Friday, July 29, 2011

Invisible bond market vigilantes just yawn with a couple of days 'til Doomsday in the debt-ceiling brouhaha

Where the hell is "Harvey"?


Is this whole crazy episode just political kabuki? The bond market seems to think so - and their "any day now" but currently-still-invisible loss of faith in the US' ability to pay its debts, after all, is supposed to be our master in the march toward austerity.

Brad DeLong has it HERE.

A conservative limps back toward reality (aka "The unbearable dishonesty of the Wall Street Journal")

Another fine Murdoch enterprise
Conservative writer David Frum, famously author of the utterly idiotic "Axis of Evil" locution for George W. Bush (tying together Iran, Iraq and North Korea, which defied comprehension), has over the years spouted a lot of dangerous nonsense (mostly in the "neo-con" vein.)  Needless to say, he's not one of my favorite people.

But in recent months - maybe as "long ago" as the emergence of the analytically-challenged conservative spokes-model Sarah Palin - Frum has devoted himself to walking back the crazy. He's faced marginalization on the right for his efforts, after counseling uncomfortable notions like "compromise" with the President to his fellow Republicans.

So the guy who wrote the aggressively neo-conservative tract, "An End to Evil," with Richard Perle - which concept, since it doesn't even fly in the theologies I'm aware of, always struck me as a bizarre notion in the realm of foreign policy analysis - isn't far enough right for today's GOP.

This week Frum has written a provocative piece - for which he definitely gets kudos from me - on another nutty, dishonest Wall Street Journal editorial and frames his analysis in his own experience as a former WSJ editorialist.  The Journal, which has long been noted for the schizophrenia of a reliable news operation twinned with purely ideological extreme right editorials, is part of the scandal-ridden Rupert Murdoch media empire:
I used to write editorials for the Wall Street Journal myself, 20 years ago now.

So I’m well aware of the challenge faced by those assigned to compose these documents. The strict demands of the paper’s ideology do not always lie smoothly over the rocky outcroppings of reality. It can take considerable skill to match the two together.