Dear Mike Judge And Etan Cohen
By Mitch Berg
To: Etan Cohen and Mike Judge, co-writers of Idiocracy
From: Mitch Berg, uppity peasant
Re: Your Blinding Flash of Epiphany
Etan and Mike,
This is just occurring to you?
I’m a conservative in Saint Paul. Looking at my city government, I thought it was a documentary when I first saw it.
That is all.
February 26th, 2016 at 7:21 am
Watching the GOP debate (bar brawl) last night reminded me of Idiocracy.
It was impossible to watch that debate and not feel embarrassed as an American.
February 26th, 2016 at 8:26 am
And watching too aging commies fight over whose idea of Marxism is better suited to finish off what 0bumbler started is perfectly OK with you. We get it, eTASS, we get it.
February 26th, 2016 at 8:28 am
Does anyone think water is getting too hot for frogs, or are they just asking for temperature to be upped some more? See eTASS comment above – he is a perfect barometer of libturdspeak.
February 26th, 2016 at 8:36 am
Trump’s popularity cuts across a wide swath of voters. His demographics are good with people who identify as democrats.
Some people see his popularity as a problem with the GOP (it isn’t), or a problem with the American people (it isn’t). The problem is with elites of both parties who, in a republic, think they they can a tell a public that opposes amnesty by a 2:1 margin that amnesty is what they are going to get.
February 26th, 2016 at 9:30 am
Showing their comic genius, Etan and Mike used a mass social media media phenomenon limited to bumper-sticker length thought to denounce how discourse and reason is devolving in modern America.
At least I hope they were being comically ironic by announcing this using Twitter. If not…
February 26th, 2016 at 9:47 am
BG, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Trump’s big contribution this whole election cycle is the willingness to shove a big F-You at the rich establishment’s disdain of working Americans and dismemberment of their wages.
Personally, I’ll put up with the fact that Trump will probably up taxes and probably be a libertarian’s worst nightmare. But if he will really enforce the laws we have now that safeguard American workers from H1-B/H2 abuse and offshoring, I’ll put up with that. There’s no better social program for this country than people having jobs, and that’s especially true for the blighted areas of the inner city and for folks with lower wages and education. If you really want a chance to reclaim the culture of America, you’ve got to get its people to work and invested in culturally in work and self improvement. And not the phony-baloney make-work government jobs that Bernie and Hillary would promise, real jobs doing real work.
It’s why I’ll take Trump over Rubio. I don’t believe that Rubio’s had a change of heart on the issue of jobs for Americans. I prefer Cruz by a landslide on nearly all issues, despite some question of his methods, but Rubio was a gang-of-eight co-conspirator making Trump my second choice.
February 26th, 2016 at 10:27 am
In a slightly related tangent, if you enjoyed the humor in Mike Judge’s Office Space, check out “Silicon Valley”. Much of the same humor, but centered around SV tech geeks/nerds and the trials and tribulations of trying to start a company and make it the next big thing. It’s an HBO series so if you have HBO, there you go. Otherwise if you hunt around, you can find it for free streaming.
February 26th, 2016 at 10:59 am
In 1824 Andrew Jackson a Tennessee plantation owner, former Congressman, Senator, and General, ran for President as the populist voice of the people. After a 4-way split where Jackson won a plurality, John Quincy Adams was chosen by the House of Representatives with the support of Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House and another of the four. Jackson’s campaign effort morphed much of Jefferson’s Democratic Republican party to the new Democratic party, with Clay taking the rest to form the Whigs. Jackson whipped Adams in 1828, soundly beat Clay in 1832, got his VP Van Buren elected in 1836, and after one miss got Polk elected in 1844. His success and Henry Clay’s failures meant that the Whigs withered and failed after Clay’s death, leading to the successor Republican party. Jackson’s terms and those of the early Democratic party are known for their promotion of the Spoils System (institutionalized corruption), the dismantling of the National Bank, his genocidal treatment of natives (Indian Removal Act, Trail of Tears, etc.), and his support of slavery in defiance of growing Northern opposition.
Jackson is historic national figure who most resembles Trump. He was despised and laughed at by the Washington establishment of the day who considered him a provincial bumpkin and an embarrassment as a leader and statesman; they actively conspired against him, just as the the media is urging the establishment to conspire against Trump, and assumed he would be out of his depth in office. But he was a genius in capturing the complaints of the public and distilling them into simplistic solutions. He found his group of Others (native Americans) and persecuted them mercilessly. He railed against the capitalists of Wall Street, and succeeded in neutering the Second National Bank. He advocated protectionism, and promoted his ill-qualified cronies to positions of power. Jackson was also the most successful American politician of the 19th century. The Democratic party that he re-organized became much more his than Jefferson’s, and the populist appeal to the working man, the support of slavery and segregation, and the support of protectionism lingered up to the Kennedy/LBJ era. In that the Republican party was formed in opposition to the policies of Jackson’s Democrats, he shaped that party as well.
So do not discount the political appeal of Trump, who shares so many traits with Jackson (find a picture of him; note the hair). I doubted his political staying ability until the start of this year, but I now see that he has captured the populist anger of the times even more effectively than Bernie Sanders, whose appeal is more lefty-intellectual than populist. While I won’t vote for him, Trump has a clear path to the presidency if he doesn’t screw it up. As President he will complete the transformation of the Republican party begun with Nixon’s southern strategy, embraced by Reagan politically despite his libertarian policy aims, and furthered during the Bush years, of making it the party of nativism, fundamentalist religion, conspiracy theorists, and ill-focused hatred of supposedly all-powerful government forces. The Democratic party, finding itself thoroughly out of power at all levels, will be forced to change as well. A Trump presidency threatens the American political establishment directly, but indirectly threatens a great deal of the current global status quo. That appeals to many, but be careful what you ask for.
February 26th, 2016 at 12:08 pm
And, EI, Jackson was the only President to have paid off the US debt. He was strongly pro-American, while welcoming immigrants. He was protectionist in an era when all countries were protectionist and allowing your markets to be flooded by subsidized production from other countries was a good way to tank your economy (not that TPP or the WTO’s treatment of other countries *cough* China *cough* bear any relationship to the issue today).
And today we don’t have any ill-qualified cronies ascending to power, do we? We can’t have an Attorney General who would resist prosecuting clear violations of National Security law for political reasons. We can’t have a Secretary of State who enriched herself with political decisions that helped her personal family slush fund, er. charity… And certainly we can have said Secretary of State bypassing the basics of security and procedure to compromise the security and life of Americans for political reasons. And certainly this Administration is packed with wise individuals whose policies would never cause millions of refugees, the rise of terrorists who operate and inspire others world-wide, and who would never conscience the resurgence of a dictatorial, repressive regime once contained. We can’t have a Secretary of the Treasury who couldn’t report all his income, failed to pay taxes, nor could he conceivably bail out his cronies with public money and then return to said cronies in a very lucrative job, right? We couldn’t possibly have a President to whom the sex and color of skin of a nominee to the Supreme Court is more important than the quality of their legal reasoning. No, we’ve got a completely honest and incorruptible, thoroughly non-political modern administration, fully qualified to give dispassionate, intelligent service to this country, right? Nothing we have now could possibly come close to the corruption of the Jackson administration, right?! (Say, just how much did the Clinton net worth go up in the last 8 years again?)
(Yeah, I’d rate Obama and this crew as worse than Jackson. And they’ve killed and displaced a lot more civilians in the Mideast than Jackson ever did on the frontier.)
February 26th, 2016 at 12:40 pm
BG wrote: “Trump’s popularity cuts across a wide swath of voters. His demographics are good with people who identify as democrats.”
It would be foolish to say that Trump could never become president. Trump has averaged 30 or 35 percent of the vote thus far. Furthermore, Trump’s popularity is concentrated among an enthusiastic plurality of Republican voters, rather than the broader American population. In fact, only about 35 percent of Americans overall have a favorable view of Trump. I would also add those numbers haven’t really changed since Trump announced his candidacy.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-really-unpopular-with-general-election-voters/
February 26th, 2016 at 1:15 pm
Nerbert: Jackson spent his pre-presidential days as a slave-owning plantation owner. He used his position in the militia and Tennessee politics to lead expeditions to exterminate Indians and claim their vacated lands for himself and his cronies. He led an invasion of Florida without U.S. knowledge or support which forced the U.S. to either string up him and his men or make a deal to seize Florida from a weak Spain; they chose to seize Florida. Yes, Jackson led the troops at the Battle of New Orleans (1815), but had no training as a professional soldier. It is a dubious contention that he was responsible for the military victory except as a figurehead. Jackson did more to institutionalize corruption and nepotism in the federal civil service than any other 19th century political leader; the U.S. was an exemplar of bad government until the reforms of Teddy Roosevelt, decades after the UK, Germany, and France cleaned up their civil service. He obstinately defended and strengthened the interests of slave-owners, which in no small way led to the political failure which became the U.S. Civil War.
I’m not a Jackson fan. He was responsible for making the country what it was at the time, in part, but I wouldn’t call that service.
February 26th, 2016 at 5:15 pm
In a market economy, total wealth grows because each person trades their economic output voluntarily with someone else. Everyone adds some value before passing their economic output along to the next person in the chain. It is an amazing system when it works.
But everything has its limits. The lion’s share of economic growth in the US, 2000-2008, was in financial service. What value do financial services add to the economy?
They manage risk.
Uh-oh.
The smartest, best educated, best compensated people working in the wealthiest capital market in the world f*cked up. When it came down to it, they were like any other middle-man, trying to squeeze out a little more from each transaction, screwing the guy he bought from, and screwing the guy he sold to.
But they’ll get it right, this time. See, they’ve figured out that the key to controlling risk is to control the government agencies that write and enforce the rules.
I’m sure that they will get it right this time.
February 26th, 2016 at 11:08 pm
I can usually take-or-leave Peggy Noonan, but her WSJ column hit it out of the park:
http://prophecyupdate.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-rise-of-unprotected.html
I will not vote for Trump, but I think that his victory in the GOP primary and possibly to the white house would be a victory for small–r republican governance. We are a self-ruling people. No one represents the opposite of republicanism more than Hillary. Her supporters and voters want to be in the 20% that can only be happy if they can micromanage the lives of the 80%, and make them pay for the privilege.
February 27th, 2016 at 4:24 pm
I don’t begrudge the ultra-wealthy their bucks unless they’ve used government granted monopolies to acquire and maintain their fortunes (and most of them have, at least in part. Intellectual property is a government granted monopoly for a term of years).
But for some reason I can’t stand people who think Zuckerberg is some kind of model entrepreneur. Does anyone think that if we did not have Facebook, we wouldn’t have something else like it and possibly superior to it? Zuckerberg has built a huge user base and he uses it to make more money. He sells advertisements and information about his users. This ain’t even the same as creating a popular operating system.
I always imagine that if he had missed the brass ring when it came around to him, due to illness or some personal disaster, instead of a web gazillionaire he would now be a successful dentist, like his father.
Oh, and you wouldn’t believe the crap I sometimes get on conservative blogs for posting comments like this. C’mon people! These tech billionaires are no more your friends than the GOP establishment pols and their donors are your friends!