Of blackmail and bogeymen

I knew that the Des Moines Register had endorsed Romney, but I confess I did not waste precious time reading the endorsement (feel free to Google it; I will not abet wasting anyone else's time).  So Paul Krugman's column today is my first time learning that the Iowa paper's implicit rationale for endorsing Romney boils down to the greater willingness of Congressional Democrats compared to their Repubican counterparts to work across party lines for the best interests of the country.  

As Krugman writes with his usual force and clarity, that is a stunning endorsement... of blackmail. 

Krugman -- and I -- certainly agree with the Register's editorial board that GOPers are the only ones in Congress who are willing to shoot the rest of us in the head if they don't get their way.   But we diverge from the board in our belief that it would be suicidal to take that as a rationale for choosing a GOP president.  If we reward a political party for blatantly, persistently, self-acknowledgedly acting in contempt of the best interests of the people, we are -- and I say this with the utmost delicacy and discretion -- f/_\<ed.

If you really want to show the politicians that you want them to cooperate, endorse -- and vote in -- the ones that you have described as the more likely to cooperate!   Vote out the ones who make an ideology of intransigence, who sign pledges to be loyal like so many hand-puppets to some jackass named "Grover" rather than to pledge themselves to do whatever it takes to build a better nation.

Obviously, the scary thing about a newspaper's endorsing the politics of Cosa-Nostra-inspired amorality is that it will legitimize that sort of thinking among those semi-comatose, disengaged, undecided voters who think that gridlock is a higher concern than values. 

All I can say to that is this: if you know anyone who is inclined to think that way, please send them a copy of Krugman's column.  Or better yet, this post!  (If Chuck Todd can do shameless plugs, who am I to blow against the wind?)

While you're at it, if those undecided friends or brothers-in-law regale you with a description of the new bogeyman PAC ad that shows Chinese people at a massive assembly where the speaker talks about the the Americans' debt having led to the once-great country's decline and to all the Americans now working for the Chinese, you can tell them:

     1) the Chinese want the U.S. economy to be strong so as to keep paying interest but more importantly to keep buying the stuff they sell; 

     2) more to the point, nations decline from outsourcing their productive enterprises and basing their own economies on useless and unproductive financial market gaming, on  packaging pieces of paper, and on creating a bifurcated society of a tiny uber-wealthy class and a massive 99% class of people struggling to survive; and

     3) the Repubicans are the lying hypocrites who invariably campaign as if they were deficit hawks but over the last ten presidential terms the GOP, not the Democrats, are always always always are the ones who create the bigger debt loads. 

This election is not about small government and debt reduction versus big-spending big government, it's about whom the government will serve, the rich people or all of the people.

p.s.

By the by, since we started with a Romney newspaper endorsement, let's put that in perspective.  The current count is 35 papers endorsing Obama to Romney's 29, with the cumulative circulation of the 35 at 9.1 million and the 29 at 5.1 million.  Just sayin'...