Media Madness

I don’t know why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, and I don’t much care. In theory, I suppose, WaPo could suck worse than it already does, but there’s more room for improvement than not.

Somebody’s going to buy the New York Times eventually. It must be running on fumes. But let us go on to other amusing things in the news today.

Per Steve Benen, the ever-amusing PolitiFact finds truth in a lie, somehow. In an interview, Eric Cantor spoke of the “growing” federal deficit, but the federal deficit is shrinking. So PolitiFact says =-

Cantor said that the federal deficit is “growing.” Annual federal deficits are not growing right now, and they are not projected to grow through 2015, a point at which the deficit will have shrunk by three-quarters since 2009. By this standard, Cantor is wrong. However, unless policies are changed, deficits are projected to grow again in 2016 and beyond, according to the CBO. On balance, we rate his claim Half True.

All together now — oh, good grief …

Elsewhere, Ted Cruz reveals that he is confused by this newfangled Internets thing.

The first paragraph of this Kevin Williamson NRO piece is hysterically funny, in a completely unintentional way. It begins, “Conservatives have for years attempted to put our finger upon precisely why Barack Obama strikes us as queer in precisely the way he does.” And then it goes on and on about how there’s something about the President that makes them uncomfortable. (Too blah, perhaps?)

I’ve decided that one of the feature pathologies of that complex of twitchiness that makes wingnuts what they are is a complete inability to perceive projections as projections. There are individual lefties with the same problem of course, but I think most of us over the age of 30 or so can appreciate that the way we perceive a thing has at least as much to do with us as with the thing. But righties are nearly always completely unconscious about this. This has a lot to do with why they think the rest of the world should adjust to gratify their predilections rather than the other way around.