Where else can we apply the Alberto Gonzales defense?

January 1st, 2009 at 9:54 am
How ironic, a man who has never been able to confront the outcomes in the real world from the predicted outcomes from his flawed theoretical belief system is lecturing others on cognitive dissonance. Krugman (from BR: In the face of radical deregulation, you claim there never really was a free market. )has been arguing that the lack of regulations and the free markets created the financial and social problems(again, In the face of radical deregulation, you claim there never really was a free market. ) that we face today but has yet to show that we did have a free market and few regulations(again, In the face of radical deregulation, you claim there never really was a free market. ). The bottom line is that both the left and the right have their stories wrong. They have both argued that governments should meddle and have pushed aside those that support individual liberty and free markets to the sidelines.

No matter how much Krugman wants to spin it, the simple fact is that the CRA did encourage lending to people who had no hope of paying off their debts. No matter what he writes it will not change the fact that Fannie and Freddie were government created entities that had their own regulator and that the regulator stood aside as both became the equivalent of government sponsored hedge funds.

While there was a minor reduction in regulations during the latter part of the Clinton presidency there are many more regulations(again, In the face of radical deregulation, you claim there never really was a free market. ) on the books today(again, In the face of radical deregulation, you claim there never really was a free market. ) than they were when Bush took office. Both the left and the right have supported regulations that pick winners( again, In the face of radical deregulation, you claim there never really was a free market. ) that would fail in a free market environment. When the winners fail because they could not survive without support from taxpayers or consumers it isn’t a failure of the market but of government policies that were supported by both the left and the right(again, In the face of radical deregulation, you claim there never really was a free market. ).

It is also ironic that Krugman has supported political proposals to fight CO2 driven ‘global warming’ at a time when the scientific evidence clearly shows that we have had no global warming for a decade and that CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas that lags temperature trends and as such cannot be a cause.
http://www.petitionproject.org/gwdatabase/GWPP/Review_Article.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming

~~~

BR: WE HAVE A WINNER!!! I knew someone would exhibit CD in pushing back, and you take the prize.

Its not that YOU or YOUR beliefs might possibly be wrong, its that EVERYONE else is.

All of the scientists that do peer reviewed data driven research are wrong. In the face of radical deregulation, you claim there never really was a free market. Your answer to long term climate change is to point to recent weather. And the CRA?( BR, you must have friends in Comm. Banking, ask them if they pay a Premium for CRA-compliant Notes Bundles that exhibit lower than expectable(which is higher than avg., to begin with) default rates) Huzzah for your unwavering belief in the Easter Bunny!

I salute you sir, and your poor, overwrought wetware.

BR,

take it EZ on the ‘Ink Blots’

as you say,
Peace be with you . . .

I hate to be irritating but if you are going to quote Orwell, can’t you at least do it correctly? EngSoc was presumably “English Socialism” (intended by Orwell to connote a form of Marxism). What I think AGG means, in the context of cognitive dissonance and the Bush administration, is “doublespeak”.

We have 19 more days of the Bush administration, one of the most incompetent and lawless of all US governments in history. The lack of protest during the Bush regime was a consequence of relentless fear-mongering and intimidation. I believe we will see more open political discussion and less apathy among Americans in the future. Let us hope that the page is not turned without some investigation of the prepetrators of at least some of the extensive criminality of the Bush years.

So if I disagreed with 31,072 American scientists (including 9,021 PhDs) who believe the effects of global warming to be insignificant or benign, that wouldn’t be cognitive dissonance?

http://www.petitionproject.org/gwdatabase/GWPP/Review_Article.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming

It’s invigorating to see this issue discussed. One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is that CD eventually leads to severe disfunction. The Sheep in one CD experiment began to lose control of body functions. Hencc the victims of CD, when they realize they’ve been had, can go berserk. Alberto Gonzales is a con artist. These guys don’t live in a kool-aid world; they try to make everyone else live there. So I don’t think he has CD. I think he is just twisting and turning as snakes do to avoid accountability. He is fully aware of what he has done. As to the decent people that believed in the kool-aid only to cling perversely to the Bush EngSoc( orwellian self contradictory speech), these are suffering CD, as they “switch off” from too much reality, a lot of violence could result.
My own view of this CD kool-aid in my family (they are all reptilians and some are fundis) is that they functioned in a reactionary way to relativism and scientific concepts of randomness as applied to society. They resisted the idea that life is a crap shoot. Then their heroes are exposed as two faced gamblers posing as men of integrity. These gamblers then had the balls to call the liberals a threat to society by accusing the liberals of wanting exactly what the gamblers really stood for and were actively doing. It’s enough to drive anyone nuts. Yep. Lots of CD. The idea that if you do the crime, you should do the time used to be a conservative one. This is step one in fixing our society. Step one would heal the victims of CD and give them hope. Hope breeds confidence. Confidence reduces risk aversion. Prudent risk taking and due diligence isn’t that hard. We can do it. The world can do it. If we succeed, we’ll have a healthy society and will colonize the stars. If not, earth will look like Dantooine (desert smuggler planet in Star Wars).

I think you got it. Mr. Gonzales was being interviewed by reporters for the WSJ for an article that he knew would be published, read and, presumably, influence those reading it.

Too me, cognitive dissonance is too kind as it suggests sincerity on his part. Perhaps he really is that stupid but I think that lets him off the hook.

http://wordlist.com/chutzpadik.htm

Thanks for your input on SST and Ninja bikes; that’s similar to my take on it too, but I still don’t get the purpose. Perhaps she sees it as a way to eliminate those among us susceptible to CD, but why only boys?

To feel (unjustifiably) sorry for yourself _is_ a kind of brazenness.

Although this considerably expands my conceptual universe as regards what I thought to be the relatively isolated word chutzpah.