Continuum Thinking, Disjunction, and ICE

Curmie doesn’t go this far, but...

Curmie was extremely fortunate throughout his career to have encountered a number of extraordinary university lecturers.  At, or at least very near, the top of the list was Ron Willis, who was the professor of record for an Intro to Theatre class for which Curmie was a Graduate Teaching Assistant for a couple of years in grad school.  Ron would lecture to a couple hundred undergrads on Mondays and Wednesdays, and then the GTAs would lead discussion groups of 20 or 25 students each on Fridays.

What made Ron special wasn’t merely his intellect, his grasp of the subject matter, or even his wit, all of which were on ample display every time he stepped up to the lectern.  Rather, it was his insistence on what is too often trivialized as “thinking outside the box.”  The phrase is cliché; Ron’s lectures never were.  One of the basic concepts Ron emphasized keeps coming back into Curmie’s consciousness: the difference between disjunctive and continuum thinking.  It is hardly a novel idea, but Curmie hadn’t seen it applied quite so self-consciously or specifically outside the realm of probability theory. 

If the local high school basketball team takes on an NBA team (that’s actually trying) and loses by 15 points, they’ve still lost by double digits (disjunctively) but played extraordinarily well (on a continuum for high school teams).  Of course, whereas continuum thinking is to be encouraged in general terms, many, even most, situations will eventually require a disjunctive solution: we watch this movie or that, we try to avoid traffic by going a little out of our way or we don’t, and so on.  You can’t cast 62% of your vote for Candidate X, 35% for Candidate Y, and 3% for that interesting third-party candidate who’s kinda crazy but has this one really cool idea.

Real-life problems, then, generally involve some level of… “compromise” isn’t quite the right word.  “Accommodation,” perhaps?  Back in the Dark Ages when Curmie was first of voting age, he sometimes found two candidates roughly equally appealing: X is better here, but Y is better there.  Now, of course, neither candidate is appealing, but they’re roughly equally unappealing. 

The key is getting the order right.  First the continuum, the weighing of all the pros and cons, then the disjunctive decision.  Reversing that process leads to confirmation bias.  That is, if we decide that a particular point of view is correct, we inevitably search out “evidence” that supports our conclusion and ignore that which might contradict that impression.  We must remember that pols and pundits lie.  All of them.  Even the ones on “our side.”

Which brings us to a discussion of ICE.  Curmie doesn’t purport to speak for everyone whose politics are somewhere to the left of those of Louis XIV or Francisco Franco (Curmie antiphrastically avoids mention of that dude with the bad haircut and the funny mustache).  That said, he understands two things: that in the modern age some form of border patrol that seeks to protect the nation from those who actually are “the worst of the worst” is a net positive, and that some of the testimonials coming out of Minneapolis right now (and elsewhere in weeks past) may well be exaggerated or even falsified.

Let’s take the second point first.  What we face here is the possibility that the anti-ICE faction might not be providing objectively accurate information.  Indeed, much of what we see and hear comes from neighbors (and therefore friends?) of victims of ICE brutality, and from left-leaning media outlets.  Does that make the reportage suspect?  Maybe.  But the alternative is to believe the stories ICE and the Trump administration are spinning.  

We saw the murder of Renee Good.  We saw ICE deny a doctor the opportunity to attend to her.  We saw the priest get pepper sprayed for no reason.  We saw the veteran dragged from her car.  We saw the invalid dragged from hers.  We saw the protester sprayed in the face when he was already in custody, face down on the ground.  We saw the 5-year-old kids (yes, plural) in custody.  We saw the old man get tackled in the hallway outside the office where he was checking in on his application for citizenship.  We heard the police chief tell us that his off-duty BIPOC officers were harassed by ICE.

And we’ve seen and heard Trump, Vance, Bondi, Noem, Bovino, Miller, et al., flat-out out lying about what happened.  Every.   Single.  Time.  And you know you we haven’t heard from?  Anyone on-site who witnessed these events live and can corroborate ICE’s narrative.  Anyone except ICE agents themselves, that is.  Is it possible that some of the specifics of some of the cases have been exaggerated or even fabricated by the left?  Curmie would say that’s not merely a possibility, but a likelihood.  Alas, that’s rather the way of the world.  And certainly the technology exists to make something appear to have happened when it didn’t.  It’s also true that people like Gavin Newsom seem much more interested in their prospective presidential runs in ’28 than in actually solving problems in the here and now.

So yes, there’s a continuum at play here.  We ought to be careful about what we believe.  One side might be lying.  The other side definitely is.  The only thing we should believe from anyone associated with ICE is when they say they “don’t care.”  Don’t care that you’ve done nothing illegal.  Don’t care that you’re a citizen.  Don’t care that you’re an asylum-seeker and can prove it.  Don’t care that you’re a doctor.  Don’t care that you’re a veteran.  Indeed, don’t care about literally anything but their presumed power.  They lack empathy, actual patriotism, humanity.  Oh, and courage.  Mustn’t forget that.

But let’s return to the other part of this analysis.  If, as those on the right would have it, ICE were detaining the “worst of the worst,” then the opposition would be significantly weakened.  And it is true, apparently, that a fair number of unsavory folks have indeed been apprehended: murderers, rapists, robbers, drug dealers, and the like.  But the percentage of detainees who fall into one of those categories is far too low.  It’s also important to remember that even accused murderers have 1st, 4th, 5th, and 14th amendment rights.  ICE doesn’t care.  Curmie does.

Curmie wrote about a variation on the theme back in 2012 when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was all about stop-and-frisk measures despite the fact that they were “successful” only once in every 879 stops, and that young black or Hispanic males were more than eight times more likely to be stopped than their percentage of the population would indicate.  Curmie wrote, 

If you search literally everybody without any provocation, chances are pretty good you’ll catch someone with a gun or drugs or an outstanding warrant. But the price is too high except in the McCarthyite universe inhabited by arrogant buffoons like Mike Bloomberg. Really, if the price of “law and order” is a state in which the authorities can do whatever the hell they want, I’ll take a little risk.

That’s still true.  By the way, how does one prove citizenship?  You can get a driver’s license without citizenship, after all.  A voter ID card, I suppose?  Curmie has never carried his except literally on election day, or his passport except heading to or from an international airport.   And if you happen to be on the other side of the state (or the other side of the country) from where those documents are stored (in Curmie’s underwear drawer, for example), there’s not a lot to be done to establish your right to be in this country.  

Curmie, being white (well, there’s a little First Nations heritage in there, but not enough that anyone would even suspect that by looking at him) and having English as his native language, is less likely than some of his friends are to be hassled by a goon squad that is longer on testosterone than on brain cells.  But “less likely” isn’t good enough, and what other folks, especially those who “look Hispanic,” have to deal with is absurd… or, rather, it would be if it weren’t so real.  Curmie has been loath to say this, at least this frankly, for the past year, but cannot now come to any conclusion other than that ICE is not merely primarily about the racism, but indeed virtually exclusively so.

Curmie does not argue here that there should be “no raids, no detention, no deportations,” as that one protester’s poster in the photo above reads.  But it is unreasonable at best to allow anonymous, largely untrained, “agents” to be able to do whatever they want, without warrants, without even probable cause (or at least without what any reasonable definition of probable cause would be), without oversight.  Take away their masks, their guns, and their ability to commit violence.  Make them work with local police: N.B., this does NOT mean that they’re the ones in charge.  No one can be detained if they are in fact obeying the rules—applying for asylum, seeking work permits, etc.  Any arrest without a judicial warrant or demonstrable exigent circumstances is felony kidnapping.  Make ICE follow the law, and Curmie has no objection to their continued existence.  But the current structure and leadership cannot endure.

So…  Yes, there have been some violent criminals taken off the street by ICE.  Yes, some of the allegations against them are no doubt inflated.  But ultimately the choice is disjunctive: we fund and tolerate ICE or we don’t.  Captain Bonespurs and the Gravy Seals would make a pretty good band name, but it’s no way to run a free country.  Time to melt the ICE.

Curmie Doesn't Like ICE Unless It's Cooling His Drink

Thirty-ish years ago, when Curmie was in grad school, he had a paper accepted for a conference in Greece.  It turned out that one of the professors with a courtesy appointment in Theatre (his “home” was African and African-American Studies) was also going, so we planned to travel together, room together to save money, etc.  But our plans were altered by the fact that Curmie’s colleague was a Nigerian citizen.

How is that relevant?  He had a visa for Greece, after all.  (Curmie, being an American, didn’t need one.)  Well, we were scheduled to change planes in Germany.  That’s it: we’d never even leave the international terminal at the airport.  But Nigerians needed a “transit visa” (I think that was the term) to even set foot in the airport.  When we checked in at the airport in Kansas City, it took a little time to convince the airline staffer that all we were doing was changing planes, but everything seemed to have been worked out, and we boarded the plane for the first leg of our trip. 

Then a couple of armed security types showed up to escort Curmie’s companion from the plane.  That was embarrassing for Curmie, let alone for his travel partner, who actually wouldn’t be allowed to land in Germany.  That meant, among other things, that the first leg of his voyage would take him to a different American city than where Curmie was headed.  He could then make a connection through Amsterdam instead of Munich or Frankfurt (Curmie connected through one going to Greece and the other on the return trip; he can’t remember which was which); he’d get to Greece a couple hours after Curmie, but he could at least get there.  The kicker is that the border between Germany and the Netherlands is open: Curmie’s friend could have entered Germany from Amsterdam without as much as having to show his passport if he’d arrived by car or train or bus.

This is the part that’s relevant to this post.  There’s more to the story about the return trip, but that can wait for a future post.  What matters is the idiocy of the rules.  This time, the problem was with German regulations, but let’s just say that those folks don’t have a monopoly on this sort of stuff.  Yesterday happens to be the 10th anniversary of Curmie’s finally getting home at about 3 a.m. with a British exchange student who had been held up by Homeland Security.  You can read about that incident here.  There was another variation on the theme (that Curmie didn’t write about) a few years later.  And, of course, there were the two times Curmie himself got stopped trying to re-enter his own country.  Yeah, there’s a lot of stupid enforcement of stupid rules by stupid (but ever so self-important) people out there.  The Trump administration does not have a monopoly.

None is this attempt to deny the importance of border safety.  True, with the exception of some restrictions on Asian immigrants, prior to the Immigration Act of 1924 (barely a century ago), you entered the US pretty much by walking or driving across the border or landing at the dock in the harbor.  Trans-oceanic flights hadn’t happened yet, but there were passenger flights between Havana and a couple of destinations in Florida.  Still, it’s easy to understand why countries would want to be able to keep foreign bad actors out and to reserve citizenship rights to those who go through appropriate channels.  There are also legitimate national security issues involved: not enough to justify a lot of what’s happening now, but worthy of attention nonetheless.

Curmie has several foreign-born friends who went through the process, and are now US citizens.  A couple of them still have accents associated with their birthplaces; others could just as easily have been born in Omaha.  (And some of Curmie’s born-in-the-USA friends grew up with (legal) immigrant parents, learned a different language (generally Spanish) before English, and still haven’t completely lost the accent.)

What this post is about, then, is not about the legitimacy of ICE as an agency.  For the sake of argument, let’s take that as granted.  This is about conduct.  If ICE really attempted to go after “the worst of the worst,” as their apologists keep asserting, the level of criticism, from Curmie, at least, would be significantly reduced.  It’s tough to make an argument that we wouldn’t be better off without foreign-born murderers, thieves, rapists, and similar purveyors of perfidy, after all.  But in fact ICE is under strict orders not to pursue those violent criminals.  Stephen Miller, who’s really in charge of this show, wants numbers and obviously doesn’t care about anything else, including whether the people being harassed are American citizens, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to detain a grandmother or a hotel maid than a gangbanger who might shoot back.

ICE agents are universally bullies.  Hence the strutting around as if they are answerable to no one.  Hence the masks, which serve the dual purpose of being intimidating and protecting the identities of the real criminals: the agents themselves.  Bullies are all cowards, after all.  There have, of course, been numerous assaults and robberies committed by felons pretending to be ICE, too: if we’re not allowed to know who’s behind that mask (even a badge number), then anyone wearing a mask and carrying a weapon is protected.

Again, if ICE agents actually needed a warrant or even actual probable cause to detain someone; if they were more interested in serving the community by detaining actual illegal aliens rather than in playing demolition derby, crashing into cars for no other reason than that the driver is brown (no, SCOTUS, that isn’t enough, even if you idiots think it is); if they obeyed the law, themselves…  then, it would be a lot harder to argue against their presence.  But they don’t do any of that, and they’ve got the entire administration—Trump, Vance, Noem, Bondi…—ready to lie to protect their little Sturm Abteilung cosplayers.  Not really SA, though, of course: no one would ever use the term “elite” to describe these bozos.

ICE agents have no right to detain anyone who isn’t a legitimate suspect of an immigration-related offense or who isn’t actively interfering with their attempts to do their jobs.  Spraying tear gas or pepper spray into a non-violent crowd exercising their 1st Amendment rights or directly into the face of a protester isn’t acceptable.  Nor is intentionally crashing into someone’s car and dragging them out. (Oops, that was an American citizen.  They’re generally free to go after a few hours without food, water, toilet access, or legal counsel.  Don’t expect an apology, let alone restitution, of course.)  Photographing public ICE actions from a distance is perfectly legal, but don’t tell that to the goons on the ground or the prevaricating pols.  Oh, and giving a speech behind a podium displaying a quotation from a literal Nazi isn’t cool, either.

A decade ago, a career in ICE might have been an ethical course of action.  Anyone in ICE today is by definition an idiot or an asshole… and probably both. 

Melissa Howard and the Diploma That Wasn't

There are a couple of stories about primary elections in the American southeast that have caught Curmie’s attention this week. One is serious, and plays into larger issues of securing the electoral process. I might get to writing about that sometime soon, but that’s a complex and frankly rather terrifying issue. Sometimes, you just need a story best accompanied by raised eyebrows and an ample supply of popcorn.

Melissa Howard and her fake diploma.
That’s probably her real mom, though.

And that is why, Gentle Reader, the gods have provided us with Melissa Howard, an erstwhile candidate to represent the 73rd district in the Florida House.  A little over a week ago, FLA News Online reported that Howard’s claim to have graduated from Miami University in Ohio couldn’t be corroborated. The National Student Clearinghouse lists Ms. Howard, maiden name Melissa Marie Fox, as having attended Miami in the early 1990s, but not as having received a degree.

On the one hand, it is passing strange that a political candidate would lie about something so easily proved one way or the other, but it’s just as odd that a news agency would pay to verify so pedestrian a credential: a BS in Marketing isn’t exactly going to make an otherwise reluctant voter to suddenly take an interest in a candidate. It is true, of course, that FLA News is a conservative site, and Howard’s opponent in the Republican primary, Tommy Gregory, is a more loyal minion of the NRA and in general the more frothing-at-the-mouth reactionary of the two candidates to replace current Representative Joe Gruters, who decided to seek a seat in the State Senate rather than run for re-election to the House.

Anyway, when the story broke, Ms. Howard, of course, denied it. According to the FLA News article,

She offered to send yearbook pictures and even provided a picture of her at a graduation ceremony. When FLA News asked for the one document that would verify graduation–a diploma–Howard promised to send an electronic copy but did not. She claimed it was in her mother’s storage unit in Ohio. Her campaign consultant later said Howard did not graduate in 1994, she was one credit short and later completed it in 1996. However, the campaign was unable to provide a copy of her diploma, despite four days of repeated requests.

Still, there’s not really a story yet. Getting a copy of a transcript can take a few days, and FLA News may well have been less than an honest broker in the proceedings.

But the campaign completely overplayed its hand, as with this preposterous claim:

This is just another attempt by our desperate opponent, Tommy Gregory to lie about Melissa Howard. He lied about her being a Democrat in Ohio, which the Supervisor of Elections refuted. There’s nothing he won’t do or say to hurt Melissa or her reputation within the community. It’s shameful. Melissa graduated with a degree in marketing and we have requested her transcripts from the University and have been told they take 4-6 weeks to arrive.

Anyone who knows anything whatsoever about the process of getting a transcript can tell you that whereas three or four days might be a bit short (although Curmie was e-mailed an electronic copy of his grad school transcript in a matter of hours a couple of years ago), 4-6 weeks is ridiculously long. One week, maybe. Four to six weeks (oh, so conveniently enough time to get past the primary in a safe GOP district), not a chance.  Of course, that’s for a transcript as opposed to a diploma, but a transcript would certainly have served the purpose.

Former President Obama showed a prescience one might wish had been more on display during his actual term in office, in a speech in Johannesburg at a celebration in honor of Nelson Mandela’s 100th birthday.  He said:

We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders, where they’re caught in a lie, and they just double down and they lie some more…. Let me say, politicians have always lied, but it used to be if you caught ‘em lying, they’d be like, “aw, man…” Now they just keep on lying.

Obama’s remarks were widely and no doubt accurately interpreted as a not so thinly veiled excoriation of President Trump, whose administration has indeed reached levels of mendacity hitherto undreamed of even by the most dishonest of pols. But those comments certainly apply, as well, to the likes of small-time prevaricators like Melissa Howard.

What’s important here is that her falsified credentials were completely unnecessary. Ms. Howard is a successful businesswoman, and coming up one or two courses short of graduation (which appears to have been the case) from a quite reputable university is not an insignificant achievement, and, as Zac Anderson of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune notes in a follow-up essay, “If Howard had been honest about not graduating, her academic credentials likely would never have been an issue in the race. There are other state lawmakers without college degrees.”

Indeed, it’s quite easy to imagine a scenario whereby an honest misunderstanding could have happened:

—Where’d you go to college?

—Miami of Ohio.

—What was your major?

—Marketing.

And we now have a completely accurate and perhaps even completely honest exchange which leads to a completely reasonable but completely erroneous conclusion. Well, except for the fact that Miami doesn’t have a Marketing major... more on that later.

Even after the story broke, if she’d apologized, said she had come very close to graduating but struggled with that one course (or whatever), blamed her campaign’s website’s false claim on a miscommunication with a staffer, the chances that she’d have lost more than a handful of votes are pretty slim.

But Howard, to use President Obama’s phrase, doubled down, with headline-making results. Let’s face it, she’s the best-known failed state representative candidate in the country. Why? Because of the lie? No, as President Obama said, politicians lie. It’s just that in true Watergate fashion, the cover-up was worse than the crime. Howard stalled, claimed she’d made up the missing credits two years after finishing her full-time studies, asserted that her diploma was in her mom’s storage facility, then posed with Mom and Diploma in a stratagem that was nothing if not audacious. It even worked, briefly. FLA News Online even rescinded (as opposed to “retracted”) its story.

But then university officials became pro-active. Miami, as noted above, doesn’t offer a BS in Marketing; marketing students would receive a BS in Business. But Howard didn’t, in fact, major in Marketing, but in Retailing (why would anyone sane lie about this?), which would have led to a degree in Family and Consumer Sciences... assuming she actually got a degree. Moreover, one of the signatures on the obviously fallacious diploma was that of Robert C. Johnson, who was, alas, the Dean of the Graduate School, not of Business nor of Education and Allied Professions. Oops.

Still, Howard persisted, briefly, before finally admitting she’d lied about the degree, claiming, “It was not [her] intent to deceive or mislead anyone.” Wow. She accused journalists, her primary opponent, and at least by implication her presumptive alma mater of lying about her; she staged a trip to Ohio to prove an innocence that never existed; she ultimately fabricated a fake diploma, even somehow convincing her mom to pose with it. Curmie wonders what one must do to qualify as being intentionally deceptive on Ms. Howard’s home planet.

And yet she announced she was staying in the race! Joe Gruters, the Howard campaign treasurer and presumably same person who is the incumbent in that House seat, came up with one of the great political quotes of all time. First, he said he’d urge her step aside if arrested (!), but followed it up with this gem: “in the meantime it’s a slippery slope when you start asking candidates who lie to remove themselves from the ballot.” How, exactly, is anyone to take the Florida GOP seriously after that?

But, as they say in the late-night infomercials, Wait! There’s more! Of course, she lied about staying in the race, too. (Well, to be fair, it wasn’t really a lie, as she might just have been crazy enough to believe her own rhetoric.) But before she dropped out we also have an unnamed Republican political consultant saying this:

Common sense and normal politics would say she can’t survive it but everything seems to be upside down…. I wonder if people don’t feel anesthetized or insensate from [President Trump]. He set the bar so high or so low, depending on your point of view, that the stuff that used to matter doesn’t seem to matter.

When your own party’s mouthpieces start saying outright that the POTUS has so degraded normal standards of integrity that they don’t even matter anymore, it might be a portent of some serious introspection on the part of the handful of remaining Trump supporters who are otherwise intelligent adults.

Meanwhile, it strikes Curmie that there are three lessons to be learned from the Melissa Howard affair:

1. Telling the truth is better than lying.
2. When the hole is too deep, stop digging.
3. If you need a diploma forged, don’t hire someone over Craigslist..

The Debt and the Deficit Are Different Things

Curmie is no economist, but he is fundamentally honest, often to his detriment in a world overrun by self-aggrandizement, cowardice, and humorlessness.

By the first part of this statement, I do not mean to suggest that I know nothing of economics. I’ve taken only one college level course in economic theory, but that’s one more than most Americans have taken, and whereas I have no idea what a derivative credit default swap is, I do know that manipulation of those little rascals by the reckless and the unscrupulous was a cause of the global financial meltdown of 2008. I know that the idea that banks are “too big to fail” is a hoax propagated by politicians who know the origin of their re-election gravy train (cf. Iceland).

But what Curmie really understands about economics is the basic terminology: terms like deficit and debt, for example. In terms of governmental budgeting, a deficit occurs when, over a specified period of time, usually a fiscal year, more money is being spent than is being collected in revenue. Debt is the accumulated difference between what is owed and what is available. This blog piece is not about whether the debt or deficit ought to be bigger or smaller than they are. Rather, it’s about basic terms and basic honesty.

You see, Gentle Reader, both political parties in this country purport to care a great deal about these things: the fact that neither side really gives a shit about the bottom line, but only about how we get there, is to be ignored for the moment. There are some things about which honest people of all political stripes can agree: the deficit is going down, and the debt is going up. The Wall Street Journal reports that, “For the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the Congressional Budget Office estimates a deficit of $642 billion, compared with $1.087 trillion a year earlier and the smallest gap since 2008's $458.55 billion shortfall.” In other words, there’s roughly $400 billion less deficit and close to two-thirds of a trillion dollars more debt than a year ago.

And here is where we invoke the second half of Curmie’s self-declaration: the part about being honest. It will come as no surprise to you, Gentle Reader, that leaders on both sides of the aisle are lying through their teeth at every opportunity less than entirely forthright about this whole business. Whether lower deficits and/or debt are intrinsically good things hardly matters: both parties are pretending they are, so the Dems are pretending there’s no problem because the deficit is shrinking, and the GOP is doing their Chicken Little impersonation because the debt is increasing.

That may be more spin than substance on both sides, but at least it’s readily identifiable as political business-as-usual. We started getting into more problematic territory when the usual suspects actually start lying. Needless to say, I wouldn’t be writing this if we didn’t have someone from both sides doing just that.

We start, chronologically, with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), who taped an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News on August 2 that aired on August 4. Here’s the key section of these remarks: “What we are trying to do is fund the government and make sure also that we take away the kinds of things that are standing in the way of a growing economy, a better health care. And all the while keeping our eye focused on trying to deal with the ultimate problem, which is this growing deficit.” [Both here and below, the emphasis is mine.]

Needless to say, Wallace, good little Fox minion that he is, didn’t correct him. And the incompetent yahoos at PolitiFact even gave him a “Half True” because, you see, although Cantor’s statement is so much equine fecal matter now, current projections are that, absent changes to policy, the deficit will indeed start to increase three years down the road to a point still less than the status quo. The logic—and I use the word loosely—of the PolitiFact idiocracy would similarly suggest that although I am writing this piece at about 11:00 at night, if I say the sun is shining brightly through my window, it’s half true, since it might well be doing so tomorrow afternoon.

No, one of three things is true. I list them here in increasing likelihood of being the correct explanation: 1). It was an honest mistake, a slip of the tongue. 2). Cantor really is so stupid that he doesn’t know the deficit and the debt are different things. 3). He’s lying, and being rather smug about it.

On to third-term Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), who was pretending to care about veterans attending a discussion of veterans’ affairs in Shreveport. She “corrected” a veteran who expressed concern about the increasing national debt. According to retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Andre E. Dean, “She assured him that the United States did not have an increasing national debt. She then proceeded to tell all of us that for the past six to seven years the federal government had been continuously driving the federal debt down and reducing it, NOT increasing it.”

OK, this is even stupider that Cantor’s comment. For one thing, it’s even less likely to be a slip of the tongue—she was “correcting” a true statement. (Neither Cantor nor Landrieu have, as far as I can tell, admitted a mistake.) But not even the deficit has been falling for “six to seven years.” The biggest deficit was in FY2009, which was… um… four years ago. On the other hand, there’s a less likelihood that Landrieu was consciously lying, because—unlike Cantor—she really is stupider than snake spit, really is utterly inept, and really might not know that “debt” and “deficit” are different things (or that four is less than six, for that matter).

Whose offense was greater? Cantor, who is probably one of the half dozen most important figures in his party and ought to be held to a higher standard, or Landrieu, who apparently belittled a veteran while yammering nonsense that wouldn’t have been accurate even if she hadn’t confused her terms? Cantor, who was talking to a national television audience and should have been prepared to choose his words wisely, or Landrieu, who was picking a fight with a constituent?

I’ve gotta go with Landrieu’s as the more grievous gaffe. It’s OK if you disagree, though, Gentle Reader, because having Eric Cantor as the less mendacious, unethical, incompetent jackass in a scenario takes a little getting used to. But what’s really troubling is that whether the debt and deficit are actual crises, they’re certainly concerns, and the people we’ve got on the job to fix them are folks like these two.

We’re fucked.