Intellectual Alert - Bob Herbert

People get paid for this kind of analysis. Unreal. No wonder the papers are tanking.

The ultimate intellectual alert, compliments of Bob Herbert at the New York Times (I know - using the Times is cheating because it's so easy to cherry pick, but cut me some slack):

Maybe the economic stress has been too much. Looking back at the past few months, it’s fair to wonder if the country isn’t going through a nervous breakdown...There is no end to the craziness. The entire Republican Party has decided that it is in favor of absolutely nothing. The president’s stimulus package? No way. Health care reform? Forget about it.

There is not a thing you can come up with that the G.O.P. is for. Sunshine in the morning? Harry Reid couldn’t persuade a single Senate Republican to vote yes.

Incredibly, the party’s poll numbers are going up.

We need therapy....The wackiness is increasing, not diminishing, and it has a great potential for destruction. There is a real need for people who know better to speak out in a concerted effort to curb the appeal of the apostles of the absurd.

A little alliteration from aggravated authors.

Don't agree with the president? You're not stupid. You're nuts.

A little further down the page, Herbert borrows a page from the nervous breakdown manual, forgets what he's saying, and ends up with Multiple Personality Disorder. For such a sane and intelligent man (you know, compared to half the country), he's pretty careless with the shoot-self-in-foot gun:

The Obama administration’s biggest domestic priority is health care reform. But the biggest issue confronting ordinary Americans right now — the biggest by far — is the devastatingly weak employment environment. Politicians talk about it, but aggressive job-creation efforts are not part of the policy mix.

Nearly 15 million Americans are unemployed, according to official statistics. The real numbers are far worse. The unemployment rate for black Americans is a back-breaking 15.1 percent.

Five million people have been unemployed for more than six months, and the consensus is that even when the recession ends, the employment landscape will remain dismal.

Well, then, maybe that's why the country is going bonkers. They can't believe the gobs of money being spent by an administration with no sense of proportion or direction while the economy circles the bowl.

Genius.