Our Intelligent Discourse

I was all ready to write a post about how fun, content-free issues like how Obama is “slashing Medicare and using the money to pay for Obamacare!” are taking over this election cycle, while truly important issues are being forgotten. For example, the fact that MF Global is likely going to evade criminal charges for stealing customer money. Which, when you think about it, is truly, truly scary. If I go into a 7-11 and take a hundred bucks from the till, I’m going to jail. If an investment banks steals hundreds of millions of dollars and blames “chaos and porous risk controls”, they get of scot-free! Gee, I wonder what the incentive is in these cases: investing money to get a return is hard, stealing is easy. Decisions, decisions.

The fact that neither the Obama administration or Romney/Ryan have plans to stop Wall Street from running amok with no consequences is a huge deal. And yes, Ryan does say he would break up “too big to fail”, but it’s questionable how he would actually do this. I’m not holding my breath.

Those issues are the important ones, and I was all ready to take everybody to task for ignoring it. Then, we get this beauty. And that about does it: how can we possibly have an intelligent discussion about anything when we have people who believe that rape doesn’t cause pregnancy? A person running for the U.S. Senate, no less?

I’m not sure how you even address that.