Letting a Commenter Do My Work For Me

There's a slow motion back and forth going on between my regular commenter MoonDragon and teabagger extraordinaire psumba  on the comment thread of this post. I highly recommend giving it  a read. MoonDragon has far more patience than I do when it comes to arguing with our paranoid defender of all things Palin and he/she is  doing a very good job of of it. Here's a taste,

Everyone getting the same shot you had is problematic, considering disparaties of the original circumstances from which people start (I, myself, was very lucky - caring parents, choosing a major that didn't become obsolete before graduation, remaining relatively healthy.) Government can help remediate some circumstances, particularly of institutional, disadvantage. Support of such policies is one of the family values I inherited from caring parents.

I hope your students learned about unions in their studies, that may be the only way to a better life than that of their parents. The decline of the middleclass parallels the decline of union membership.

The biggest boosts to the "ruling elite" over the last few years have been in the tax code that has fed the growing gap between the top 2% and the bottom 98%, especially the recinding of the "death tax" is particularly amusing, as it is creating a defacto aristocracy. Just watch an episode of BRAVO's NYC Prep.

It's the railing against unions and taxes on the top 2% by the Tea Party, two things that will help people get back in the game, amuses me.

Why do I call psumba paranoid, you may ask?  Well, consider these remarks. This is from his first response to my post about him from over a month ago.

You must really have some "juice" to have the CDT take down the Palin article & comments that the above remarks were posted against ...

This one is from three days ago.

What was represented as my original posting was really my fifth posting in a long thread. Hence my compliment to Veblen about getting the original article taken down ... destroying the context of the original remarks.

Of course, I had nothing to do with the vanishing comment thread. The CDT puts most of their articles behind a paywall after two weeks and the comment thread for an article vanishes when the article goes behind the paywall. But psumba's first instinct was  to accuse me of conspiring  with the powers at the CDT to victimize him and  more than a month latter he still thinks that he's the victim of a conspiracy to make him look bad....did I mention that psumba is huge Glenn Beck fan, too?

Phds Aren't All Brilliant and Teabaggers Aren't All Teetotalers

About a month ago, I had a post highlighting the CDT's most teabagelicious commeter, psumba, who showed up in comments here  to defend himself.  He wrote, in part,

Let's see ... I'm charged with:

- anti-intellectualism - as a student, I was considered to be quite intellectual. In fact, I did earn two simultaneous undergraduate diplomas from Penn State in four years ... in two demanding fields from different Penn State colleges. What happened ...

To which one of my regular commenters, MoonDragon, wrote,

I will take your word for it that you have the degrees you claim. Earning a college degree is an achievement in and of itself, however it  isn't proof of intellect. Your statement may be evidence of being highly trained, but isn' t proof of either education or intellectual capacity. Pardon the anecdote, but I know more than a few Phds who are dumber  than dirt.

Today we no longer have to depend on MoonDragon's anecdotal evidence concerning dumber than dirt Phds. From Kevin Drum comes this Quote of the Day, from the man behind the Teabagging curtain,

...Dick Armey, PhD University of Oklahoma, former economics professor at the University of North Texas, and former Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives:

One of the things that we see as we look at Glenn Beck's work that's been fascinating to me, is we see a more true and accurate history of the United States, and we see it documented at levels of rigor that, in fact, one would expect out of Ph.D. dissertations — it is serious, scholarly work....[Liberal critics] don’t have to argue with Glenn Beck. They have to argue with his documentation and they can’t match that level of rigor.

Somebody just shoot me now.

Digby adds,

It has often been rumored that Dick Armey is a falling down drunk and his behavior on TV certainly suggests that he's on something. I'm guessing it's acid...

What is it with Teabaggers and alcohol? Here's psumba

You should have taken me up on my offer last Fall to have a drink together the last time that I was in State College.