While looking for images for my last article, I came upon this image from an article in Driftglass, Today in False Equivalence. I’m not so much interested in the article itself, because it doesn’t actually address what they’ve done with this image. It’s a takeoff of one or more of those Demi Moore covers that I guess are supposed to say that the magazine is celebrating the beauty of pregnancy, but somehow always come off as a celebration of pregnancy fetishes. But in this case, the point is clear: supposed reasonable conservatives don’t want to take responsibility for the craziness of the conservative movement.

Actually, I don’t know if they care. Based upon his writing, David Brooks seems a little concerned. He is part of the long line of conservatives who are embarrassed by all the coarse things that other conservatives say. Brooks is careful with his language so that when everything that he believes in crumbles and destroys millions of lives, he can say, “I said it might be a good idea to raise taxes on the poor and eliminate taxes on the rich; I didn’t say it would be a good idea!” So it makes more sense to apply the unwanted pregnancy image to him.

I have a special dislike for David Frum. He’s as much of an ideologue as any Tea Party wacko. The only reason people consider him reasonable is because he thinks that having a bit of gun control mightn’t be the worst thing in the world. He’s also recently okay with same sex marriage. For decades he was against it because he thought it would be bad for “the kids.” But now the data are in and that case can’t be made anymore. Fair enough. But the truth is that his original problem with it was not based on evidence. It was based upon bigotry. When evidence becomes overwhelming, Frum will change his mind. But it is always up to the world to convince him that his bigotry is wrong. In other words: he’s just a right wing wacko who is smart enough to know when his arguments are untenable.

What I think totally sums up David Frum is the popular phrase “axis of evil.” He’s the guy who invented it. And it shows that like all conservatives, he has no actual interest in the truth. In World War II, the axis powers were a coalition. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea were not a coalition. In as much as they had anything to do with each other, it was to fight. But Frum was more than happy to lump them in together because Frum is an evil little man who doesn’t care about the nation or the world. Just like with Cheney and Bush, Frum cares about power.

The image is perfect in that it shows that the smarter people in the conservative movement would prefer to deny that they are responsible for the state of the modern Republican Party. Those Tea Party people that continue to clog up Congress are an embarrassment. But let’s not kid ourselves. They are an embarrassment because they are vulgar. They are an embarrassment because they aren’t tactical about the long-term goals of the conservative movement. They are an embarrassment because they are ignorant and stupid. But they are right in line with the ideology of David Brooks, David Frum, and all the “respectable” conservatives.

For Christmas, Paul Krugman wrote, Tidings of Comfort. He felt that people were kind of glum this holiday season. And the reason is that the media have painted a picture of the world that has indeed been very bleak. There was Ebola that was going to kill us all. Then there was Vladimir Putin and ISIS and North Korea who were going to destroy us because, you know, a democracy could never meet the threat of authoritarians except minor things like World War II that are easy enough to forget about. But perhaps you are like Paul Krugman and you’ve noticed that all of these things are imaginary.

I don’t think any of this is unusual. As a nation, we are always freaking out. We don’t have much in terms of cultural cohesion to hang onto. So we manage our lives by moving from crisis to crisis. We are like adrenaline junkies: we get excited and then we calm down. Wash, rinse, repeat — for the rest of our lives. I don’t much care in a certain way. My interest is in the way that such behavior stops us from dealing with real problems. And I think that our hair-trigger concern that we are, for example, all going to die from Ebola explains why we have the highest levels of teen pregnancy, illiteracy, and income inequality among the advanced economies.

It is hard not to think back to another great American who jumped from freak out to freak out: Ronald Reagan. Remember when he told us, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”? What exactly did he mean by that? I was never really clear what that one problem was. But I feel certain that what he meant was that individuals and the private sector was the solution to our problem. But it is three and a half decades later and it is more clear than ever that individuals don’t have the power to solve that one great problem (largely because of policies Reagan himself enacted) and that the private sector has become, if anything, a far greater problem than the original one great problem.

I’ve written a few articles this last week about Darrell Issa. And the main thing that I’ve had to say is that Issa has won in all of his fake scandal mongering. It doesn’t matter in the least that nothing came of those scandals — that there was literally nothing untoward going on. What matters is that he was allowed to go to media outlets all over the nation and push the idea that something was amiss. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” So he got people to think exactly the opposite of what was true and what was in their best interests, “The government is bad; the government can’t be trusted; the government is out to get you.” Imagine that you tell someone a hundred times that the White House is targeting its enemies. And then on the 101st time, you say, “Oops! I was wrong; the White House didn’t do anything wrong.” What are they going to remember? Or more to the point: what are they going to remember when the media don’t even cover that 101st statement?

I have little use for wimps on the left that don’t seem to stand for anything other than maybe technocratic competence. I have no use for the demagogues on the right who will do anything to keep themselves in power and enrich their friends. But there is a very special level of hell that I reserve for our media system that allows disinformation to be reported as fact in the name of balance. It can be very hard to get to the truth of any matter. But our media have given up on it. It’s hard, so they just report what the two powerful sides of the debate claim. And usually, the truth is far from both.

Dean Baker brought up an important issue today, New for Washington Post: Politicians Don’t Always Tell the Truth and TPP Is Not a Free-Trade Agreement. Primarily, he’s talking about the likely reason that Obama is pushing the TPP and TTIP, “President Obama is trying to get more business support for the Democratic Party.” But I’m more focused on just how awful these deals are.

As Baker has noted many times in the past, these are not “free trade” agreements. The two agreements involve nations in Asia (TPP) and Europe (TTIP) with which we already have pretty much free trade. What these agreements would do is make it very easy for business to contest local, state, and federal laws in newly created tribunals. Here is the key that ought to cause a shiver down the spine of all sentient beings, “Their rulings could not be over-turned by domestic courts.”

You know all the right-wing loonies who are always worried about the one world government or the imposition of sharia law? Well, that’s all nonsense. But this here is a very real threat. As I discuss a great deal on this blog, what we have to fear is the business community. Conservatives are constantly worried that it is the government that is oppressing them. But that isn’t the case at all. Our biggest threats come from private corporations with the government backing them up.

And that’s what we see with the TPP and TTIP. This is a very clear attack on national sovereignty. And this is why people like Obama want a quick vote on this — fast track authority. Because they know that a careful analysis of it will kill it. This is just another way for the business community to gain more power over us. I can’t say exactly how it would all work. No one can because these treaties have never been made public. But it is quite likely that what they would eventually mean is that local minimum wage laws were illegal. And local environmental laws were illegal. And local zoning laws were illegal.

I’m I going too far? I doubt it. Things that seem beyond the pale in one step are often totally acceptable in two steps — much less a hundred. Let me give you an example. In the 19th century, the idea of drug laws was preposterous and clearly unconstitutional. But by the beginning of the 20th century, the idea of taxing drugs and then using the power to effectively make drugs illegal was acceptable. And before long, the government just made laws that never would have been allowed a century earlier.

So going home to the house located a few meters from a new fracking operation after losing your only shot at justice in the TPP tribunals shouldn’t sound too far fetched. Because if we don’t work against it, it will become reality. This is an area where we really do have allies on the right. Of course, after Fox News starts pushing it, I can’t say. The black helicopter crowd isn’t hard to manipulate. As long as a Democrat is pushing the TPP and the TTIP, they will doubtless be against this move. But once President Cruz is pushing it, all bets are off.

Paul Krugman has written a couple of blog posts about David Beckworth. I know what you’re thinking, “Why would Krugman be writing about soccer? Or is he writing about the Spice Girls?” Don’t be an idiot like me: it’s Beckworth, not Beckham. He’s an economist of sorts. In the first post, Krugman was impressed that Beckworth agreed with him about the limitations of monetary policy when interest rates are already hanging around zero. But in his second post, Krugman grumbled because Beckworth seemed to be backtracking.

The argument that Beckworth is making is really interesting, even if Krugman’s argument is valid. Beckworth’s argument is that fiscal stimulus can’t really help the economy either. He claimed that any stimulus created by the government spending money would be offset by the Fed raising rates. Krugman countered that this isn’t true in the current situation where the Federal Reserve has consistently been unable to keep inflation as high as its (ridiculously low) inflation target. When it comes to this, I think there is an easier way to counter Beckworth. Basically, he’s just making the argument that there is never anything the government can do to fight economic downturns. So why bother?! That’s a typical conservative conclusion in search of an argument.

But there is something to be said for Beckworth’s argument in a general sense. In regular times, the Fed stands guard over the wealth of the power elite. If the economy starts to really take off — most especially in the form of workers actually earning more money for a change — the Fed raises interest rates to slow the economy down. The only time in the last four decades that we have seen a substantive improvement in the earnings of ordinary workers was when crazy heterodox Fed chairman Alan Greenspan went against what all the economists said.

The interesting thing is that Greenspan showed that unemployment could get down to below 4% without causing inflation. But the actual real world experiment hasn’t changed the thinking of economists. I still hear economists claiming that inflation below 6% is going to cause inflation. I know that things change over time. But 6%? Really?! That’s extreme. Things haven’t changed that much. But this is why I think it is better to think of economists as religious apologists than as scientists. But instead of arguing on the literal truth of the Bible, they argue for whatever is best for the power elite.

So in good times — or moderately good times — the Federal Reserve really does have the power to kill any recovery that democratically elected officials might be able to facilitate. And that really doesn’t speak well for us. It means that what hereditary “rights” did for feudalism, the Fed does for modern capitalism. And capitalism hardly needs such help! But with the Fed, it makes it substantially harder to break the established bonds of the power elite. It’s not just the fact that money makes money and that’s why you are best off being born rich. It is also that the most important economic entity in the entire world is there to enforce the status quo.

But just like we tell children fairy tales to make them behave, we tell ourselves comforting myths about meritocracy in America. But it is time to put away childish illusions and look at the cold reality of modern America. Then maybe we can change it.

See also: The Myth of the NAIRU and Its Purpose