Delong, a former Clinton economist and current econ professor at UC Berkeley, writes:
You Know, I Arrived in Washington in 1993 to Work for Lloyd Bentsen's Treasury as Part of the Sane Technocratic Bipartisan Center...
And it took me only two months--two months!--to conclude that America's best hope for sane technocratic governance required the elimination of the Republican Party from our political system as rapidly as possible. Nothing since has led me to question or change that belief--only to strengthen it.
This, apropos of TX governor Rick Perry's declaration that anything the Federal Reserve might do to bolster the economy would be "almost treasonous." And speaking of treason, Perry expressed his opposition to Bernanke's policies by telling an Iowa audience "I don't know what you'all would do to him in Iowa but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas."
I don't know about Iowa, but in the parts of the country where I've lived, people didn't cotton to jokes about lynching government employees. Then again, I never lived in a state that seceded from the Union, nor has my governor ever suggested that secession seemed like a good option in the 21st century. Turns out, as far as political whackjobbery, Kansas wasn't so bad.
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The Republican Party and its financial backers are a lot more dangerous than most other people want to believe. The casual talk about lynching is backed up by a very real arsenal of guns and ammunition and a proven willingness of many on the right to kill people. Matching that with the emotional denial on the real situation on the left is a recipe for disaster. And in no part of the left is that refusal to face reality more dangerous than in the courts and the shrinking liberal media that have enabled this situation to develop over the past thirty years.
The extreme right has used the media libertarianism so stupidly adopted on the left as a tool to gain power against the common good and reason. Buckley v. Valeo was a landmark in that effort and as well as being a conservative attack against the right of The People to self government in favor of corporate dominance, it was joined in by several liberal icons and institutions as a misguided extension of speech rights.
These things have real consequences. We have to destroy corporate personhood and make it anathema to promote it. If not now before another civil war caused by the defects in our constitution, then afterwards, if we are ever able to reinsitute representative democracy.
What leads you to believe he was joking?
Perry sure wasn't kidding when he ordered the execution of Cameron Todd Wittingham for the crime of having tattoos in the first degree.