When Paul Krugman sounds like Glenn Beck, you know the country is in trouble. Bad trouble. In today’s New York Times Krugman’s “Let There Be Blood” column keyed off a remark by Alan Simpson, one of the chairs of the bipartisan presidential commission established to formulate ways to address the national debt. Simpson’s remark referred to an upcoming vote next April on raising the nation’s debt limit, and the political crisis this now seems likely to spawn.
The larger issue here, of course, the larger crisis, is the seeming impossibility of getting our government to work in ways that benefit the people as a whole, rather than pandering to the increasingly partisan views of the two major parties. This is now in evidence not only on fiscal matters, but on everything more potentially debatable than approving a National Mothers Day.
This tawdry domestic drama is being played out against a background of international financial crises difficult to enumerate because they are proliferating so quickly. And barely addressed environmental crises (have you read about the Siberian tundra’s melting and the rapid release of methane it is generating?). And, oh yes, the extraodinarily scary doings in the Middle East, Iran, North Korea, et. al.
All these potential horrorshows remind you of anthing? They remind me quite a lot of the apocalytic rantings of Glenn Beck. “Rantings,” in my view, not because they have no basis in reality, but because of the biblical causality to which Beck tends to link them.
Someone asked me the other day what I thought would be a good investment. I suggested freeze dried food and shotgun shells. It was a joke. But with Paul Krugman doing a Glenn Beck, I’m not so sure.
Earth to Beltway. Please start behaving. Sometimes, difficult as it is, you just gotta act like adults.
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