Alan Simpson suffers a "Barbara Bush Moment"

"Parents are asking 'what do I get my kid, 'cause I don't even know their language,'" says one of those weekend pinch-hitting Fox and Friends hosts whose name we can never remember, introducing a segment on high-tech toys for tots and teens. The same could be said of Alan Simpson with regard to the "kids" today. He doesn't even know the language of the GOPs tech-savvy offspring, the Tea Party. More below. (Above: Talking turkey in the Thanksgiving Kitchen Down East.)

"You don't want to listen to Keith Olbermann and Rush Babe and Rachel Minnow or whatever that is, and Glenn Beck. They're entertainers," counsels Alan Simpson, co-chair of President Obama's debt commission, in an unwittingly self-revelatory Barbara Bush Moment of noblesse oblige cluelessness. As with Bar's outspoken authenticity, we used to love Simpson's eye-twinkling manner of politically incorrect straight shooting, but now the old boy is talking straight past us:

They couldn't govern their way out of a paper sack — from the right or the left. But they get paid a lot of money from you and advertisers thirty, fifty million a year — to work you over and get you juiced up with emotion, fear, guilt and racism. Emotion, fear, guilt, and racism.

"Time to go for facts. Everybody's entitled to their own opinion, but nobody's entitled to their own facts," Simpson said, paraphrasing former U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Time to "go for facts" yourself, Mr. Simpson. It's understandable the longtime Senator's upset with the self-described "Titular Head of the Remains of the Republican Party," given "Rush Babe's" take-no-prisoners dismissal of the debt commission's work (h/t The Giant Wakes*):

This debt commission report, Irksome Bowles, Alan Simpson, forget it. It's worthless. The premise is totally corrupt. Don't get caught up in debating any of the minutia or the aspects of this thing. It's a setup; it is a trap. All it does is cement the notion of expanded government spending ad infinitum.

But Simpson's gratuitous casting of the ratings-challenged MSNBC attack dogs with talk radio's top talker as somehow morally equivalent is straight out of the same dog-eared Journolist/Cabalist handbook the President himself used when he "stiff-armed Limbaugh and Beck" last spring. As Althouse explained at the time:

Obama understands why you feel those negative emotions. The actual ideas you express don't really matter. They are to be disregarded — they're the things you say when you get mad or depressed, because of all the problems — problems that he aims to solve, in his way, for your sake, because he knows better. Now, if you would please, quiet down, and let him get on with the work of giving you what you need.

It's the ideas, stupid. You need to get out more, beyond the Northeast Corridor Conservative echo chamber, Mr. Simpson.

*NOTE. Thanks to twitter colleague The Editor at The Giant Wakes for debt commission analysis (in 140-or-fewer-character bits) and links:

The Debt Commission report was just economic sleight of hand, meant to preserve both the Entitlement Economy and Big Government.

Just went back thru a few links I had bookmarked, and sent them to you. Main source was my own opinion, having read the draft.

Big issues are no constitutional protections against future debt, little change to entitlements, and no real reform of tax code.

From The Dakota Beacon: "The document reveals the Debt Commission’s bias toward “establishment politicians … it does not factor in the current mood of our country toward real fiscal reform." As we were saying, they don't even know our language.

Crossposted at Riehl World View and Liberty Pundits.

Comments

[Marcy O'Rourke]

Who is responsible for bankrupting the US? The Politicians who lied to us, or the public who chose to believe?

[Kate Stokes]

Ha! Awesome! This reminds me that I think when Huckabee grows up he will be Alan Simpson. #uberdoofus.