Monday, July 25, 2011

WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WINGNUT ECONOMIC TERROR WAR, DADDY? UM, I SENT ANGRY, NON-SPECIFIC TWEETS, DIDN'T I?

The economic suicide bombers of the far right are on the verge of destroying the economy if they can't completely control it, and what's the response? Well, via Dave Weigel and The Miami Herald's Naked Politics blog, I see that what all the kewl kidz are doing is ... just going on Twitter (because heaven knows we don't want to do anything that requires more than the minimal effort it takes to whip out a phone and fire off a message), and railing against the system in general (because, obviously, the guilty parties here are "everybody"). From the Herald:

It is the mantra of the political moment. A barbaric yawp too hot for twitter to trend. Perhaps best of all: #fuckyouwashington is bipartisan.

Judging by the tweet-a-moment pace, the crude viral anger infects Democrats, Republicans and independents alike. Staffers and pols on the Hill and the White House probably feel the same way. Many in D.C. certainly do(the heat alone is enough to set tempers ablaze).

"To America: 4 million of us who live/work in and around DC (not in politics) won't take #fuckyouwashington personally. We feel u. #p2 #tcot," someone named @DeepVision tweeted Sunday, long after CUNY prof Jeff Jarvis first started the shoutout.

"So I was angry. Watching TV news over dinner - turning my attention from scandals in the UK to those here and frankly welcoming the distraction from the tragedies in Norway - I listened to the latest from Washington about negotiations over the debt ceiling. It pissed me off. I’d had enough. After dinner, I tweeted: 'Hey, Washington assholes, it's our country, our economy, our money. Stop fucking with it.' It was the pinot talking (sounding more like a zinfandel," he wrote Sunday in his BuzzMachine blog to explain, well, all the buzz reported in Slate and on Storify....


Wow -- everyone blames everyone! Trendily! That's sure to make the guilty parties tremble!

Weigel does note that some lefties did try to assess guilt:

Most of the tweets came from liberals angry at the debt impasse. A small sample:

@mcullen546: #FuckYouWashington for calling programs that we pay for entitlements

@mwynn: We see through your public pension theft conspiracy so #fuckyouwashington

@Mr_Pettapucci #fuckyouwashington or letting corporations steal our natural resources and sell them back to the people for profit....

[Jarvis] retweeted critics. TPM's Josh Marshall pointed out that the hashtag put blame on all parties, instead of Republicans. "To use threat of default to leverage policy changes that can't be one at the ballot box, an unprecedented tactic which amounts to threatening vast damage to country if policy demands r not met (sic)," he wrote. "Generalities instead of specifics serves no purpose." By making rage generic, Jarvis was muddying the story of the current crisis, making it one of Washington failing, not obstructionist Republicans holding spending and debt limit votes hostage until the last minute in order to extract demands.


Good for Josh and the others. But Jesus Christ, people -- this is all we do?

We know the president is failing. Yes, he's making a goal-line stand on revenue increases -- but only after voluntarily moving the ball deep into his own territory so Republicans don't have to struggle to score. Whether or not he could have played the long game better given the intransigence he's facing, nothing has prevented him from using the bully pulpit to go on prime time TV and lay out the stakes, explain who's made concessions and who hasn't, and urge the public to tell the extremists to back down.

But what are the rest of us doing? Politico tells us that the actual "professional left" is punting:

While the battle over raising the debt ceiling plays out in Washington, conservative groups are outspending liberal ones in the effort to frame the issue through a sharply edged media campaign that some Democrats worry could put them at a serious disadvantage headed into the 2012 elections.

"The thing that liberals never understand is that the person who defines the game, wins the game and these moves right now are the game-defining moves," said Erica Payne, president of a donor-advisory group called the Agenda Project.

While it's impossible to precisely measure ongoing ad buys, anecdotal information, combined with interviews of operatives, media buyers and trackers, suggest that avowedly conservative groups and candidates are spending between five and 10 times more than their liberal counterparts on TV and radio advertising related to the debate over debt ceiling negotiations....

[Payne said,] "What I have found in 20 years in politics is wealthy liberals just don't play in economic issues. As soon as you start working on economic issues, the percentage of money that you have to spend on paid media goes down substantially."


And what about ordinary Americans? Are we in the streets chanting "TAX THE RICH"? No -- although I guess a few of us are tweeting that phrase. Well, it's a start. But it's not much.

And, really, the hashtag should be #FuckYouRepublicans.

(Herald via skippy.)

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