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Jon Chait is Shrill

by John Cole

More of this, please:

Jesus Christ, Mike Allen, Reconciliation Is NOT THAT COMPLICATED

When I read the op-ed, I figured it had to be totally redundant. What sentient being who’s following this closely could not understand it by now? I give you Politico’s Mike Allen, writing Saturday:

    When Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) made this confusing argument last week on “Face the Nation,” we weren’t sure he was being deliberately disingenuous. It was, in fact, spin. Now, he’s made the same case in a similarly obtuse WashPost op-ed, “Reconciliation is not an option for health-care reform.” Don’t misread it: It’s an Alice-in-Wonderland argument FOR the use of reconciliation as part of the recipe for getting comprehensive health reform to the president’s desk

Confusing? Obtuse? Does Conrad need to stop by Politico’s offices with a picture book and some finger puppets? I understand perfectly well how intelligent people who don’t follow this debate closely might not catch on to the distinction. But this is what Mike Allen does all day—and, as I understand it, much of the night and the wee hours of the morning as well. How can anybody still not understand this? I’m at a loss here. Look, there’s an endless list of topics I don’t understand at all. I went through an entire semester of pre-Calculus in high school and was never able to understand what a function is. I still don’t. It’s a complicated subject and I was a lazy student. But this reconciliation distinction is easy, and Mike Allen is (legendarily) not lazy. So, what the hell is going on here?

Mike Allen, dishonest right-wing hack, or complete moron?

I vote both. And how much better would our media be if everytime someone was as bad as Allen, someone like Chait would call them on it?

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March 7, 2010 9:55 pm Posted in: Clown Shoes, Excellent Links, Media  70 Comments

70 Responses

  1. valdivia - March 7, 2010 | 10:03 pm · Link

    Mike Allen, dishonest right-wing hack, or complete moron?

    best line of the the year so far. I am voting for complete moron.

    ETA: thought these two are not mutually exclusive no? He could be both a complete moron and a right wing hack.

  2. El Cid - March 7, 2010 | 10:04 pm · Link

    You know what else is confusing? Jumbo shrimp!

  3. MikeJ - March 7, 2010 | 10:06 pm · Link

    Long hours does not equal not lazy.

  4. cleek - March 7, 2010 | 10:07 pm · Link

    Politico is shit?

    wow.. big scoop!

  5. Dennis G. - March 7, 2010 | 10:08 pm · Link

    When facts get in the way of the chosen narrative you can always count on Politico to ignore the facts.

    It is as predictable as the sun setting in the West over at Pravda on the Potomac.

    Cheers

  6. mgordon - March 7, 2010 | 10:08 pm · Link

    Functions are not that complicated.

  7. cat48 - March 7, 2010 | 10:15 pm · Link

    @valdivia:

    Mike Allen, dishonest right-wing hack, or complete moron?

    Yes, he is, and maybe even a John Bircher. His wiki page has a link to his father, Gary Allen, political writer/John Bircher.

  8. gbear - March 7, 2010 | 10:15 pm · Link

    Obligatory Upton Sinclair quote:

    It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

  9. Mark S. - March 7, 2010 | 10:16 pm · Link

    I’ll go with complete moron because he quotes Conrad explaining how this isn’t passing the entire bill thru reconciliation:

    What the president and others have suggested is that, after the House acts, reconciliation could then be used to pass a much smaller ‘fixer’ bill to allow for modifications to the comprehensive bill that will have passed under regular order

    A dishonest hack wouldn’t have bothered with that, and only a moron wouldn’t think that this kind of destroys his argument.

  10. demimondian - March 7, 2010 | 10:17 pm · Link

    Hey, John, take it up with…what’s his name…Greenwald. That fellow…he does a lot of that.

  11. Max Power - March 7, 2010 | 10:17 pm · Link

    Wasn’t it John Stuart Mill who said “Not all conservatives are stupid, but Criminy-on-a-stick if all Politico’s right-wing hacks aren’t dishonest and complete morons.”

  12. kay - March 7, 2010 | 10:20 pm · Link

    Here’s my guess.
    They’re all pretending they don’t understand reconciliation because then they don’t have to reveal they still don’t know anything about the heath care bill.
    I love the Conrad quote.
    “It’s like they’re listening to the first three sentences of what I say, but not the next three sentences”.
    Tomorrow we’ll hear how the Democrats haven’t “gotten the message out” on reconciliation, and how it’s “unclear”.

  13. cat48 - March 7, 2010 | 10:23 pm · Link

    Hmm, looks like his dad, Gary Allen, was also a George Wallace speechwriter. Those were some hateful speeches.

    It also appears someone has been messing with Mike’s wiki page again:

    Michael Allen (1964-) is the chief political stenographer for The Politico.

  14. valdivia - March 7, 2010 | 10:25 pm · Link

    @cat48: interesting info. does not surprise me though. given the son.

    and LOL on the on wiki page.

  15. dmsilev - March 7, 2010 | 10:26 pm · Link

    I don’t think Allen is a moron, so I’m going to have to go with “dishonest hack”. Possibly mixed in with a bit of “politics are more important than policy, so I don’t have to learn anything about policy or procedure” arrogance.

    -dms

  16. DonkeyKong - March 7, 2010 | 10:27 pm · Link

    Isnt Mike Allen the Dennis Hopper photojournalist ranting about the genius of Cheney as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

    “Hey, man, you don’t talk to the Cheney. You listen to him. The man’s enlarged my mind. He’s a poet-warrior in the classic sense. I mean, sometimes he’ll, uh, well, you’ll say “Hello” to him, right? And he’ll just walk right by you, and he won’t even notice you. And suddenly he’ll grab you, and he’ll throw you in a corner, and he’ll say “Do you know that ‘if’ is the middle word in life? ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you’...” – I mean, I’m no, I can’t – I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s, he’s a great man. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas – I mean I love crab puffs and chardonney in McLean man!”

  17. Jim, Foolish Literalist - March 7, 2010 | 10:29 pm · Link

    @valdivia: A rightwing hack because a genuine moron, is my vote.

  18. Pavlov's Dog - March 7, 2010 | 10:29 pm · Link

    Drudge link in 5…4…3…

  19. kay - March 7, 2010 | 10:33 pm · Link

    Since I refuse to believe anyone in the general public cares, at all, about “reconciliation” I can only conclude that it’s important and flogged endlessly because it’s a promising political theme ‘o the week for Republicans.
    This can’t be about informing people. No one cares.

  20. Island in Alabama - March 7, 2010 | 10:34 pm · Link

    Mike Allen, dishonest right-wing hack, or complete moron?

    Yes

  21. John Cole - March 7, 2010 | 10:34 pm · Link

    @demimondian: Yeah, but other than MMFA and Glenn, it is pretty quiet out there. Would be nice if the press competed with each other instead of their readers.

  22. valdivia - March 7, 2010 | 10:35 pm · Link

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    yes the more I think about it the more I think we have set up a false distinction or a chicken/egg sort of problem.

    I still love the way John formulated it though because it embodies pretty much everything about The Village.

  23. Woodbuster - March 7, 2010 | 10:49 pm · Link

    @cat48: the last thing I will do is defend a lazy Politico hack like Allen, but just because his father is a Bircher doesn’t make Allan one. My father was a racist redneck. I am the most liberal person in South Carolina.

  24. mai naem - March 7, 2010 | 10:54 pm · Link

    You can too be a right wing moron.

  25. Brick Oven Bill - March 7, 2010 | 10:55 pm · Link

    The King’s man explains:

    “I went through an entire semester of pre-Calculus in high school and was never able to understand what a function is. I still don’t. It’s a complicated subject and I was a lazy student.”

    Then we have the Free Man:

    “It could be said that Pythagoras saw the study of mathematics as a purifier of the soul, just like he considered music as purifying. Pythagoras and his disciples connected music with mathematics and found that intervals between notes can be expressed in numerical terms. They discovered that the length of strings of a musical instrument correspond to these intervals and that they can be expressed in numbers. The ratio of the length of two strings with which two tones of an octave step are produced is 2:1.”

  26. Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle - March 7, 2010 | 10:58 pm · Link

    @cat48: The link is here:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Allen

    I really love this part, where it gives you umpteen Mike Allen’s to chose from. To wit:

    Michael Allen (journalist), chief political stenographer for The Politico and Dick Cheney

    Notice that last part. ;-)

  27. Annie - March 7, 2010 | 11:00 pm · Link

    Mike Allen is a dishonest right-wing hack, which makes him a moron. What pisses me off the most is that people listen to him, that people take him seriously, and that he actually gets paid…

  28. Joseph Nobles - March 7, 2010 | 11:00 pm · Link

    It helps to be a complete moron if you’re a hack, right-wing or otherwise.

  29. NobodySpecial - March 7, 2010 | 11:04 pm · Link

    @Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle:

    I also love this from his wiki page:

    In 2004, Allen won the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Merriman Smith Memorial Award for outstanding presidential coverage on deadline. The award was given to Allen for his reporting of President George W. Bush’s secret trip to Baghdad, Iraq.

    Was that the Plastic Turkee trip?

  30. ajr22 - March 7, 2010 | 11:09 pm · Link

    Of course no one cares about reconciliation, its all just talking points to get the right wingers pissed because “the bill is being jammed down their throats”. Lets be real If you took a random survey of Americans and asked “what is reconciliation?” what percent would know? My guess is below 10.

  31. peorgie tirebiter - March 7, 2010 | 11:19 pm · Link

    . I went through an entire semester of pre-Calculus in high school and was never able to understand what a function is. I still don’t. It’s a complicated subject and I was a lazy student.

    I think Chait has just proudly proclaimed his own stupidity and blamed it on being “lazy.” And proudly even. Jeez.

  32. Chuck Butcher - March 7, 2010 | 11:25 pm · Link

    Hmmph, Allen can’t figure it out. Maybe Allen should stop trying to cover politics since procedure is beyond him. There is arcana and then there is the Senate – they do have a Parliamentarian and a rule book.

  33. Annie - March 7, 2010 | 11:28 pm · Link

    He won an award for “outstanding presidential coverage on deadline.” On deadline—WTF…

    It doesn’t take much to write “Awesome, George Bush, in Iraq, awesome, and there were soldiers, awesome..and, I am in a war zone, awesome” and make deadline…

    If I got an award for each time I made deadline in a war zone, I would have to get a bigger townhouse. Making deadline, with all of the resources given a President when he travels, is really no big deal.

  34. williamc - March 7, 2010 | 11:32 pm · Link

    @Chuck Butcher:

    I was waiting on someone to make this point: if you don’t understand how government functions, at Mike Allen’s level, how can you cover politics and policy?

    But I guess they did let Lil’ Luke Russert in on the game and he barely understands how to spit and not swallow, let alone how policy is made, so I’m betting this reconciliation thing is over his head too…

    And yes, I have it in for any legacy who didn’t earn their jobs through hard work, but through daddy’s Rolodex.

    /snark at incompetence

  35. Xenos - March 7, 2010 | 11:33 pm · Link

    @Brick Oven Bill: Pythagoras had some sharp mathematical observations but in terms of philosophy he was at least as much of a nut as Isaac Newton. Get back to me with your natural law crap once you figure out how to square it with metempsychosis and Rosicrucianism.

  36. AB - March 7, 2010 | 11:33 pm · Link

    Not that I disagree generally, but… a function?

  37. Quiddity - March 7, 2010 | 11:46 pm · Link

    Crudely put, Mike Allen is making the Democrats’ health care bill and process look “ugly”. Not in any gross-out way, but in a kind of “geez, this is tedious, confusing, discombobulating, and I wish it would all go away”.

  38. Mark S. - March 7, 2010 | 11:50 pm · Link

    @Chuck Butcher:

    You don’t need to be intelligent to cover politics, and as I learned from Richard Cohen, you don’t even need to pay a lot of attention to it:

    . . . indeed things have gotten to the point that when I see Obama on TV, I hurry on to another channel, even one with a Maury Povich rerun. I recently came across Anderson Cooper, who was interviewing Obama in Africa or some such place, and after noticing how they were both so trim, I quickly channel-surfed my way to Animal Planet. I knew I had not missed anything important.

  39. Max Power - March 7, 2010 | 11:51 pm · Link

    @AB:

    Not that I disagree generally, but… a function?

    I think the point is that if Jon Chait finds a fellow commentator insufferably slow-on-the-uptake, that means he’s pretty much in the world-champion class.

  40. demimondian - March 7, 2010 | 11:54 pm · Link

    @AB: OK, then, define function to DougJ. Or to the Grand Panjandrum, if he’s still around these parts.

  41. burnspbesq - March 8, 2010 | 12:06 am · Link

    How about “Mike Allen is … irrelevant.”

    That would be a happy place, wouldn’t it?

  42. J. Michael Neal - March 8, 2010 | 12:19 am · Link

    @demimondian: It’s a mapping from one set to another, in which each element of the first set maps to one and only one element of the second set.

  43. DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal) - March 8, 2010 | 12:30 am · Link

    Mike Allen, dishonest right-wing hack, or and complete moron?.

    Fix’t.

    It’s Politico, they exist solely to define what Democrats on Capitol Hill really mean when they say something. They’re like a machine that takes spoken or written words and turns them into a smelly compost to plant their fertile ideas in.

    I do have to admit that they grow some impressive weeds, that’s for sure. You would think that as much as they want to keep everyone in the dark about reality that they were aiming to grow mushrooms.

  44. Linkmeister - March 8, 2010 | 12:48 am · Link

    I was watching This Week this afternoon while Senator McConnell was lying in his teeth, and I asked the world in general “When did the media conclude it wasn’t allowed to say ‘You’re wrong about that’ to the people it covered?” Because Matthew Dowd let all of McConnell’s BS slide, even though he knows that some of that blather was pure talking point.

    I’m really wondering when the press decided it wasn’t its function to try to get at the truth.

  45. Comrade Kevin - March 8, 2010 | 1:14 am · Link

    Is this the same Chait who jumped on the “Andrew Sullivan is an anti-Semite” bandwagon?

  46. guest - March 8, 2010 | 1:33 am · Link

    He’s probably not talking about functions. That’s something you cover way earlier than precal, IIRC. He probably means derivatives or integrals, or the trig functions you have to use to solve those kinds of problems.

  47. mcd410x - March 8, 2010 | 1:35 am · Link

    Completely ot but has anyone figured out the point of Caprica?

  48. Comrade Mary - March 8, 2010 | 1:40 am · Link

    Where’s DougJ? I think we may need someone to interpret Massa’s latest for us. Josh Marshall calls this week’s radio show “at once genuine, completely disjointed and confused, somewhat endearing and also totally bizarre”, but I’d love to hear Doug’s take

    On Massa’s weekly radio show he explained his side of the alleged incident of sexual harassment and went on to suggest that the timing of recent events was part of a plan by Democratic leaders to force him out of the House to pave the way for passing health care reform.

    And from there … well, I guess the highlights would include the cursing match with Rahm and Massa’s story of walking in on his Navy bunkmate masturbating back in the early 1980s and how that led to a misunderstanding and the bunkmate requesting different quarters.

    Massa explained that he then danced first with the bride, who was not identified, and then with a bridesmaid. He said multiple cameras recorded the incident.

    “I said goodnight to the bridesmaid,” Massa continued. “I sat down at the table where my whole staff was, all of them by the way bachelors.”

    “One of them looked at me and as they would do after, I don’t know, 15 gin and tonics, and goodness only knows how many bottles of champagne, a staff member made an intonation to me that maybe I should be chasing after the bridesmaid and his points were clear and his words were far more colorful than that,” Massa said. “And I grabbed the staff member sitting next to me and said, ‘Well, what I really ought to be doing is fracking you.’ And then [I] tossled the guy’s hair and left, went to my room, because I knew the party was getting to a point where it wasn’t right for me to be there. Now was that inappropriate of me? Absolutely. Am I guilty? Yes.”
    ...
    By the end of the show, Massa is saying that passing Health Care Reform via reconciliation will tear the country apart and that the only way to stop it from passing is to get his story (presumably the alleged plan to force him out of Congress) on to Fox News to let the public know what the Democrats will do to get the bill passed.

  49. FlipYrWhig - March 8, 2010 | 1:49 am · Link

    Jesus Christ, Mike Allen, Reconciliation Is NOT THAT COMPLICATED

    You know, just judging by the headline, I think Jonathan Chait may be saying that Mike Allen can still reconcile with Jesus.

  50. asiangrrlMN - March 8, 2010 | 2:38 am · Link

    @Comrade Mary: Holy shit what the fuck? Am I drunk because that made no sense to me.

    Cole, I don’t understand why it has to be an either/or situation here. Stupid and dishonest. Yep. Works for me.

    ETA: I see you voted for both, too. Carry on.

  51. Mark S. - March 8, 2010 | 3:00 am · Link

    @Comrade Mary:

    Wow, that’s insane.

  52. burnspbesq - March 8, 2010 | 3:15 am · Link

    Krugman is also shrill.

    It’s bad enough that there are all this wacko hippies running around spreading the scurrilous lie that Canada does health care better than we do.

    Now Krugman is saying that the damn Canucks also do financial regulations and consumer protection better than we do.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03.....ugman.html

    But … But … Saddam Harper prorogued Parliament (whatever the fuck that means)!

    And you damn Canucks have to answer for Mark Steyn.

  53. The Main Gauche of Mild Reason - March 8, 2010 | 3:16 am · Link

    @Comrade Mary:

    Judging from that performance, DougJ’s probably indisposed, removing all traces of his affiliation with the Massa campaign :-P

  54. arguingwithsignposts - March 8, 2010 | 3:37 am · Link

    @asiangrrlMN:

    @Comrade Mary: Holy shit what the fuck? Am I drunk because that made no sense to me.

    You may not be drunk, because that makes no sense to me either.

  55. asiangrrlMN - March 8, 2010 | 4:13 am · Link

    @arguingwithsignposts: Thanks. I thought it was just my reading comprehension fail.

  56. DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal) - March 8, 2010 | 4:14 am · Link

    @arguingwithsignposts:

    I’m stoned and I thought it sounded like he was doing meth.

  57. me - March 8, 2010 | 4:35 am · Link

    Functions

    There’s one bunch of things, and another bunch of things, and each and every thing in the first lot goes with one in the second. The function says what goes with what. That’s it.

  58. Rarely Posts - March 8, 2010 | 5:46 am · Link

    Chait doesn’t understand pre-calculus, and Cohen doesn’t understand algebra . . .

    How do these people get jobs at major media outlets when they had so much trouble with basic, foundational high school classes? And, don’t they find it difficult to understand discussions about economics, budgets, and science?

  59. Bill E Pilgrim - March 8, 2010 | 5:48 am · Link

    I admit to being one of those who usually tunes out whenever all of the animal pic posting starts but TBogg’s picture of his Hitler salute puppy is one for the ages.

  60. Rick Taylor - March 8, 2010 | 6:41 am · Link

    Most of the press cannot handle anything more complicated than “four legs good, two legs bad.”

  61. ppcli - March 8, 2010 | 6:58 am · Link

    @Rick Taylor:
    Well, Fox News has managed to grasp “”Four legs good, two legs better.

  62. tofubo - March 8, 2010 | 8:31 am · Link

    as with many a congresscritter or the tools that opine about them on the radidio or teevee

    knowledge may be power, but willful ignorace pays better

  63. Socrates - March 8, 2010 | 8:54 am · Link

    “Is this the same Chait who jumped on the “Andrew Sullivan is an anti-Semite” bandwagon?”

    This is ironic in a discussion about getting the facts straight.

    While Chait criticized Sullivan’s views on Israel, he stated quite explicitly, more than once, that he does not consider Sullivan an anti-Semite.

  64. John - March 8, 2010 | 9:24 am · Link

    I think Chait has just proudly proclaimed his own stupidity and blamed it on being “lazy.” And proudly even. Jeez.

    I don’t think he’s especially proud. His point is that it’s one thing to lazily fail to even try to understand a subject you don’t care about. Everybody has probably done that at some point in their lives. What takes Mike Allen to the next level is that he lazily fails to even try to understand the subject he’s paid to write and comment about. The dude is treating the legislative process, something he is supposed to be an expert at and to explain to the public, the same way that 17 year old Jon Chait treated pre-calculus.

  65. bemused - March 8, 2010 | 10:08 am · Link

    @kay:
    Most in our media have a 3 second attention span with low comprehension skills & then divert attention from their own failures to inform by pretending that all americans find talking about issues like adults is too nerdy & boring. The media prefers everything to be a tag team wrestling match.

  66. lovable liberal - March 8, 2010 | 10:45 am · Link

    Our culture is failing because it has allowed thinking and knowing stuff to become, y’know, like, icky. Who’s shtupping who, though – that’s news to live by, just like adolescence.

  67. AJ - March 8, 2010 | 12:14 pm · Link

    Isn’t “dishonest right-wing hack” an oxymoron?

  68. sukabi - March 8, 2010 | 12:21 pm · Link

    how much better would our media be if the first time someone was as bad as Allen, someone like Chait would call them on it?

    And the second time they were FIRED for failure to do their jobs.

    fixed your typo, and added a consequence.

  69. HRA - March 8, 2010 | 12:47 pm · Link

    Late getting here. I read this last night and was really surprised. To be exact -not surprised at Mike Allen being what John said and then some.

    Jon Chait is a ? Mike Allen somehow gives bad vibes and I don’t know why.

  70. Phoenix Woman - March 8, 2010 | 12:49 pm · Link

    Just the title alone brought a smile to my face:

    Jesus Christ, Mike Allen, Reconciliation Is NOT THAT COMPLICATED

    Sorry, had to see that again.

    It’s as if Brother Froomkin, having finished dumping some truth serum in David Broder’s Metamucil, swung by TNR’s shop to spice up Chait’s Earl Grey.


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