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Greider was my debate foe last week on Lou Dobbs's CNN business show. Soon after we sparred, he wrote in his online column for The Nation that although Moore "looks remarkably human ... what if he is really an android?" In case there is any confusion on this point, let me unequivocally set the record straight. I may bear an uncanny resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger, but that doesn't make me an android. I am not now, nor have I ever been, an android. And if Greider persists in making this kind of nasty accusation ... well, I just may have to terminate him. Greider is a reasonably affable fellow in person and his article is entertaining and provides invaluable insights on how we conservatives are viewed by the Left. Allow me to quote from his column, "The 'Right' People":
Moore is a skillful performer with reliably rightish opinions and bromides on any topic. I managed to get some points made, but Moore employs all the usual smart moves in this format. Adroitly timed interruptions. Couple of cheap shots. Obligatory paean to the golden years of Reagan. The need for still more regressive trickle down tax cutting. Actually, that was the part I liked — and I didn't pay him for it. But read on:
What if they are androids? All those familiar rightwingers whom we see every night, week after week, on the chatter shows — they do seem like manufactured talking mannequins, don't they? The subject of conversation doesn't matter, neither do the other opinions, so long as there's a liberal foil present. The content of conservative discourse has the "quality control" of McDonald's. It gets better:
I began to imagine that maybe this is how the Republican cheerleaders manage to stay "on message" so reliably. There is a microchip embedded in the base of the skull, a tiny receiver that takes cues in "real time." The control room could be at the White House but more likely it is located somewhere in the corporate sector, maybe at GE headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, or perhaps in lower Manhattan where the financial titans are desperate to lure nervous "marks" (investors) back into the "casino" (the stock market). On Dobbs's show, what seems to have gotten Greider's gander was that after he first spoke in full Chicken Little hysteria about the "coming American deflationary depression," I reminded CNN viewers that he predicted three American depressions that never happened. (Liberals absolutely hate being reminded of their gaffes.) Greider was the original horseman of the apocalypse back in the 1980s when Reagan enacted "trickle down" tax cuts and ran big deficits, but the economy responded with 4 percent annualized growth and 15 million new jobs. Some depression, Bill. Greider believes that "right wing" pundits like myself are polluting the political talk shows, turning them into conservative romping grounds. It's the old right-wing bias of the media that has Greider in a huff. He seems to long for the days when Americans could get their news night after night from just one "unbiased" source, Walter Cronkite, and each morning from the "unbiased" New York Times or Washington Post (where the staunchly "unbiased" Bill Greider once worked as an editor). These days, once again, Greider thinks the country is headed for deflation and depression, and that we are in the second or third year of an economic retrenchment that is very similar in pattern to what Japan has experienced for more than a decade now. (If he turns out right, I will buy him a Terminator doll.) He keeps lamenting that Bush has "no plan" to deal with the hard realities of the economic crisis. But one gets the sense that he has been sleepwalking through the last three months of debate, and that he missed the president's bold tax-cut victory. Apparently, Greider refuses to acknowledge that the Bush plan is indeed an economic plan. Rather than tax cuts, Greider favors a huge explosion of new government spending on "public investments" to get Americans back to work. But there are three problems with the Greider quick-fix: First, Bush and the Democrats have already tried this. The federal budget has gone through the roof in recent years, with spending up nearly $400 billion in the last two years. And there's still no rip-roaring recovery. Second, the government-spending route to financial salvation has been a big bust in Japan. Heritage Foundation economist Ronald Utt reminds us that Japan has led the world in useless public-works spending (i.e., government investments) and in debt spending. Third, the last time massive public spending was used to try to regenerate prosperity was in the last real depression in the 1930s. The FDR spending binge converted what could have been a short-lived depression into a decade-long economic retrenchment that drowned millions of Americans in a sea of human misery. Let’s have no more of that. Liberals like Greider want to terminate the Bush tax cut even before it’s been given a chance to work. This robotic opposition to pro-growth tax policies is what we might expect from, well, an android. But not from a rational thinker. I would suspect that most Americans want their tax cut and will be mighty angry if liberals try to snatch it away. In my book, anyone who tries to repeal the tax cut should be terminated. Oops, I gave myself away! — Stephen Moore is a real live human being and president of the Club for Growth. |
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have been accused of many sins and transgressions in my life, but
last week William Greider attacked me in an online column, pummeling me
below the belt.
