The Lucky Duckies myth

by: Eric B.

Wed Sep 19, 2012 at 11:06:47 AM EDT

Someone asked me a couple of weeks ago why I spend so much time ridiculing the likes of Henry Payne and the assortment of societal misfits he's gathered at Henry Payne's Museum for Half-Formed Thoughts. It was in light of the revelation that personally I mostly hate politics and if given a choice would spend my time eating chicken wings, drinking beer, watching movies about war and growing food. Why spend time laughing at these people, why not just ignore them.

The reason is that we used to try to marginalize them by not paying attention to them, but the only thing that did was ultimately make them more powerful. The John Birch Society of your dad's youth is today's Repubican Party. As much as I would rather be doing other things that give me more personal enjoyment, I hate even more a fact-free conversation about how we ought to be governing ourselves. It's horrible, painful work but until such time as the self-described adults in the room take their responsibilities for driving fact-driven politics seriously, it's a cross I have to bear.

For instance, I popped over this morning and saw Henry Payne once again bitching about the MSM's focus. This is a guy who works for a major daily newspaper, mind you, whining as if he's just some guy off the street who just runs some website. What was he whining about? Well, normally I can't make it more than a couple of paragraphs through anything he's written before I get bored -- his writing isn't just awful and his arguments aren't just normally based on paranoid fantasy, but he's also predictable to where I could write his posts for him -- but I did note that he referred to Mitt Romney's extended comments about the "47 percent" as a gaffe and something the MSM has no business paying attention to. Keep in mind that Henry Payne routinely ridicules Joe Biden for committing gaffes (an ugly side effect of ignoring these people for years and years and years until their ideas became dominant is that it embued them with the false sense of entitlement that you're not actually allowed to criticize them or their "ideas").

Well, it's not a gaffe. In fact, it's part of the Republican philosophy when it comes to the social safety net. Food stamps enable lazy jerks to spend someone else's money on steaks and lobsters so they can use the cash they get from welfare checks to buy cigarettes and beer. Willard's lazy slob two years ago to Maura Corrigan was your college student receiving food stamps ... if only we deprived them of food, they might turn out better. Normally, however, they don't attach a number to it. It's one of those things that they just know, kind of like that global warming isn't real and that tax cuts stimulate long-term growth in revenue.

The number 47 itself wasn't a gaffe, either. Willard Romney's campaign got it from Erick Erickson, who came to fame calling Cindy Sheehan -- mourning her dead son -- a media whore. Denigrating the weak and helpless is what these people do, and they're the ones who've informed Willard Romney's campaign. You can't entirely blame Willard for getting his information from rightwing blogs, by the way, because in this he has the company of leading rightwing "intellectual" Antonin Scalia, who during the Obamacare oral arguments appeared highly concerned about the Cornhusker Kickback, which never caught on with anyone but rightwing bloggers mostly because it was removed from the bill and never became law.

It's also an idea that has caught flak from everyone, including conservatives. Why? Because the notion that 47 percent of all Americans are lazy sponges who don't contribute tax dollars and expect everyone else to pay their way isn't just factually inaccurate. It's just downright stupid. This breaks things down nicely. So does this.

The problem is that the number and the idea itself have been allowed to percolate in conservative circles to where they now dominate how the Republican Party approaches the issues of poverty and government benefits. Willard Romney's comment is no less stupid or unsupported by evidence than the Wall Street Journal's editorial a few years back calling people who don't pay federal income taxes "lucky duckies." We're seeing a lot of pushback today, when a Republican candidate for president gave voice to it. Where was everyone's pie charts showing how asinine his comments were a few years ago, when it might have actually led to a better informed candidate?