Why are pundits so ass-stupid?

I was watching some blowhard pundit on some blowhard propaganda outlet masquerading as a cable "news channel" this morning, and the guy said something so infuriatingly dumb, so astonishingly out of touch, so... words fail... that I just had to blog about it. Before I get to what the guy actually said, let me give some background on why the pundits are such buffoons.

Today's moronic pundit comment is nothing unusual, nothing new. The pundits have pretty much been wrong about everything since, roughly, the First Gulf War back in '91 when when news in America stopped being news and started being an instrument of Military-Prison-Industrial brainwashing. The USSR had fallen and there was no longer a need for the USA to even have the pretense of a free press. The press was bought lock, stock, and barrel by...

... the 1 percent.

And they have done the bidding of the 1 percent ever since, selling lie after lie after lie. And, sadly, many of us bought it.

People went along with their stupid, evil, highly profitable wars -- one right after the next: Gulf War !, Serbia, the War on Terror, Gulf War II, not to mention the absurd and never-ending War on (some) Drugs.

People went along with their crazy ideas about deregulation, taxation and finance, their insane notion that taxing un-earned income at a lower rate than earned income was somehow fair or healthy from a macroeconomic perspective. (Seriously -- if you don't believe people were brainwashed, let this sink in: Un-earned income -- the kind that accounts for most of the 1 percenters' income -- is taxed at a much lower rate than earned income -- the kind you get in your paycheck if you're lucky enough to have one.)

People went along with their stolen elections.

People went along with all kinds of ridiculous theories, one right after the other.

Why wouldn't we go along with it? It's what all the pundits were saying in one massive 24-7-365 echo chamber of ignorance and outright disinformation. The voices of reason were drowned out and marginalized in a concerted effort to stupidify us and let our wealth and our democracy be stolen right out from under us. And it worked.

An aside: You know what we need? We need a War on Ignorance. A great many of us have been made ignorant by Gush Liebaugh and the vast universe of Beavis and Butthead talk radio hosts, the studly studs and honey hoes of teevee news, the reasonable-sounding Pentagon mouthpieces at National Propaganda Radio, the frothy fools of Fox.

So listen to me now and listen to me well, you moron makers of the press:

The jig is up. We're on to you.

So anyway, what was this particular pundit that got me started this morning saying? He was saying that the Occupy Wall Street protestors have the wrong target. We should focus our ire on Washington, not Wall Street, since it's Washington that's racking up deficits.

First of all, this isn't about deficits, you idiot, but that's not the main point I want to make.

We tried airing our grievances to our representatives. Remember when literally millions of us marched all over this country to stop the totally illegal invasion of Iraq? There's your deficit right there, you moron. That little misadventure has cost us a few trillion by now, and Iraq hadn't done a damn thing to us when we invaded them. Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and all, but he didn't take three trillion bucks out of our wallets. Washington D.C. did. They did it after we called, wrote letters, marched.

Most of us were against the TARP. We were quite active and vocal about it. Where did it get us? Oh -- right, they gave trillions to the banksters, then tried to get us to believe that it's been paid back magically. The banks that had teetered on the brink of collapse somehow came up with hundreds of billions of dollars in 18 months without any significant changes to the business plans that bankrupted them. Yeah, sure...

Quite clearly, the real power is not in Washington D.C. That war was going to happen no matter what We the People thought, and most of us knew it was bullshit despite the clever come-ons the propaganda machine fed us about it. That money was going to be handed to the banksters that trashed our economies no matter what we had to say about it. So fuck you if you think we're stupid enough to waste our energy trying to change your bought-and-paid-for politicians.

The kings of finance are the perfect focus of this ire. They are the ones who robbed us of our wealth. More importantly, they are the ones who robbed us of our democracy. They are the ones who brought shame and bankruptcy on our country with their illegal wars. Sure, the politicians helped sell the wars and signed off on them, but they are not the ones ultimately responsible. D.C. politicians are just the sleazy car salesmen, not the CEO who knows he manufactured a bunch of lemons and offers incentives to the sleazy salesmen to move them off the lots.

While I am sure that the pundits and propagandists and banksters would love it if we did take the heat off Wall Street by focusing on their greaseball marionettes in D.C., that is not happening. Like I said, the jig is up.

Now to answer the (somewhat) rhetorical question posed about 1000 words ago, "Why are the pundits so ass-stupid?" It is elementary. They are ass-stupid for the same reason the politicians are corrupt: They are paid very well for it.

The 1 percent need for the 99 percent to be divided so that we're easy to conquer. They need to keep us arguing about patently absurd notions such as the idea that un-earned income should be taxed at a lower rate than earned income. They pay the pundits and politicians to stoke the flames of ignorance and division.

And that, in a nutshell, is why the pundits are so ass-stupid and why Washington D.C. is not the right focus for these protests.