The Conservatives are out in force trying to bail John McCain out from Phil Gramm’s ridiculous comments—you know—about calling us all a bunch of whiners.
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“Phil Gramm was right of course,” Will declared. “Absolutely
WILL: On two points. … We’re not in a recession as commonly defined. That is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
STEPHANOPOULOS: We may be running there though. Even Bernanke says so.
WILL: We’re not however. Unemployment is just about the post-war average at 5.5 percent. His second point that we’re a nation of whiners: we are the crybabies of the western world. In fact, we have an extraordinarily low pain threshold.
Heather says:
Stengel follows with saying that no one wants to be called a whiner and cites one of their polls on the public perception of the economy and says those statements weren’t helpful. You, think? Brazile notes that McCain had to distance himself from Gramm and says Phil is mental. Roberts follows with saying that it’s just the old harsh style of politics and it’s the wrong year for that. Oh, and the public doesn’t understand McCain’s jokes.
Filed Under: Election 08, This Week/George Stephanopoulos
Tags: Economy, George Will, John McCain, Phil Gramm
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Telling us about our malaise didn’t work for Jimmy Carter.
Maybe all of these folks chiming in together can make us be disgusted with ourselves, rather than with them.
It isn’t working for me, so far.
I don’t understand how they think this could be a good idea.
Have you noticed that all the a-holes who tell everyone they’re whining too much about the economy all have very large and secure paychecks?
who listens to the people? have they made a mortgage payment recently? or had someone in their family die in iraq? or pumped their own gas?
Remember when the punchline to the old joke about what is a (fill in the blank with your least offensive demographic target) favourite wine, was: ‘But I wanted to go to Palm Springs this year’?
Guess now it’s more, ‘what is a struggling middle-class American’s favourite wine?’
Answer is, ‘I wanna not have to work two crappy jobs for basic wages just to buy enough gas to get to work in the first place, and not lose my house because the banks that gave me this predatory loan in the first place are going tits up, and for the dollar to be slightly worth more than toilet paper, and gee whiz since I’m whining here, might be nice to have a bit of medical insurance for the kids while we’re at it, in case they get shot while at their school…’
Hmm. Not quite so funny.
I’d like to find out what George Will’s pain threshold is.
If it’s all in my head, does that mean I can show up for work tomorrow at the company that moved my job to India? Come to think about it, following this line of propaganda may be counter productive. They are on TV, and the only people who have enough time to sit there listening to their babble are the unemployed, or the drunk.
Hey, you are all whiners. Now go out and buy these fine products from our sponsors, and you will feel better about yourself.
why cant they say recession directly? “mental recession”? When’s disney going to start making cutbacks in the ABC news department because we whiners cant afford a week at EPCOT?
Conservatives at least defend the gaffes from their surragates. Liberals run in fear otherwise the media will obliterate them.
If they have no bread, let them eat cake.
The Dollar is Doomed and the Fed’s Days are Numbered
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=zhLPNdjyjyg
Wake-up America–Bush’s goodtime goodies of low mortgage rates sucked you royally for his two invasions.But there will always be money for Israel.5.5% unemployment rate–baloney!
Don from Canada @ 11:
Vive la Révolution!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastille_Day
As a token foreigner, I think the evidence is on his side. America still has some of the world’s cheapest oil, cheapest commodities, a currency which is a pseudo common currency, hugely powerful economy etc etc.
However, of course saying that is political suicide…
They said the same thing before all the banks crashed and they jumped out the windows.
http://www.iht.com/articles/20.....14bank.php
w is bailing out two more lenders and Budweiser sold out.
Finally a majority of Americans have awakened to the FACT that our “leaders” have driven the ship of state over a cliff ..
And that makes us “whiners” ..
It wasn’t OK for Obama to refer to disillusioned American workers as “bitter” ..
But it’s OK for the ReThugs to call us “whiners” ..
Oh those bitter serfs—how dare they complain. George’s solution would be to send everyone a pair of bootstraps so they could lift themselves up just like he did–yeah, right. And if the serfs would have a bit of patience then they would see a few pennies trickle down their way. Surprisingly enough these people are actually affected by 4.00/gal. gas prices—wow, that’s quite a concept.
Of course when you’re a millionaire like Will you can afford to insulate yourself from the reality of average people and avoid being soiled by the great unwashed.
I just read Cynthia McKinney was nominated as the Green Party candidate for President. Now there’s an idea !
“Whiners”!!! The WORD of the Presidential campaign of 2008! This is the word I’ll remember.
Thanks from: Citizen Whiners everywhere.
Both Will and Gramm are absolutely correct about the whining, they’re just wrong about who’s doing the most of it.
The big I-Banks on Wall Street, the National Association of Realtors, the Nat. Ass. of Home Builders, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the CEOs of Wells Fargo and BAC (’cuz they didn’t get the sweetheart deal JPM got from the Fed. Yet.)
Never mind that the unemployment figures have been padded by the Bush regime by counting part timers as employed and doesn’t count people whose unemployment benefits have expired or never qualified in the first place. Many people are unemployed who never qualified for benefits because they either didn’t hold a job long enough or were fired. They are not counted in the unemployment figures.
RickMack @ 18:
…that makes almost everyone laugh.
go try to jack some other thread this one is about George Will’s claim that; “we have an extraordinarily low pain threshold.”
I’d like to slug Will and see if that’s true.
RickMack @ 18:
If you think letting McCain win in November is an idea. Then again, you didn’t say it was a good one.
MEME! MEME! MEME! =)
this is kind of funny. Obama says that families in blue collar small towns are bitter with politics, so they cling to guns & god.
so many reporters meme out there “elitism, elitism” - so many websites are sighing “oh come ON, who CARES?!?! they AAAARE!!!”
now the tables are turned. and its funny. they’re as literally turned as they can get.
McCain’s #1 cheerleading and advisory section says that families in blue collar small towns are “whiners”.
the web memes “whiner, whiner” - so many reporters are downplaying it, or reasserting (as the esteemed soft handed yanking, thick glassed wearing, middle aged skinny with a beer gut having Mr. Will so eloquently and verbosely articulates) that we *ARE* kind of whiny.
meanwhile, the internet kind of does that whole.. um.. pissed off girlfriend thing on McCain. seriously. its like the whole internet, even the right leaning blogs, are kind of snapping our head and sticking out our hips and eyeing McCain (and his apologists) in the eyes and saying “ex-CUSE me, motherfucker?!?! *WHAT* did you just caaaalll me … ?? what?!! what .. ? - come on, say it again…”
McCain is going to have to distance himself farther from Gramm than Obama had to distance himself from Rev. Wright, once this shit is through.
oh, and by the way, if I didn’t make it clear enough before? and if any ABC trolls are lurking… its *REALLY* ironic to see a skinny baby booming nancy pants nerd like George Will talk crap about Detroit auto workers, Pittsburgh coal miners and Pac NW loggers. George, *YOU* might fall into the statistical evidence of weak American pain thresholds vs. Easterners, but…… that don’t mean the rest of us don’t know how to take a punch.
I mean, for crying out loud - when Detroit auto workers are “whining” that something hurts, thats USUALLY a good indicator that something’s broken…
Attila the Neopopulist, no Stomach for Imperial Adventures @ 13:
YouTube: Casablanca - La Marseilaisse
it’s been a few months now so i can’t recall for sure
was that Bear Sterns that was whining and was sold
for $2 a share(93%drop in value)……..oh that’s right the fed reserve helped out….a bail out….
I’ll probably get flamed here for this, but McCain’s jab at Gramm, “In serious consideration for ambassador to Belarus,” was pretty funny.
George Will is a pathetic though articulate fool. What we are wittnesing today is a government gone absolutely off the deep end with no accountability what so ever to the American people who are in fact the government of the United States. But things don’t seem to work that way any longer.
With todays bailout of Freddie and Fannie, we have all be sentenced to a life time of slavery and servatude to the banking masters. They are allowed to make hundreds of millions in profits off the back of the little guy. They nickle and dime us for every last penny they can squeeze out of us, whether in the form of ATM fees, outrageous interest rates on credit cards if your payment is one second late, or selling you a sham mortgage. Just how many of these assholes that have created this nightmare along with their political bretheren that was supposed to be watching over them are going to jail? When will Uncle Ben Bernanke and I’m full of crap Paulson be fitted for their jump suits?
I thought America died last week when the FISA bill was signed into law. I was wrong. It took place today and all we do is turn the other cheek and ask for more. It doesn’t get any more pathetic than this. The dollar will continue to fall. Gold and silver will continue to rise. Good luck trying to keep yourselves warm this coming winter when fuel oil hits 6 to 7 dollars per gallon. But have no fear. No doubt there will be another rebate check in the mail before black Friday arrives so we can all do the right thing and go out and spend it. In the evnt there isn’t another rebate check, you can always burn your furniture to keep you nice and toasty.
Attila the Neopopulist, no Stomach for Imperial Adventures @ 8:
You mean an F-18 from McDonnell Douglass or the Mercedes that only about one in a thousand can afford?
So, whiners is the new unpatriotic.
They are trying to shut you up because the economy will get much worse.
You want to see whinning. Make the rich pay taxes.
(1) IndyMac is 2nd largest bank failure in history not 3rd.
(2) Recession is “significant decline” NOT two quarters of negative growth.
WILL: On two points. … We’re not in a recession as commonly defined. That is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
A recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales. A recession begins just after the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends as the economy reaches its trough. Between trough and peak, the economy is in an expansion. Expansion is the normal state of the economy; most recessions are brief and they have been rare in recent decades. - NBER
The NBER is the nation’s leading nonprofit economic research organization. Sixteen of the 31 American Nobel Prize winners in Economics and six of the past Chairmen of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers have been researchers at the NBER. The more than 1,000 professors of economics and business now teaching at universities around the country who are NBER researchers are the leading scholars in their fields.
We are in a recession.
Here’s what I propose: let’s displace all the money of all these rich pricks into the pockets of the common man (i.e. the bottom 85% of America), and see whether or not the George Wills, Sean Hannitys and Phil Gramms of the world whine about it.
Yah see… conservatives only whine in private… “Muffy, Buffy, we’re out of Perrier… we might die!”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/.....refer=home
Anyone who can afford $20,000 a week to go to a private Island to whine… doesn’t really have much to whine about!
RickMack @ 18:
And the Conservatives try to label Michelle Obama as an “angry black woman”. Just wait until they get a taste of Mrs. McKinney.
burnt @ 24:
McCain didn’t make the whiners remark himself.
That’s why it won’t be as powerful.
I’m still going to do what I can to spread it.
So during the Bush Administration, people bought gas guzzling trucks to go to the grocery store - and gas prices rose so much, the trucks became unaffordable.
So during the Bush Administration, people bought houses using adjustable rate mortgages - and interest rates rose so much, the homes became unaffordable.
Meanwhile food prices, tuitions, medical costs, and cost of living rose faster than wages. The value of the US Dollar has dived making goods overseas more expensive (including oil) thousands of Americans have died in an unncessary war (10’s of thousands wounded). Each American’s share of the national debt has increased, and everyday, we are closer and closer to losing social security and medicare.
actually we really know what’s going on here…..they’re
doing the whining because this isn’t going to go over well
in ohio,pennsylvania and michigan. they’re trying real hard to blame it on the democrats……obama needs to hit them hard with this
To paraphrase Reagan it seems that the economy has stayed afloat so far by “mortgaging our future and our children’s future for the temporary convenience of the present”. Of course, Reagan ran deficits, and today, associating the Republican party with fiscal responsibility is laughable. However, I don’t think the people who voted for Bush should be whining. We had a balanced budget and projections for eliminating the deficits handed to us on a silver platter by Clinton, every opportunity for continuing the policy with Gore, and threw it all away. (The 2000 election shouldn’t have been close).
So where are we now? The dollar is devaluing against other currencies, health care costs are spiraling, energy costs are spiraling, the deficit as a percentage of GDP is increasing, foreclosures are up, the jobs reports indicate 438,000 jobs lost in 2008 through June, and food costs are rising.
I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better. The stimulus checks may have bought a little time, but their effect was offset by rising gas prices, and also, because part of the stimulus occurs in the country of manufacture. With so much stuff imported these days, China’s economy probably benefited from the stimulus checks as much as the U.S.
I don’t think that the excessive government, corporate and personal debt is going to somehow be miracled away. We have mortgaged our future, and the bill is becoming due.
George Will is a pontificating popinjay.
Why anyone takes him seriously is a wonder.
Whiner @ 36:
When Bu’ush “took” office you could buy a Euro for 94 cents. Today it’s $1.57.
The MBA-in-Chief / CEO-in-Chief. LOL!
Like the rest of them, he too need a bail-out.
Rasputin @ 33: