Saturday, May 18, 2013

Dog Bites Man, Again

Also too, someone is wrong on the Internet. Somewhat less surprising is that the someone is The Daily Beast's Megan McArdle. Remember her? The "special correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast covering business, economics, and public policy." Also kitchen gadgets & other consumer goods.

Megan McArdle doesn’t understand the Kermit Gosnell case

An oddly misinformed Daily Beast piece gets everything about Pennsylvania's abortion debate backward

We can only quibble w/ "oddly."

This, on the I.R.S. "scandal", gets it all as backward & awful as usual.
A related genre is the column explaining how the real victims here are liberls*, [sic since 14 May] the Obama administration and maybe the American public.

I'm going to stick with "the real scandal is a [sic] employees of a government agency using the large powers we have granted them to selectively investigate people based on their political beliefs" and "the real victims are the people who were investigated", though of course, I think this is also terrible for the American people, because we deserve good government.
Citizen's United, that's great government. What other "good government" does she think the American people deserve to get, good & hard?

The asterisk?
*This originally contained a link to a Josh Marshall post, but he disputes my interpretation, so I've removed it.
And here we go, on the stretch & headed home!
The real scandal is that all these complicated tax rules exist. If we would just eliminate the corporate income tax, then people could organize groups, or not, just as they please. And the IRS would not be in the position of deciding what counts as excessive political activity.

But Megan, you will say, isn't this just a list of things that you already cared a lot about, like statistical literacy and getting rid of the corporate income tax? And indeed you're right. But isn't that always the real scandal?
No, really, once we've eliminated the corporate income tax then the job creators will start creating jobs. Just you watch!

And Sweet Blood of Jesus yes Megatron did claim to care a lot about statistical literacy. Gack! We're going up to the roof to heave ourself off it, hoping to be impaled on a neighboring bldg.'s tee vee antenna. Good-bye cruel world.