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Go Home TRB: Crankocracy In America

TIMOTHY NOAH MARCH 29, 2012

TRB: Crankocracy In America

BY TIMOTHY NOAH

Now that TNR's paywall has come down you can read my TRB columns for the print magazine--relatively current ones, anyway--without shelling out. You should subscribe anyway, either to the print magazine or to the spiffy digital tablet edition, so you can read the magazine lying down or on a park bench or in the loo, and also so you can access the archives.

Anyway, this week's column, "Crankocracy In America," explains how the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision (combined with a less-publicized lower-court decision) unloosed on America not the expected corporate political donations but a flood of cash from rich right-wing cranks, which is actually worse.

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Is it worse, though? The right-wing cranks have been financing Newt and Rick, thereby making possible a nasty, extended primary season, which has given us the Etch-A-Sketch remark and so many other wonderful things, and all the while, Etch's negatives have kept going up in the polls. Thank you, right-wing cranks (i.e., Sheldon "Casino Mogul" Adelson and Foster "Aspirin Between the Knees" Friess).

- liberalref

March 29, 2012 at 2:56pm

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The right wing cranks cancel out the left-wing parasites (public sector unions, trial lawyers) Bad news for moonbats

- mr_rationale

March 29, 2012 at 3:01pm

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Without the Fairness Doctrine, those right-wing cranks have been able to take over newspapers (Murdoch) and Fox News (Murdoch, and the Koch Brothers) and right-wing radio (Rush Limbaugh -- who supports him anyway?) The result has been even NPR has to discuss "the issues of the day" as framed by Fox News. The resulting distortion to our political process has virtually 50% of our electorate voting based not on reality, or their own best interests, but instead the ditto-head propaganda of Fox News. Thus while 90% of people support the tenets of the ACA, 60% of the people oppose "Obamacare".

- AllanL5

March 29, 2012 at 3:46pm

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It is to be expected that Allan would overstate the power of the right-wing media. This is a hugely popular meme on the left, and if anyone goes in for cliches here, it is A. The rise of Fox has seen the decline of Republican electoral successes and an increase in the unpopularity of the Republican Party among Americans. The Heritage staffer keeps evading my remarks on the parasite known as Friedrich Hayek. In Nicholas Wapshott's wonderful book Keynes Hayek, he writes that an academic offered a position to Hayek in America, but Hayek didn't let this academic know when he was coming from Europe. When Hayek arrived, the academic was away and couldn't be contacted, and Hayek prepared to take a dish-washing job in New York City. The very day that he was going to start, he got a call from the academic's office, and thus Hayek was spared manual labor. In all of his years, Wapshhott writes, Hayek never worked a day in the private sector. But I know, for the right moonbats, parasitism is only wrong when it is practiced on the left.

- liberalref

March 29, 2012 at 4:22pm

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mr_rationale, don't forget the greatest of parasites, Halliburton.

- Nusholtz

March 29, 2012 at 4:23pm

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Speaking of cranks - they passed the Ryan budget today, in the House. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/29/paul-ryan-budget-passes-house_n_1389165.html

- Sophia

March 29, 2012 at 6:55pm

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If there are "moonbats" [only logical, as bats mostly hang out at night, though why those flying rodents should be left wing I have no idea], I wondered, "Are there "sunbats?" Lo and behold, the Internet is truly a wonderful resource for us demented ADD/HD elderly people. Somehow it fits TNR as well. I found: "Sunbat (Ar. Sunbāṭ; Sambūṭ or Sambūṭiya in Cairo Geniza documents) was a town in Lower Egypt which had a Jewish population from at least the tenth to the seventeenth century. Although small, the community maintained a rabbinical court and a synagogue, the foundational elements of a middle-sized Jewish settlement. The town also sustained a scholarly elite: scholars from Palestine and Syria lived in Sunbat, and an eleventh-century head of the Babylonian community in Fustat." I spared you italic!

- skahn

March 29, 2012 at 8:28pm

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Rich people, we are told, are our betters in every way, because, among other reasons, in their munificent beneficence they create jobs for the rest of us. If only. If the rich were job creators, we'd never hear about them because everyone would have jobs. Rich people are bullshit creators. A lucky few will get jobs cleaning up the BS, the rest of us just have to put up with the smell.

- GeoffG

March 30, 2012 at 11:04am

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Moonbats and Sunbats, unite! Meanwhile, what GeoffG said; I'm getting really tired of this baloney about how the rich are better than the rest of us. Especially coming from "Christians." What was that about the eye of the needle?

- Sophia

March 30, 2012 at 2:38pm

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