The Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti subbed for the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin yesterday in confecting yet another "Right Turn" farce of laughable distortion and appalling anti-intellectualism. Naturally, the diabolical President Obama was Continetti's target.
Why diabolical? Well, according to the class-warfare brigade, of whom Continetti is a highly decorated officer, throughout his press conference Obama was "playing the same old game of coalition politics, desperately trying to divide the public by pitting Republicans and the rich against the rest of America."
A disagreeable business, this divisiveness; and it seems that Obama shamefully exploited it by merely noting it, whereas Republican pols, who created it, have merely tried to conceal its enormity from "the rest of America." In this context Continetti's use of "coalition politics" -- a conservative bugaboo that spells "anti-GOP electoral phalanx," to be distinguished from conservatives' honorable coalition of gun freaks, Scripture tormenters and fiscal prehistorics -- was fascinating. Which is to say, Obama's thrust was that Medicare should not suffer at the expense of a hedge-fund manager's obscenely low tax bracket, yet that hedge-fund manager will someday benefit from Medicare, just like "the rest of America." How, then, in this instance, was Obama playing "the same old game of [devisive] coalition politics"?
Even gun freaks, Scripture tormenters and fiscal prehistorics get old and sick, and they, too, will someday benefit from Obama's caress of civilized policy; indeed, huge majorities of Republicans and "Tea Party supporters" oppose cuts to Medicare (as well as Medicaid). Hence in Continetti's configuration of Obamian cynicism, Republicans and Tea Partiers are a part of the Democratic coalition.
But all that gibberish was comparatively lucid when stacked against Continetti's expedition into ignorance-pandering and rank anti-intellectualism. His opening argument is breathtaking in the lowness of its brow:
The idea that the way to solve America's debt problem is by raising the debt ceiling is the most counterintuitive of them all. The public doesn't buy it.
Oh my. One hardly knows where to begin. In fact, the above demagoguery is so snicker-worthy, so utterly irreconcilable with the known circumstances as known by knowledgeable readers, I won't even make an effort beyond the customary dispatch: You unscrupulous imp, the debt ceiling relates to past spending.
That, however, was just a scandalous warm-up for Continetti, who either hasn't picked up an economic textbook published subsequent to 1933, or, far more likely, simply elected to further mislead what he populistically prays is a hopelessly unschooled public:
They have not read Lord Keynes and doubt whether his prescriptions work in the real world. For them, thrift is not a "paradox" but a virtue.
This intellectual divide between the president and the public is the reason his ratings on the economy are so poor. One suspects the gap is unbridgeable.
This pseudoconservative quackery about the "unworkability" of theoretical Keynesianism "in the real world" has been repeatedly debunked (Lord -- I mean Lord Keynes, does one still really need to point this out?) -- twice, for instance, by FDR during the Great Depression, and soon enough again throughout the vastest of all Keynesian "experiments," the Second World War.
Continetti is a bright fellow who, with minimal but heroic effort, could rip those ideological blinders from his mischievous eyes and thereupon help "bridge the gap" between this intellectual president and those man-on-the-street ignoramuses whom Continetti labors to oppress with yet more validating ignorance. Such an act of independence would showcase the kind of small-r republican virtue about which his army of pseudoconservative ideologues so routinely blathers. But, Continetti is a good soldier, a magnificently loyal officer in the partisan-based war of class divisions, which his ruthlessly anti-intellectual army cares far more about.