Apparently, the National Review’s Editors Plan to Swear Off Flying. And Eating Farm Products. And Want to Force the Rest of Us To, Too.
Ah. It’s official: The National Review’s editors do not depend on Social Security and Medicare to survive or keep them from bankruptcy. Nor do they have an elderly parent in a nursing home who, since exhausting his or her financial reserves, remain cared for there by dint of Medicaid. Which is nice for them.
And most of them live in the Northeast, not in Arizona, California, New Mexico, or Texas, so, much as they hate illegal immigration from Mexico, it doesn’t really impact their lives. Their homes, unlike the Arizona ranchers who elect the state legislators who enact harsh anti-illegal-immigrant laws, their own property, including their winter homes, are probably secured by private guards.
But they probably do fly. Maybe in their employer’s or their friends’ corporate jets rather than in commercial airliners. But fly, nonetheless. They also probably eat produce, poultry, meat and dairy products inspected by–OMG–a federal agency; specifically, the Department of Agriculture.
So it didn’t occur to them that, by publishing that editorial in which they acknowledge that the Republicans are losing the PR fight on the debt ceiling, and in which they advised the Republicans nonetheless to issue a revised ransom note removing only bond interest payments and already-incurred contractual debts as hostages and leaving the rest with guns to their heads–sorry, Dana Milbank, but that analogy is appropriate even after Sandy Hook, and is utterly irrelevant to Sandy Hook (what a weird claim by Milbank in a thoroughly off-kilter op-ed)–they’re effectively urging the Repubs to commit political suicide.
I say, go for it, Repubs! Go for it.
Beverly,
Maybe everyone is giving Republicans and their publicists too much crdit for understanding the difference between budgeting new debt(the deficit debate)and paying approved debt(the absurd discussion over approving the debt ceiling). It takes some little bit of economic sophistication to understand that once costs have been budgeted by legislative action such costs must be paid through either allocation of funds or the creation of new debt. That is subtley different from refusing to increase budget allocations which may increase future debt.
Maybe their confusion lies in the fact that so many of the words used to describe the two processes are the same. Maybe their education and experience has led them, especially the publicist class, to only regurgitate rather than comprehend and analyse the ideological message of their political clients even in the absence of facts or logic. That is what a publicist/propagandist is paid to do. So, in fact, people that are employed by media outlets like the National Review or Fox News or even the Washington Post, etc. are only doing their jobs as publicists. What the media industry needs now are some journalists.