Robert Samuelson is a truly vile person. He uses his prominent perch at The Washington Post to argue week after week that all of our problems come from the fact that we treat our elderly too well. He thinks Social Security pays too much, even though it pays out what it takes in and it is not nearly as generous as similar programs in other advanced economies. And then he complains about all the money we spend on Medicare, but isn’t at all concerned that the cost is so high because we pay twice as much for our healthcare as people in other advanced economies where the medical care is better. He just wants to harm the poorer people in our society and assure more and more money for the already rich. Like I said: he’s a vile guy.

On Christmas eve, he sunk to new lows, Repairing the Middle Class in 2015. The title itself is funny. As if Samuelson is in the least bit interested in helping the middle class. But the article itself is just one distortion after another. He claims that the American system is not rigged against the middle class but rather for the middle class. “That’s a natural result for a democracy in which politicians compete more for votes than for dollars.” No serious person could look out on the vast American political system and conclude that the votes really matter. A tiny investment of $8 million by Monsanto caused a hugely popular GMO food labeling bill in California to go down to a resounding defeat.

But when it comes to all that money that the middle class is getting from the government, Samuelson points to — Surprise! — Social Security and Medicare. Keven Drum calls him on this issue, The Middle Class Needs More Income. Faith Will Follow:

But Samuelson doesn’t leave it there. He goes on to complain that most of the taxes fall on the rich. Well I wonder why that might be! Median incomes have been stagnant for almost four decades. But he is further disingenuous by looking only at the federal government where taxes are most fair. As I showed last week when discussing the supposed Texas Miracle, state taxes are usually ridiculously regressive. But Samuelson doesn’t want to talk about that, because he isn’t interested in what the truth is about life for the poorer classes in the United States. He’s interested in pushing the interests of the oligarchs.

But if that weren’t bad enough, he then goes on to blame the financial crisis of bursting the house bubble on those evil poor people getting loans they couldn’t afford. He noted, “There is much evidence for [the cause of the financial crisis], but it ignores the deeper cause: an intellectual, political and social climate that legitimized lax lending policies in the name of promoting middle-class well-being.” To begin with, those lax lending policies were not created to help the middle-class. They were created to help bankers make a lot of money. But his narrative is just outrageous. Oh, those poor bankers being pushed around by the intellectual, political, and social climate! Funny how when people are screaming for jobs, the business community is sitting on piles of cash, despite the intellectual, political, and social climate.

Samuelson ends his article by noting that the challenges for the middle class are only partly economic. It is also psychological. It seems we can’t really control the economic environment, but we can control ourselves. So let’s not do anything about the economy and let’s complain that the middle class just kind of sucks. Dean Baker called this for the nonsense that it is, Robert Samuelson Thinks That Because He Is Confused About the Economy, Everyone Else Is Also:

It’s also interesting that the government has done nothing to keep the minimum wage up with the rate of inflation — to say nothing of the rate of productivity growth. The government has done everything it could get away with to screw the poorer classes and lavish the rich with every possible benefit. But that’s what Robert Samuelson thinks it ought to do. I just wish he were more honest about it.

Michael Hiltzik offered up some potentially good news at the end of this year, Is Texas, the Biggest Domino, About to Topple on Medicaid Expansion? It seems that not all right wing freaks are created equal. With Rick Perry and his Super Glasses leaving office to pursue truth, justice and the American way, governor-elect Greg Abbot has indicated that he might be open to taking the Medicaid expansion in the form that Arkansas and Utah have pioneered. In it, instead of the working poor getting added to Medicaid, they are given money to buy insurance on the exchanges. It ain’t perfect, but it is a distinct improvement on the way things are.

It’s kind of the perfect way for Republicans to dip their toes into Obamacare. After all, they are already part of it. The citizens of Texas are already required to have health insurance. And they are already paying higher taxes for the new law. So they are getting everything bad from the law and relatively little good from it. They might as well get some of that money back that they are sending away. The way the law was designed, blue states (because they are generally richer) were subsidizing red states. But because Republicans have been so spiteful about Obamacare, it’s worked out that red states have been subsidizing blue states. This is not a state of affairs that can go on for long.

This kind of “block grant” approach to the Medicaid expansion is something that Republicans have long claimed to like. And this kind of deal is a great face saving maneuver that allows the Republicans to claim both that they made the evil president bend to their will and that they don’t just hate the working poor. (Even though they clearly do.) Now we will have to see if Texas goes along with this. It is still likely that the Texas legislature will be unable to get past their mean girl spite and do what is best. But this is good news regardless.

Hiltzik runs the numbers in his article and they are overwhelming. Texas has the highest level of uninsured residents with over 22%, when the average is around 13%. And with bad economic times coming to Texas, it will only get worse. A 2013 report found that by not taking the Medicaid expansion, the state was set to lose almost $8 billion and have extra costs of almost $400 million. That was for a two year period. What’s more, hospitals are getting hit hard. Each year, they do $17 billion in uncompensated work. The Medicaid expansion would take a big chunk out of that.

I spend a lot of time complaining that the Democratic Party is too much the party of big business. But what’s remarkable is that the business community is so wedded to the Republican Party when the party doesn’t look out for its interests at all. Its general incompetence hurts business growth but on the individual level, it doesn’t do anything for business except for its trademark crony capitalism.

But we have a perfect storm here in Texas. It is losing a huge amount of money. The hospitals are keen to see the extra money coming in. The state is looking at bad times ahead. And it has a perfect face saving excuse for signing up for the program now. Given the absolute joke that the Republican Party is — especially in Texas — we can’t say what will happen. But this is hopeful news. And if Texas accepts the Medicaid expansion, many other states are sure to follow.

Charlie Pierce made an interesting comparison over at his place at Esquire, Life And Cheerios Imitate The Newsroom. He started by noting the ridiculousness of Chuck Todd claiming that he has to allow Republicans (“politicians”) to lie on Meet the Press, because if he didn’t, they wouldn’t come on the show. It was a remarkable moment of honesty, although Todd does seem to think it is about “balance.”

I think it is typical of what I call “fake power” — the kind of power you only have as long as you don’t use it. The best recent example of this has been Speaker of the House John Boehner who has enormous power, but if he ever used that power to do what was right rather than just to do what his caucus wanted, he would find that he was out of a job. Similarly, Chuck Todd has the power to ask the “hard questions” only so long as he absolutely never asks the hard questions.

It reminds me of something else. You could watch the nightly news on ABC, NBC, and CBS. And you would never see anything different. It is a remarkable example of self-censorship. Either that or it just so happens that the major news outlets manage to get right to the heart of what is going on in the world. Of course, we know that isn’t the case. You can go back over the decades and see what the news sources were reporting in their amazing unanimity and see what was really going on. It’s just follow the leader.

Meanwhile, all the time I was growing up, I was told that the Soviet Union didn’t have a free press. Well, true enough. But that didn’t speak poorly of them so much as it speaks poorly of us for thinking that we do have a free press. It’s like what Noam Chomsky said in The Common Good, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

So good old Chuck Todd is there to play the part of a free journalist. And indeed, he isn’t being told what to say and not to say by the government. Oh no! He’s being told what to say and not to say by the “free” market! And that is better because… I’m not sure. No one has ever answered it because no one seems to even be aware that it is a question to be answered.

Pierce focused primarily on Reince Priebus’ recent hissyfit about not allowing any Republicans to come on MSNBC, after someone at the network had tweeted out, “Maybe the rightwing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww: the adorable new #Cheerios ad w/ biracial family.” MSNBC folded like a cheap ironing board, of course. And Pierce notes that if a Democrat had made a similar demand, he would have laughed out of polite company. But there is a difference I’m afraid: Democrats aren’t bigots. If half the electorate that votes Republican weren’t compelled to do so by their bigotry, Priebus wouldn’t have felt the need to demand an apology.

I don’t think there is an other side to this situation. Democrats — despite their many failings — actually believe in what they claim to believe in. It isn’t the case that half of the Democratic vote comes from closet communists. And even that would be more acceptable than the racist base of the Republican Party. So of course if the Democrats started acting like the Republicans, people would scoff. It’s pretty much impossible to imagine a comment that would cut the party so deeply while also being true.

What’s wrong with our media system is that people like Chuck Todd don’t start interviews with Reince Priebus with questions like, “What is the Republican Party going to do when all its racist voters die off? Does the party have a plan to create new racist voters?” But that won’t happen. If it did, the Republicans wouldn’t come on Meet the Press, and people like Chuck Todd would have to do actual journalism. And I don’t think there are many people in the mainstream press that still know how that’s done.

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.