Navel-gazing mush

I swear I'll stop writing Piketty posts soon, or at least try to pause to read Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century myself, somehow, but it's going to be really hard if these conservatives don't give it a rest. There are just so many of them, just sufficiently stupider than me as to be not worth the attention of any actual economists (though Krugman couldn't resist a brief shout-out to Brooks this morning), and it gives you such a rush to realize you really do in a simple and straightforward sense know more about economics than Ross Douthat or Megan McArdle or—what's this? James Poulos?

Do any of you all recall James Poulos, an Edroso candidate for the title of worst writer working in the English language, whom I had the opportunity to cast as the logorrhoeic slave Lucky in an imaginary production of Waiting for Godot? Yeah, that James Poulos.

He's still around, it seems, still a colossally bad writer, and getting gigs with the Daily Beast, so you don't have to feel sorry for him, and apparently he too has been driven to write a [jump]

Cheap shots and chasers 3/16

Santorum lets out his inner Islamofascist:

Santorum had the opportunity to make an uninterrupted case, calling out Newt Gingrich for two-timing the Republican party in a 2008 anti-global warming video (“I didn’t sit on a couch with any other woman. I sit on a couch with my wife, not Nancy Pelosi.”)

He's accusing the Newtster of khalwat!

Two Lovers, by Reza Abbasi, 1630 (A.H. 1039). Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Republican physics:

Avant-garde opinionist James Poulos, doing some classically styled concern trolling for the President's poll numbers during the 15 minutes or so that it looked as if he was losing this week:

Inertia — the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion — is the momentum of incumbency, and inertia favors the president right now, on the economy, on foreign policy, even on the deficit.

Also, centrifugal force is the Republican gravity--I picked that up from David Brooks.
Recycled from comments at Rumproast.

Inertia demonstration. From Educational Technology Clearinghouse, Florida.

Panty-sniffing is the fifth freedom:

Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.
“I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union,” Lesko said. 

Oh, right—in the Soviet Union only the government was supposed to pry into your personal life. Here, your boss is free to do it too. That's why he loves this country!

 

What are bad writers for? (addendum)

While I was preparing my effusions on the literary efforts of James Poulos, I was not alone. Hordes of bloggists leapt at Poulos's text like hounds on the umbles (actually, no; the hounds get random bits of flesh, which might be a better metaphor anyway, while the umbles are reserved for the servants, baked into umble pie; but I digress); in addition to the links given in the earlier post I should mention TBogg, SEK, Betty Cracker, and Rich Yeselson. But the most startling approach is undoubtedly that of Doctor Habilitatissimus Michael Bérubé, who laid down a claim that Poulos's writing is not merely not bad but actually in some sense—well, extraordinary; "modern," he says, "perhaps on the very cusp of the post-modern," citing as evidence the following text:

to the growing discomfort of many, that framework hasn’t come anywhere close to answering even the most basic questions about what women are for — despite pretty much universal recognition across the political spectrum that a civilization of men, for men, and by men is no civilization at all, a monstrously barbaric, bloody, and brutal enterprise. Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua [jump]

What are bad writers for?

Roy Edroso has been inviting us to savor the writing of James Poulos, at the Daily Caller, on the topic of "What are Women For?", a question you may never have asked yourself.

Witches at work. From A Blurred History.

Thers, whose opinions I normally revere, insists for some reason that James Poulos does not truly deserve to be called the worst writer on this or any other Internet (his italics); he thinks [jump]