{"id":3722,"date":"2008-12-01T06:28:03","date_gmt":"2008-12-01T11:28:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3722"},"modified":"2008-12-01T06:28:03","modified_gmt":"2008-12-01T11:28:03","slug":"preparing-the-battlefield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3722","title":{"rendered":"Preparing The Battlefield"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s a genuine economic crisis out there.\u00a0 I’ve lived through enough of them (barely, in a few cases) to know not to be excessively dismissive or sanguine about ’em; but for the grace of God, most of us are a couple of bad executive decisions or market breaks away from the unemployment line.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And yet for all the media’s carping about the dismal state of the economy, “Black Friday” sales were up three percent from last year – a complete turnabout on the media’s pre-Thanksgiving drumbeat, which called for big drops in sales on the nation’s biggest shopping day.<\/p>\n

John at Powerline has a theory<\/a>\u00a0about the media’s reflexive bleakness (emphasis added):<\/p>\n

The financial crisis is real, and we are most likely in a recession. But the hysterical terms in which the economy is discussed are unwarranted and unhelpful. They are also, I think, politically motivated. Reporters and editors like the idea of a looming depression (or, failing that, an unusually severe recession) for a number of reasons. If it happens, it will be taken as refutation of the relatively conservative consensus that has influenced government policies since the early 1980s–a consensus under which a great many people have flourished, but not, notably, reporters and editors<\/strong>. And if it doesn’t happen, they will give the credit to Barack Obama and the more-liberal policies they expect from his administration. So for the left, hysteria over the economy is a win-win proposition. Not so for the rest of us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not to mention that it sells papers; hysteria gets people tuned in and\/or buying those papers.<\/p>\n

Or so the theory goes.<\/p>\n

Oh, yeah – read the whole thing, naturally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a genuine economic crisis out there.\u00a0 I’ve lived through enough of them (barely, in a few cases) to know not to be excessively dismissive or sanguine about ’em; but for the grace of God, most of us are a couple of bad executive decisions or market breaks away from the unemployment line.\u00a0 And yet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3722\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}