Wild-eyed crazy Davey is good for a laugh now and then; the context is a blog entry designed to show a) the "liberal" media and b) the alleged incompetence and/or gutlessness of the Democratic candidates. The fact to keep in mind is that he's denied being a part of "any" wing, and gets offended when I term Randian wackos like himself rightwingers:
"Remember all that liberal propaganda you were fed in high school about how the evil robber barons oppressed their workers, stuffing them all in sweatshops and unsafe factories and making them work 25 hours a day? (Until the noble Progressives intervened with their legislation and unions, of course.) .."
Oh he is clever in his mendacity: he's at his best smarmy quasi-honesty in the above quote, but it's only to turn it on John Kerry, who told Peter Jennings that "the workplace of America, Peter, has never been as unfair for the average American as it is today." So in order to disingenuously crap on the liberal of today, he had to let the cat out of the bag a bit in candidly crapping on the liberals of yesterday. What's up? Is he really admitting that the olden days were more unfair? No, he just wants to slam Kerry's hyperbole.
The point is that he sees the laissez-faire days as a paradise from which man was cast out by evil Progressives. But wait, that's not true either, for as he asserted in the infamous PETCO thread among other places on Primer, government regulation actually accomplishes nothing: unfair business practices are entirely market-corrected, or are solved by lawsuits. In other words, the Pure Food and Drug Act, which resulted from public outcry from the lurid descriptions of Sinclair's The Jungle, did not stop the meat processing plants of the glory days from selling canned rat droppings, only consumer pressure and the threat of product liability lawsuits did the trick. Right.
Never one to completely free himself from the "virtue of selfishness," Nieporent neglects to remind the reader of his conflict of interest: he's a lawyer.
Next we have a glimpse of the toe of racism creeping from his closet:
"Brit Hume asking Al Sharpton, without smirking, what to do about the chaos in Iran: 'As president, how would you deal with the situation in Iran?' (Next: asking Sharpton, 'As head of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory , what would you do to help advance research into fusion technology?')"
You see, Sharpton's too stupid to have any opinion on Iran, Crazy Davey's saying. What I think he means is that Sharpton is a single-issue guy, that issue is race, and so the Reverend is incapable of intelligent opinion on "peripheral" subjects. If this is an accurate description, then once again Nieporent is a pot calling the kettle -- literally, in this case -- black: for Nieporent himself is the ultimate single-issue machine, in his instance it's to a tribalist cause, yet none of his political enemies, to my knowledge, have accused him of letting this fact render him incapable of having intelligent opinions on other subjects. Of course, I must immediately add that when I say "intelligent opinions," I mean that they are often cleverly dishonest, ingeniously corrupt, or fascinatingly insane.
posted by RETARDO MONTALBAN @ 4:29 PM
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