected officials, who will only reverse their assault on our civil rights when they need our votes.

And yet, how do you tell people that their authority thinks they are chumps when they were raised to respect and obey authority? Tell them their parents were selfish, foolish and cruel to teach them to obey? For most people the idea is an absurd and evil accusation. They do not believe it; they cannot admit that people we love can harm us, even if that harm was done unwittingly and with the best intentions. We love our parents so much that we can't bear to admit that they forced us to mistrust our own judgement, underminded our self-confidence and self-esteem, and left us looking for someone to obey for the rest of our lives. We might be willing to die rather than admit it.

We certainly would rather let strangers die than admit it.

Evolution In Twitter

I miss Megan McArdle. Nobody can backpedal from embarrassing herself in public due to ignorance as fast as she can. From Twitter:

Megan McArdle‏@asymmetricinfo I sometimes get a feeling that solid majority of Americans who aren't creationists believe in Lamarckian evolution or ID by some other name  

Dom Narducci‏@dnathe4th @asymmetricinfo I'll take Lamarckian over ID any day. At least soft-inheritance can be debated against Darwinism, without a "just because".  

Megan McArdle‏@asymmetricinfo @dnathe4th I'm talking about what you might call "Gaian ID"--concept that animals/ecosystems evolve in some direction for benevolent purpose  

Dom Narducci‏ @asymmetricinfo Oh ... I thought Lamarckian was the concept that organisms can pick up traits to pass on during their lifetime?  

Megan McArdle‏@asymmetricinfo @dnathe4th Yes, it is. I hear both--a lot of people read evolution in strange ways, including those who think creationists are crazy.

When is Lamarkianism not Lamarkianism? When Megan McArdle says so.

But at least McArdle isn't one of those silly liberals! They think creationists are crazy to believe in ID but they believe crazy things too! Sadly, McArdle does not let us know who actually believes in "Gaia ID" but they must be out there somewhere because McArdle says she heard them say it. And we all know that people frequently tell McArdle things that supports her negative image of liberals. And "urban" people. And teachers.

McArdle didn't learn much science at school but she did learn how to cover her ass. And it wouldn't be a McArdle whoopsie without some friend trying to help with the ass-covering.

Timothy P Carney‏@TPCarney @asymmetricinfo you are correct. First time I was called a creationist was b/c I denied creatures could "evolve" on demand.

Link Bait

Does The Atlantic think all women are scum? Instead of hiring a female economist it hired Megan McArdle, as if to prove the cliche that women can't do math. It paid that harpy Sandra Lo, who wrote about her messy and selfish personal life and now it has Elizabeth Wertzel, who seems to think that feminists must be narcissists to earn the title. (No links for them.)

Using unpleasant women who humiliate themselves in print as link bait might please the accountants and The Atlantic's  conservative readers but it doesn't improve the already damaged reputation of the magazine.

Dead Horse, Dead Rider

Son, get off your knees. --Steve Gilliard

David Brooks' column, in which he scold the peasants for lack of reverence for the divine right of kings, has been beaten to a pulp but try as I might, I can't ignore a plea for greater authoritarianism.

Brooks began by lamenting that the nation no longer builds monuments to the glory of America's greatness.

Why can’t today’s memorial designers think straight about just authority?

Authoritarianism is the straight, the right  way, and Brooks does not understand why everyone else isn't falling into line, as God and nature intended. Dividing authority between just and injust is merely a transparent attempt at deflection; for authoritarians, all authority is just and, as we will see, Brooks thinks people who protest injustice are just whiners.

Obedient, subservient people are frightened by the thought of disobedience. It threatens the basis for their entire worldview. There is a hierarchy and everyone has his place on that hierarchy. The hierarchy was given to us by God and instilled in us by our parents, to whom we owe absolute obedience as well. If we do not obey our parents/gods will be angry with us. Anti-authoritarianism offers uncertainty, poverty and isolation. Authoritarianism offers security, the promise of money at some time in the future, and the consolation and pleasure of belonging to the (weak, obedient) tribe. And, much more practically, if offers money. Otherwise Brooks would not be crouching under the rich man's table, mouth wide open and watery eyes expectant, to catch any crumbs that happen to fall. Obedient--nay, Godly--people are rewarded for their loyalty.

It is perfectly obvious who has money and therefore the authority and who does not. The left has no money at all compared to the corporate right. Exxon funded Reason, not Greenpeace. The Koches fund libertarians, not liberals. America is not just conservative because it is authoritarian, it is conservative because conservatives promise to "leave more money in your pocket." Conservatives must have a carrot as well as a stick, after all.

Some of the reasons are well-known. We live in a culture that finds it easier to assign moral status to victims of power than to those who wield power. Most of the stories we tell ourselves are about victims who have endured oppression, racism and cruelty.

We live in a culture that worships power and thinks it natural to kill anyone who displeases us. Brookes's tribe, who also live on their knees, tell themselves that they are victims of the powerless because they are afraid to admit they are the victims of their authority and because they want to continue exerting authority over anyone with less power than them. After using others to feel powerful, keeping slaves "for their own good," controlling women "to keep them safe," abusing children to force them to learn fear and automatic obedience, authoritarians claim they are the victims in an attempt to deflect attention and alleviate guilt and responsibility.

Then there is our fervent devotion to equality, to the notion that all people are equal and deserve equal recognition and respect. It’s hard in this frame of mind to define and celebrate greatness, to hold up others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves.

This is the money quote, the reason David Brooks lives in a multi-million dollar house and you don't. He can state with a straight face that not everyone deserves respect, not everyone is equal. Some are "immeasurably superior to ourselves." The lickspittle must lick spit.

But the main problem is our inability to think properly about how power should be used to bind and build. Legitimate power is built on a series of paradoxes: that leaders have to wield power while knowing they are corrupted by it; that great leaders are superior to their followers while also being of them; that the higher they rise, the more they feel like instruments in larger designs. The Lincoln and Jefferson memorials are about how to navigate those paradoxes.

We have a choice, to either give away all our power to one man or small group of men, or to share power amongst our fellow man. Shared power is less corruptible. It forces us to acknowledge that we are only as good as our actions. To wield power is to wield force, and force always crushes those under its power. Why not? The little people owe their betters obedience, right? Who are they to question the powerful?

These days many Americans seem incapable of thinking about these paradoxes. Those “Question Authority” bumper stickers no longer symbolize an attempt to distinguish just and unjust authority. They symbolize an attitude of opposing authority.

God forbid. Literally.

There is no just and unjust authority. There is power, and either we let the rich have it all or we demand our equal share.

The old adversary culture of the intellectuals has turned into a mass adversarial cynicism. The common assumption is that elites are always hiding something. Public servants are in it for themselves.

Who has the money now and who doesn't? We don't have to theorize, we just have to look at the massive transfer of wealth that just happened.

Those people at the top are nowhere near as smart or as wonderful as pure and all-knowing Me.

How dare you, in your arrogance, think you are as good as your authority? Authoritarians love this approach because they think liberals are afraid to seem arrogant.

Has there ever been such a naked appeal to authority? (K-Lo excepted, of course.) David Brooks is now "Knees" Brooks, because he is always on them, the better to abase himself before his betters. Grovel, little man!

You end up with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Parties that try to dispense with authority altogether. They reject hierarchies and leaders because they don’t believe in the concepts. The whole world should be like the Internet — a disbursed semianarchy in which authority is suspect and each individual is king.

Grind those $500 trousers into the dirt as you wiggle your tail!

Maybe before we can build great monuments to leaders we have to relearn the art of following. Democratic followership is also built on a series of paradoxes: that we are all created equal but that we also elevate those who are extraordinary; that we choose our leaders but also have to defer to them and trust their discretion; that we’re proud individuals but only really thrive as a group, organized and led by just authority.

Sadly this is more true than not; many liberals think that we do owe our leaders our trust. We do not owe our president anything. He is our public servant, we are not his.

I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else.

What could be more cynical than accusing someone of vanity when he is only trying to protect his own rights? Might we have had a reason for becoming more cynical? I watched Watergate updates in between episodes of Josie and the Pussycats and Scooby Doo as a kid. It takes willful blindness to retain worship of authority under those conditions.

I also learned to mistrust anyone named Old Man Withers, but that is another story.

In his memoir, “At Ease,” Eisenhower delivered the following advice: “Always try to associate yourself with and learn as much as you can from those who know more than you do, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.” Ike slowly mastered the art of leadership by becoming a superb apprentice.

How much is David Brooks learning from his position on the ground? What should we be studying--how to run unsuccessful wars? Destroy the economy and the middle class? Shove more people into poverty and dependence? And then demand admiration, respect and obedience?

To have good leaders you have to have good followers — able to recognize just authority, admire it, be grateful for it and emulate it. Those skills are required for good monument building, too.

To bad they are not the skills needed to have a good country.

David Brooks' sycophancy is sickening and he deserve every bit of the scorn that has been heaped on him for this column. If he wants to make a living by bowing and scraping before his betters that's his right but all he is doing is humiliating himself.

Goodbye To You

Press play to hear this article's soundtrack.

It is with deep, deep, ever-so-deep sadness that we at the Snark note the passing of Megan McArdle from the pages of The Atlantic (online!) It seems that she and her beloved magazine have parted ways and now McArdle must bid adieu to her cushy, prestigious little Watergate office. But as McArdle told us when she bought her darling Victorian row house, she has confidence that she can always find a new job in DC, and lo and behold, McArdle was snapped up at once by Tina Brown.

This is a bittersweet post for me to write. I've missed you all terribly while on leave, and in the interim, Newsweek has come to me and made me an offer I couldn't refuse to move there.

Ah, proof positive that McArdle was not fired, as some ungenerous people might think. True, McArdle went on book leave right after lying about her Koch conflict of interest but since The Atlantic never cared about that before it could not have fired her for such unprofessional conduct. Now we know that McArdle quit to write for The Daily Beast and Newsweek instead. They must have offered her a great deal of money; while Newsweek has a bigger audience, The Atlantic featured McArdle prominently as its only female Voice. Anyone trying to find McArdle amidst the clamoring clutter of The Daily Beast will need a search engine and a microscope.

Some might quibble at the disloyalty McArdle has displayed after all The Atlantic has done for her by taking a chance on a little-known blogger and financing her book leave. Thanks to The Atlantic McArdle was also a shining star at the Aspen Ideas for Big Brained Thinkers festivals and followed those triumphs with speaking engagements and fellowships provided by allies of David G. Bradley. But, thanks to McArdle, we all know that the most important thing in the world is money and we also know that where money goes, Megan McArdle follows.

I'll still be on leave for a few more months while I finish up the project I've been working on, and then at the end of the summer, I'll start blogging and writing for Newsweek/Daily Beast.

Yes, Megan McArdle, once the Senior Editor for economics at The Atlantic, will now be one of the fine stable of bloggers at The Daily Beast and a "correspondent" for Newsweek. Evidently her first assignment has something to do with McArdle's specialty, failure. Wikipedia tells us:

The back page is reserved for a "My Favorite Mistake" column written by celebrity guest columnists about a mistake they made that defines who they are.[25]

Since McArdle recently tweeted requests for her devoted followers to fill out a survey on their favorite mistake, McArdle must be working on that or a similar column; we look forwards to many posts and articles explaining how wonderfully failure has worked out for, well, certain people.

[yap yap yap]  

I'm very excited about the opportunity to work in a newsroom led by Tina Brown, whose turnarounds of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker are legendary. But it is not without regret--the inevitable regret that tradeoffs are necessary and I cannot take the job at Newsweek/Daily Beast without leaving so much behind at The Atlantic. In my five years here, we've gone from a magazine that was fantastic, but losing money by the bucketful to one that was still fantastic, but also profitable. That happened in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, an achievement which still boggles the mind. We've built a web presence, and a web brand, that few organizations can match. And it's been immense fun. Working for The Atlantic has been more than I ever dreamed it would be. I'll forever be immensely grateful to everyone who was here during my time--including my readers and my commenters, who are the ultimate reason that I get to spend my days reading and writing about stuff that interests me.

Those readers and commenters variously informed McArdle that they wished her the best and that most of them would continue reading her column at The Daily Beast, if they could find it. A few noted sadly that they understood her decision to sell out and didn't blame her at all for going for the money, and a few took a final shot at our favorite libertarian princess, now swiftly replaced by Garance Franke-Ruta. (Thanks, Downpuppy.)

Come tomorrow, I should have a URL to give you for the new blog, where I'll be posting a little bit over the summer (expect a post when the Supreme Court decision on ObamaCare drops). For now, I'll just say thanks for reading. I miss you guys more every day.

The link did not arrive but she need not bother; a less-important Megan is not the threat that an Atlantic Megan represented, and therefore is not worth wasting one's time over. Since McArdle was recently whining about her nasty troll critics no doubt she will be immensely relieved that she has traded prominence and respect for money and can now sink into anonymity. The Snark will continue to check out McArdle from time to time but as she is no longer important she will no longer be a central focus on this blog.

So.

Who's next?