Banality

Evil.  Here's the sort of thing we normally think of when we hear the word:

These days, I'm thinking of something else.  Here's what I think of these days when I hear the word "evil:"

Recognize her?  It's Cokie Roberts, child of inside-the-beltway privilege, and the poster girl for horse-race politics in which everything is personality, nothing has anything to do with the issues.

Well, I made a big mistake yesterday.  They took Stephanie Miller off the air so they could have a fourth right wing radio station in Los Angeles (with no left leaning ones,) so driving to work I made the bad decision to turn on to that bastion of "liberalism," NPR.  There, I had the experience of listening to Cokie Roberts explain the recent  CBO report on Obamacare to the American people.  Here's what she said:

“Well, because the Congressional Budget Office said that the law would result in the loss of two million full-time workers over seven years. That’s a tough one to spin. Now what the Democrats are saying is ‘Look, you know, if people stop working and collect Social Security too, I mean this gives them the opportunity not to be in a job that they don’t want or to have a second job. They can spend more time with their children.’ I mean that’s sort of the talking points you are hearing from Democrats. But that’s a tough one because anything that says ‘jobs go away’ is not something that’s likely to be very popular no matter how sophisticated it is.”

Now, here is what was common knowledge within hours of the release of the report-  you know it, I know it and Cokie Roberts knows it too:   First of all, the report did not say that two million jobs or workers would be lost over seven years.  Second, the Democrats have nothing to spin.  It is the Republicans and Cokie Roberts herself who are "spinning" this story, openly lying to the American people about what the report had to say.

Let me be clear about what the report actually said:  many people who were currently being held in virtual slavery to their employers, afraid to lose their medical coverage by leaving their jobs, would be free to make a decision to change jobs or cut their work hours- to retire early, perhaps, or to start a business of their own, or maybe even to paint pictures or write a novel if they choose, without being afraid that they had signed their death warrant by doing so.  Those jobs- perhaps 2 million- are not going away.  In today's world of not enough work to go around, they will now be available to someone else.  People should be cheering in the street at this unexpected benefit of Obamacare.  Instead, Cokie Roberts and people like her are collaborating with Republicans to spread one more malicious lie about Obamacare damaging the economy.

And I don't even want to hear anyone suggesting that Cokie is too stupid to understand this.  She has demonstrated over and over again through the years that she is abysmally ill-informed, but no one is that dumb.  She is working as hard as she can to delude the American people into once more stabbing themselves in the back, so that rich people like the ones who pay a fat salary to a person with absolutely no sign of competence, like Cokie Roberts, can continue to work their will on us.

Here's another picture:

You may very well not recognize her.  Her name is Hannah Arendt, and she invented the phrase "the banality of evil," the notion that evil isn't largely carried out by mosters like Diablo, but by so many people that just don't care what damage they do to others, as long as they do okay for themselves.  Cokie Roberts is one of those evil people, and Cokie and those like her are destroying us just as fast as they can.  And don't even pretend that they don't know what they are doing.  It's fine with them as long as their paychecks don't bounce.