PEORIA -- Set your DVRs and VCRs. The best Sunday morning TV talk show, also on Saturday mornings, is Up with Chris Hayes.
It plays on MSNBC at the awful hours of 6-8 a.m. Saturday, and 7-9 a.m. Sunday (central time) -- thus the recording devices. Or you can watch it on the website.
The Jan. 1 show was especially good, as a fresh panel of sharp authors, not the same old politicians or hacks, discussed the conservative mind -- based on a new book.
They answered an important question: why conservatives are deficit hawks, and insist on deficit reduction above all, and especially above job creation.
Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman insists that debt doesn't matter, but never says why the conservatives insist on it, just that it's bad economic policy.
So here's the answer, according to the Up panel: conservatives see debt as a moral failing, symbolic of or akin to 'sins' of modernity they don't like, such as sex, abortion, homosexuality, drugs, even crime.
On the national and international level that's not accurate or true, but feelings and impressions are what matter in politics, not truth.
So they push for debt reduction over all, and never mind the fallout. Austerity from spending cuts punishes the sinners, in their unconscious or even conscious view.
Crazy? you bet. But real. It could saddle us with a GOP government that actually destroys the economy and brings all of us down with it.
Anyway, watch Up for the most provocative weekend talk show on TV.
-- Elaine Hopkins
1/4/12: Here's an emailed comment from Ed Dentino:
Crazy like foxes are the right words for these conservatives. Wonder why they don't complain about the Foreign Trade Deficit; which has averaged 30-60 billion a month for years. The Foreign Trade Deficit is a very real form of debt and taxation for that matter. Wealth that's left America likely to never return. I think it's because the foreign trade deficit lets the rich get richer and everyone else poorer. With the net effect that the rich are more easily able to control American society. Scary and a real threat to democracy.
Posted by: Steve Waterworth | January 02, 2012 at 08:22 PM