No, They Won’t

The truth hurts. I’ve said before that Fareed Zakaria gets closer to the non-political truth than any other pundit/analyst I know of. Put your political blinders on. Take them off. It doesn’t matter to me, it still sounds like the truth. (And that’s hard for me to say when he credits Gingrich.)

(Watch the first segment with Fareed talking. We’ll get to the rest in a minute.)



Now that that is over, I’ll predict this. The Republicans won’t “close” the deficit. They’ll cut taxes (if the Democrats won’t stop them) and they’ll blame the failure to cut spending on the Democrats in general and Obama in particular. And the American Public -- mostly older, white people -- will be more than happy to believe them. Check out the graph in this article from Ezra Kline and you’ll see what I mean.

Fareed says that surely Americans will finally say to the Republicans, “Fool me three times, shame on me” for not getting our finances under control. No, they won’t. The sad truth is they want to be fooled.

If you keep watching the show, you’ll see Paul Krugman face off with some guy from the University of Chicago (a conservative stronghold for those that don’t know.) If you take the time to view it, watch the body language of both. They look troubled to me. Scared. You should be too.

Don Brown
November 8, 2010