My Yglesias Barometer
April 8, 2011 2 Comments
At the risk of exposing myself as an ignoramus and unworthy pundit who doesn’t follow the ins and outs of politics, let me start by saying I’m now vaguely aware there’s someone called ‘Paul Ryan’ (I think – something like that), but I’m not quite sure who he is.
The reason I know this is that approximately 50-70% of the recent posts on Matthew Yglesias are about ‘Paul Ryan’s [budget? or something]‘ and how horrible it is. I don’t really read Matthew Yglesias all that closely (who can?), but I do scan his blog post titles in Google Reader before doing a ‘mark all as read’, and as a result, I’m totally fully aware and up to speed that ‘Paul Ryan’ must have proposed a [budget? or something] that totally bothers Matthew Yglesias. This is because he seems to spend roughly half his ‘working’ hours diligently researching it, digging up graphs, and fulminating against it, whatever it is. Tossing a LOT of words into a LOT of blog posts to mount deft, Harvard-trained verbal attacks against the bad, horrible thing that ‘Paul Ryan’ has [proposed? done?] is VERY high on Matthew Yglesiases’es list of priorities, in other words, nearly to the point of obsession nowadays.
Accordingly, my presumption is that the thing that ‘Paul Ryan’ has [said? suggested? written?], whatever it is, is very sensible and worth doing. Or maybe, he’s a budding candidate for something [President next year?], or whatever, who totally threatens Matthew Yglesias. Either way, count me on ‘Paul Ryan”s side until I figure out otherwise. But someone let me know if I’m wrong, I can’t be bothered to actually look it up. It’s just easier (and more efficient) to consult my Yglesias Barometer.
I think he’s been writing more like 90% of his posts on Yglesias. In some ways, he’s making some decent criticism of Ryan’s budget. However, all of the criticisms he’s made that are legitimate are equally applicable to Obama’s budget, which he considers valid.
The only reasonable conclusion is that he’s a propagandist.
There’s a sense in which taking any politician’s ‘budget proposal’ at face value and spending one’s time analyzing and criticizing it, vs. some other ‘budget proposal’, automatically makes one a propagandist. In my interpretation this says more about Yglesias, and what/who he fears politically (=deems worthy of spending time propagandizing against), than it does about the content of the budget proposal itself.
In short, my take-away is that Yglesias must think ‘Paul Ryan’ (sp?) is an up-and-comer and wants to nip him in the bud. But, I could be wrong. Again I can’t be bothered to read about ‘budget proposals’ and suchlike.