What a glorious one-liner:

“You are a pyromaniac in a field of straw men.”

It’s Will vs Reich.

Newsbusters has the transcript [bold my emphasis]:

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: Can government, should government do what the congressman is doing and allow upward mobility, which stalled?

GEORGE WILL: Big government inevitably exacerbates the problem of inequality. Big government inevitably is a servant of the strong. I’ll give you two examples. The tax code has been changed 4,500 times in the last decade. Every one of those times at the service of a group strong enough and attentive enough and wealthy enough to hire a Washington lawyer to represent them to game the tax code.

The welfare state exists to transfer wealth basically from the working young and retired elderly — working young and middle aged to the retired elderly. The elderly are, according to the CBO study, the net worth of a family of a household on average, household headed by someone 65 years old or older is 47 times larger than that of the net worth of a household of someone 35 or younger. That’s a record, and has doubled in the last five years. Big government is responsive to big, muscular interest groups.

ROBERT REICH: Well, I — let’s just be clear about the facts. I mean, right now, the top 1 percent is claiming in terms of their pay, a larger share of total income than has been at any time since before the Great Depression. And their tax rates — and their tax rates are lower than they have been in 30 years.

You look at that period. I mean, George, you say that, you know, big — rich people and big corporations have undue influence. Yes, I agree with you. But the answer is not to shrink government and not even to have government attempt to invest in education, in job training and all of the ways in which we traditionally have generated upward mobility. The answer is to get money out of politics, to make sure that those who are at the top reaches, that is both individuals and corporations, don’t have the untoward influence they now have.

One final point. In the first three decades after the second world war, we had in this country much more of an equal distribution of the fruits of economic growth. And yet what happened? It turned out that in those days, the economy grew faster than it has grown since. There was, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom nobody accused of being a socialist, a marginal tax rate on the top of 91 percent. I’m not advocating we go back to 91 percent. I’m just saying that for conservatives to say that we cannot tax the wealthy, when all of the nation’s wealth and income, virtually speaking, is at the top, to invest in people and education and training and everything else we need to invest, it’s absurd on its face.

WILL: You are a pyromaniac in a field of strawmen. No one is arguing against government investing in education. That’s not –

CONGRESSMAN BARNEY FRANK (D-MASSACHUSETTS): Wrong. You guys are.

CONGRESSMAN PAUL RYAN (R-WISCONSIN): No, we’re not.

WILL: No, we’re not.

FRANK: I’ll make the point.

WILL: Look, I’m not attacking the elderly. I am elderly.

Reich ignores six decades of tax receipts showing how the “one percent” pay an egregiously progressive amount year after year. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay only a consumption tax, noting on income (further highlighting the need for a flat tax or simple graduated consumption tax to replace our burdensome, economy-killing Rube Goldberg-type system). Furthermore, when rates are cut, revenues increase (see the 1920s, 60s under Kennedy, and 80s). There is a great chance to multiply resources via investment and employment as opposed to the Marxist notion Reich supports: a game of cups, aka wealth redistribution.

Here’s a simple question: if wealth redistribution works so well, then why are record numbers of Russians falling into poverty? Why is China moving (albeit slowly) to a more capitalist-based economic system to combat their high levels of poverty? China arbitrarily defines its own level of poverty because of the UN average was used their poverty numbers would double.

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- Lee Enterprises goes belly up.

- Fox says it was left off of Facebook’s Most Shared Stories for 2011.

In May, FoxNews.com wrote about a quirky page on the Centers for Disease Control’s website that advises viewers how to deal with a potential zombie apocalypse (strange but true). That story received 38,649 Facebook shares — well within the boundaries of the two New York Times stories, but not included in the list.

Other stories from FoxNews should have made the list as well, such as a September story about the White House condemning the death sentence of an Iranian pastor. It received 26,208 shares.

- But what happens if reporter Chelsea Clinton goes into politics? Newsbusters has more.

- “Tebow’s prayers are … flagrant end zone dance.”

Tebow is free to give “mad respect” to his lord, but I’d rather he do it on his own time. A number of players cross themselves on every play, but they do it discreetly — and expeditiously. Tebow’s prayer timeouts, by contrast, are as gratuitously in-your-face as the most flagrant end zone dance. And they last as long. Yet, according to his supporters, all of footballdom is supposed to give him a pass because his purpose is holy. Isn’t that what churches are for?

Christians aren’t supposed to hide their religion and in an era where one of the most recognized images in football is Janet Jackson’s nip slip. It’s refreshing to see someone out and loud about their faith. You can always change the channel.

- Eason Jordan, he’s baaaack!

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It only took a few days for NBC News’ newest star Al Sharpton to insult his colleagues and further undermine the already diminished journalistic credibility of MSNBC.

In an interview with The Daily Beast the controversial activist turned TV news anchor defended himself against criticism from the National Association of Black Journalists.  (emphasis mine)

“To be fair about it, the NABJ understood that if I didn’t get it, it wouldn’t have gone to a journalist,” Sharpton tells me. “It’s a moot point. There are no journalists [as hosts] after 5 p.m. on MSNBC. Everyone after 5 deals with opinions. So the argument is kind of apples and oranges.”

In an effort to defend himself from the obvious observation that there are many more qualified journalists (of any color) to fill a nightly anchor spot at MSNBC, Sharpton has inadvertently “outed” Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and Ed Schultz as mere commentators voicing opinions rather than legitimate journalists presenting news as well as ideas and opinions to their audience.  For the sake of this column, let’s forget O’Donnell and Schultz for a moment because their shows do border on the brink of pot and pan banging temper tantrums, let’s just focus on Matthews and Maddow.

One has to wonder how Chris Matthews feels about his new workmate telling the world that he isn’t a journalist.  Matthews spent fifteen years writing for the San Francisco Examiner.  He’s covered politics for decades on behalf of newspapers and television news bureaus.  I bet if you asked him, he’d say he was a journalist.

And Rhodes Scholar Maddow (a title Sharpton could never dream of acquiring) also has her share of opinions on her show, but she also prides herself on her excellent team of researchers who painstakingly dig for stories and facts to present news to their viewers.  Look how she presented herself in her first “Lean Forward” ad.  Surely you can see that she considers herself a journalist obsessed with details and facts, not opinion:

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This morning on Talk Radio Network’s nationally syndicated, “America’s Morning News,” George Will told co-hosts John McCaslin and Amy Holmes that he is happy to see Glenn Beck leave the Fox News Network.

Will said that Beck’s “drift into more extreme and bizarre positions was threatening the Fox brand.” And that the “the health and happiness of Fox is served by his departure.”

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A recent Politico piece focusing on a “conservative intelligentsia” backlash against Sarah Palin playing identity politics gleans this nugget from George Will:

Asked if the GOP would remain the party of ideas if Palin captures the nomination, Will said: “The answer is emphatically no.”

I think self-government and individual liberty are grand ideas. Principled and limited governance is a grand idea. I’m not sure what ideas Will thinks will be lost here, but in my estimation, the federal government does not exist as some sort of symposium for over-intellectualizing or a platform for one party to promote their own agenda. Sure, that’s where we’ve been for a very, very long time (around 220 years), but wanting to scale that back is one of the best ideas I’ve ever heard. That’s what Palin brings to the table. Her current media appearances are not indicative of how she would govern, nor are they indicative of how she would conduct herself on the campaign trail.

The piece also quotes the Manhattan Institute’s Heather McDonald as saying:

“She is living up to the most skeptical assessment of her.”

I’m not so sure. The most skeptical assessment of her was that she was an absolute ignoramus whose 15 minutes of fame would be over right after Obama won the election, and we’d never hear from her again. To the chagrin of many, that didn’t happen.

The piece goes on to state:

For now, however, Palin’s appeal is largely rooted in the sympathy she’s gleaned from her loudly voiced resentments toward the left, the news media and the GOP establishment.

I don’t buy this for one second. Any wars of words she has engaged in recently have had little to do with her appeal, they have only served to galvanize her most ardent supporters, while possibly turning off other people. This is sloppy because she is not actually campaigning, nor can we say with any certainty that she is going to.

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There is a misconception that the mainstream media hates all conservatives.  That’s just not true.  The MSM loves some conservatives – the ones who combine a willingness to stick their conservative brothers and sisters in the back with a stereotypical, tweedy doofusism that ensures absolutely no one would ever want to be one of them.  Their poster children are David Brooks and David Frum.  Call them the Conservanerds.

Conservanerds aren’t hard to identify. You can tell one by listening to him for about 15 seconds, by which time you will be overcome by a desire to either slap him or take his lunch money.  You can find them dwelling at the fringes of liberal culture – they are allowed to attend the cocktail parties as the token conservative, tolerated by their masters in return for passive obedience and the occasional swipe at Sarah Palin and her intolerable uppityness.

If they were simply annoying, that would be one thing, but the problem is that the MSM loves to present them as the true face of conservatism, a face that is reasonable and harmless and that always – always – loses out to the liberals.  Conservanerds play up to the awful stereotype of the bookish, passive-aggressive “traditional” conservative with a disdain for popular culture and, critically, for the other 95% of modern conservatives out there today.

Tea Party folks?  Heaven forbid – those simply are not our kind of people.   Those vulgar Tea Partyiers enjoy NASCAR and beer and guns and some actually believe in God.  Many of them work with their hands, and most of them didn’t even go to Harvard!

Sure, there’s class at play – it goes without saying the Conservanerds feel more at home with an Ivy League Hillary Clinton than a Middle-American Sarah Palin – but it’s also MSM wish fulfillment.  Liberals love the idea of conservatives who pose no threat at all, who are happy to take the scraps from the MSM’s table just as long as they get invited to the dinner party.

This is not a new phenomenon.  Starting with Goldwater and up through the Reagan years, a bunch of new folks flooded into the Conservative movement, folks that were less William F. Buckley and more John Wayne – or even Johnny Rotten.  The old line conservatives, the tweed-wearing country club types, found it quite a culture shock.  During college in the 80’s, half the staff assembling the California Review, UCSD’s right-wing paper, would be trying to appreciate to some Respighi concerto while the rest of us would be cranking the Ramones and swilling Coors.

It turned out that the party Republicans won.

The real conservative today is aggressive, outspoken and (worst of all for the Conservanerds) cares nothing for the approval of the elite.  That makes us anathema.  No wonder they are so eager to pounce – we’ve committed the sin of not caring what they think.  Whether you’re a tee-totaling Georgia Evangelical, a concerned mama grizzly from Kansas or a beer-swilling LA cavalryman with a four letter vocabulary and the Sex Pistols on his CD player, we’re the new face of conservatism.  And it’s driving the Conservanerds bonkers.

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You can’t make this stuff up. From the Washington Post, the employer of the most ethically challenged bunch of pundits and bloggers this side of Pravda:

This is a contest aimed at people who’ve read a column in a newspaper or watched a talking head on TV and thought: “Hey, I could do that.” It’s for people who may already regularly voice their opinions — but wouldn’t mind a bigger audience. It’s for people who want to influence the national debate.

If you’re one of those people, then this is your chance to put your opinions to the test — and win an opportunity to write for The Washington Post and launch your opinionating career.

Start making your case.

We’ll accept entries as soon as the online entry form goes live on Sept. 20, 2010 at 12:01 p.m. ET. Use the form to send us a short opinion essay (400-word limit) pegged to a topic in the news and an additional paragraph (100-word limit) on yourself and why you should win. Entry deadline: Oct. 1, 2010 at 11:59 p.m. ET. Post editors will pick the top 50 entries on the basis of style, intelligence and freshness of argument (but not on whether we agree or disagree with your point of view). And then we’ll be looking to readers to help us narrow the field to ten finalists.

How pathetic is this? (more…)

HBO’s Bill Maher exhibits some of his wisdom on ABC. Its nice to know people like Bill are looking out for us poor ol’ helpless minorities, and appearing on major “journalism” shows like This Week, which now feature comedians instead of real newsmakers.

“Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” Alexander Pope asked in his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Well, on ABC’s “This Week” show Sunday, a mere 277 years later, we learned the answer: George Will does. With gusto.

The poor butterfly was “Real Time’s” Bill Maher, making his maiden voyage as a member of the political show’s roundtable, and the merciless wheel of torture was the ever-anatomizing mind of George Will. There’s no need to recount the incident—odds are you’ve seen it by now. And if not, you can read about it—and relive it—in this excellent analysis by Brad Schaeffer on this very website.

To be honest, Mr. Maher’s talent for self-immolation is so highly developed that Mr. Will had little to do other than ask two clarifying questions and watch Maher try to free his flailing self-pinned wings. The logorrheic Maher had fallen prey to his own intemperate mouth. Hoisted on his own petard, Maher forgot that vanity is not just a character flaw—it’s one of the Seven Deadly Sins. You can put vanity ahead of truth in the comedy arena with near-certain impunity, but you’re bound to pay a heavy price when you relegate truth to hind teat in the Sunday morning political ring with heavyweights like George Will punching back.

What lesson can be learned from the Maher meltdown? Or in the parlance of today’s telespeak, what’s the “teachable moment” in all of this? Let’s get out our Maher microscope and take a look. (more…)

Marc Ambinder poses this question in his April 23 article in The Atlantic : “Have Conservatives Gone Mad? “

Ambinder lays blithe and, according to no less a source than himself, undeniable claim to the liberal journalism’s monopoly on political veritas, identifying “the most trenchant and effective criticism of President Obama” coming “not from the right, but the left.” On the other hand, he asserts, “mainstream conservative voices are embracing theories that are, to use Julian Sanchez’s phrase, ‘untethered’ to the real world.”

Before examining that assertion, let’s list a few more of Ambinder’s pronouncements about the journalistic right.

The base itself seems to have developed a notion that bromides are equivalent to policy-thinking, and that therapy is a substitute for thinking. It is absolutely a condition of the age of the triumph of conservative personality politics, where entertainers shouting slogans are taken seriously as political actors.

Well, thank goodness he laid that to rest. Q.E.D. Still, if therapy really is a substitute for thinking, Ambinder should consider changing his surname to Freud. (more…)

In case you missed this cheer moment Sunday on ABC’s This Week, guest-hosted by Barbara Walters, here’s Fox News’s Roger Ailes swatting aside a pesky Arianna Huffington the way President Obama might dispatch a fly:

Naturally, the frothing Left had a fit:

… bringing in Paul Krugman, Arianna Huffington, and George Will to discuss the news with Barbara Walters on ABC’s This Week made sense, but Roger Ailes, president and CEO of FOX News, made an appearance as well and did exactly what one would expect from a FOX representative — evade the facts and rely on ratings as validation.

Using the ten-point-must system, how did you score the fight?  Let’s have your overnight thoughts.