MSNBC and Other Anomalies of the New Political Reality

Listening to MSNBC today I was struck by the following: 

After two days of ranting about Boehner losing to Cantor or resigning, he won his Speakership handily; albeit, two votes were cast for Alan West and one each for Eric Cantor and Colin Powell.

After years and years of hearing that pork is bad and that it sucks tax dollars away from more worthy things, we are now hearing how the system doesn’t work without the grease of pork that leveraged votes for more worthy things.  We are not supposed to notice the contradiction, even as we are reminded that our government functions largely on greed and bribery.

After weeks of hearing that President Obama has the advantage of a second term and a clear electoral mandate, we are now hearing that he will be going into the Debt Ceiling debate at a disadvantage having lost political capital in the Fiscal Cliff debate.  Never mind that his approval rating is still very high.  He is still the winner of the 2012 election, and he beat the crap out of the Right within the last week by forcing tax increases on the very rich as the people demanded.

After learning that Boehner will no longer negotiate with Obama and that he told Reid to go “f” himself, we are suppose to believe that these are acts of defiance on the Speaker’s part in the face of Democratic victories rather than acts of cowardice by a man who can’t run his own caucus and is tired of being pummeled by a handful of Tea Party Wingnuts. 

After decades of protecting Social Security some “Progressives” are indicating that because people are living longer they should have less to live on.  Somehow increasing the ranks of the poor will be good for the economy, forget that Social Security has never contributed to the deficit.  No word is ever uttered about corporate welfare or subsidies to hugely profitable oil companies.

Nor is there ever a word even of recognition for the many thousands of people who lost enormous sums of money earmarked for their retirement in the Wall Street meltdown of 2008.  Many of them would have had no problem living with benefit cuts then.  As it stands now they will be hurt by the proposed benefit reductions suggested by our co-conspiratorial, accessory-after-the-fact government that has failed to bring a single “robber baron” responsible for the inevitable results of thieving and greed to justice.  Indeed they rewarded them with bail-outs, guaranteed bonuses and watered down regulations.

In the final analysis the question becomes what in the bloody hell are these media twits smoking – more to the point what in the bloody hell do they think we are smoking?