Call the fire department, not the arsonists

Rachel Maddow shamelessly flouts bipartisanship, calls some claims about economics better than others.

Rachel Maddow shamelessly flouts bipartisanship, calls some claims about economics better than others.

I’m too technically challenged to embed the video directly, but I’m happy to link to Steve Benen’s money quote, as it would be mine too:

Cutting food-stamp funding to attract Republican support is proof-positive that the Republicans are not trying to come up with an effective stimulus here. If your house is on fire, and you call your fire department, and your fire department tells you to pour gasoline on the flames, they’re not actually making a good-faith effort to help you put out the fire. They’re not a good fire department.

If you’re working up policy to fix an economic crisis, which is characterized by there being no spending in the economy, and someone in that debate says, ‘OK, but cut the spending out of the rescue plan,’ they’re bad at making policy.

And you know what? It matters when you’re wrong. A whopping proportion of the Republican rhetoric about stimulus is wrong…. It’s just wrong. The time is now to take the radical step, as Americans — as civic-minded Americans concerned about our future — it’s time to take the radical step of privileging correct information over incorrect information….

If you are wrong, from here on out, you should lose the argument and you should lose your political potency. Form a flat-earthers club or something, where you talk enthusiastically to each other about your made-up economic ideas that aren’t based in reality. But get out of the way of the people who are actually trying to save the country.

Chortle loudly. Then, more usefully, send the link to a few low-information acquaintances.

Sorry to be repeating so much material posted elsewhere. But at times like these, repetition is a virtue.

Author: Andrew Sabl

Andrew Sabl, a political theorist, is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics and Hume’s Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England, both from Princeton University Press. His research interests include political ethics, liberal and democratic theory, toleration, the work of David Hume, and the realist school of contemporary political thought. He is currently finishing a book for Harvard University Press titled The Uses of Hypocrisy: An Essay on Toleration. He divides his time between Toronto and Brooklyn.