The Washington Post

Obama giftwraps another soundbite for Republicans

I didn't think so. But I did think this.

On the right side of minimum wage 

On the right side of fair pay 

On the right side of rebuilding our infrastructure 

Right side of early childhood education 

So this isn't about, uh, my feelings being hurt, but, these are folks who are strong allies and supporters of me.

Me!

Me!

That there's what you call rhetorical conduplicatio, the anaphora type. Where to start, the arrogance of the construction "the right side of ____ ? " 

My least favorite one of those is "history," the right side of history. How arrogant, I thought whenever I heard that. Because you're surfing the wave of history not making history by your morally unmoored surfing pulled by speeding amphibious bandwagon. I don't hear it so much anymore. The locution sounds anachronistic.

The man speaks in axioms. The axioms are lined up as a drunk bellied up to a bar ruminates all his grievances, condensing to irrefutable nuggets,  lining up his axioms, delivering them all at once in an organized spew. 

Once I asked a relative who came home and delivered such a spew directly to me, "Is that what you do, drink through the afternoon thinking about all the things that make your life miserable? "

"I'm going to bed."

Start at the end of the president's rhetorical waxing, with the fallacy of the conceit of early childhood education having any educational benefit whatsoever beyond babysitting and freeing up working single mothers from expensive daycare. Not by my lights, mind, I figured  preschool would be helpful. Why not?  I heard good things, one time from Woopie Goldberg, she said it was helpful to her as unwed mother. Unfortunately,  government reports say otherwise. If you want to demand childcare help for unwed mothers you must admit government policies, your policies, damaged their prospects. 

The right side of fair pay. Please. Does this horsewhipped trope still work on people? All one has to do is observe Mick Rowe on mute for thirty minutes to realize there are some jobs so crap that women will flatly not take them up. And for other reasons besides this subject is completely abused. Also, check your own payroll. 

Rebuilding infrastructure. He has GOT to be kidding us, been there did that, does the man imagine our memories so short? "Shovel ready jobs," jokes about shovel ready jobs not being so ready, doled out on the basis of balancing the burly-man ratio, mustn't be unfair to girly-men and girly-girls. Payouts to political supporters for bogus energy projects, a gigantic scam among the politically connected right here in my state. 

Finally, the beginning, I will not listen to another thing until the man completes a college level economics course. Two courses. Here's the thing about macro economics vs. micro economics. Apologies, you likely know this, it is common knowledge but sometimes the simple things fall through the cracks. 

A micro economics 101 course will introduce the eager student to various economic models that describe one little portion of the economic board at a time, if the board were a game board then each theory and model (always with its own graph) explains what happens to individual companies when faced with various challenges. Models gauge environmental changes such as supply and demand and taxes, laws and regulations. Never the whole picture, just one little piece at a time. 

A macro economics 101 course will introduce the student to what happens when government enacts  policies of quantitative easing that buy back short term bonds to exhaustion and then buys back longterm bonds but not to lower interest rates for they can be lowered no further, but rather to increase the money supply, that is to ensure that growth continues to appear on paper, that inflation is steady to counter recession, deflation, stagnation, but inflated nonetheless so that now people need more of it to buy the usual steady things like fuel, energy and food, and many citizens now must have two part-time jobs, sometimes three, to pay for the things they need to persist with their new air-inflated money so that generally across the land the essential meaning of "minimum wage" is completely eradicated and replaced with a new term "living wage" with a new meaning. No longer is minimum wage segue into the workforce, it must fulfill the basics of living in a new age of puffed up currency.  Of course, it must, the administration's policies made it so. Before demanding Republicans acknowledge "the right side" of minimum wage the Democrats must acknowledge government's role in completely jacking its own economy so that wage minimum change becomes necessary.  The president is  admitting, "I jacked the economy so badly Republicans must now cooperate to increase minimum wage to living wage." Or he can skip the basic economic courses altogether that everyone else takes that explicate in graphs what happens to companies when government jacks its economy this way and that, and wave his cracking wand at Republicans instead, Prince. 

Econometrics is like considering the economic board as a balance board laden with glasses of water each standing for an economic sector, an economic consideration.  The government stands with a pitcher of water in one hand and a turkey baster in the other pouring water into glasses and siphoning others while the econometrics students measure the tilt of the board. In its present state the whole board gone thud solidly stuck over to the left.