Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Ben Stein, HUGE DOUCHEBAG

As if we needed more evidence that former actor, former economist, former speechwriter, and current dickhead Ben Stein is a huge douchebag.
The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say “generally” because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work. They are people who create either little utility or negative utility on the job. Again, there are powerful exceptions and I know some, but when employers are looking to lay off, they lay off the least productive or the most negative. To assure that a worker is not one of them, he should learn how to work and how to get along — not always easy.
 That's just unconscionable.  Republican policies of cutting taxes for the wealthy while deregulating every industry they could while spending a trillion dollars on two unfunded wars trashed the economy and cost 8 million people their jobs.

And Ben Stein blames them.

What's even worse is that he reflects comments made by many senior Republican Congressmen and Blue Dog Democrats, whose only proffered solution to our current fiscal mess is more tax cuts for the wealthy, while they filibuster employment insurance for those who desperately need it to feed their families and pay their bills while they look for work.

Unless you're rich or a douchebag, why would you ever vote for these contemptible jerks ever again?

3 comments:

Marc said...

It's just amazing that someone with a public personna can make a statement like that with absolutely no evidence. It's obviously based on his general sense. I guess this is what Palin means by "common sense"--you don't need "evidence" before you make a generalization. The GOP always complains (and sometimes with good reason) about Dems/liberals overgeneralizing about conservatives, but it seems as if the concern only goes one way.

But Ben Stein is an asskisser of the first order who will basically say anything to (1) get attention that he otherwise wouldn't get, and (2) be a player in conservative politics. Apparently, you can only be a conservative if you make an outrageous statement based on no evidence. This is exactly what my right-wing dentist does.

Of course, conservatives aren't the only ones that do this, but, in their case, it seems a way to demonize people that are outside their ambit. By saying that the unemployed are worthless, they make other people, who you would expect to be sympathetic, feel better about themselves, similar to how, in the Old South, how the white elites managed to bind the poor whites to the established order by, in effect, saying, well, we are all above the blacks, thereby keeping the poor whites in their place as much as the blacks. This seems very similar to this. The story about the UPS driver I heard complaining about extending unemployment benefits is consistent with this. Instead of saying, "there but for the grace of God go I" (forgive the religious imagery), he can say, well, it's not luck, I'm just better than they are.

It's almost brilliant the way the largely rich conservatives--such as Limbaugh and Beck--have managed to convince people that should have nothing in common that they are in it together against the liberals. In fact, they have gotten rich off these people by doing this.

As for Ben Stein, he is a pathetic little cretin.

Paul Seegers said...

When did Ben Stein do his "survey" of the unemployed? What methods did he use?
I kills me when the top percentile of income seems to have have some knowledge about the unemployed.

Marc said...

Ben Stein doesn't need to do a survey. He just uses conservative "common sense" to know everything. If he was designing airplanes, he wouldn't bother with that book learning about drag ratios and so forth; he would just build a plane from common sense knowledge.