◼ Did the entire U.S. media really fall for the imaginary dead girlfriend of a star football player? Did the president of the United States really announce 23 executive orders by reading out the policy views of carefully prescreened grade-schoolers ("I want everybody to be happy and safe")? Clearly, these vicious rumors were merely planted in the foreign press to make the United States appear ridiculous. - Mark Steyn/OC Register
Meanwhile, hot from the fiscal-cliff fiasco, the media are already eagerly anticipating the next in the series of monthly capitulations by Republicans, this time on the debt ceiling. While I was abroad, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a Harvard professor of constitutional law, a prominent congressman and various other American eminencies apparently had a sober and serious discussion on whether the United States Treasury could circumvent the debt constraints by minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin. Although Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider called the trillion-dollar coin "the most important fiscal policy debate you'll ever see in your life," most Democratic pundits appeared to favor the idea for the more straightforward joy it affords in sticking it to the House Republicans. No more tedious whining about spending from GOP congressmen. Next time Paul Ryan shows up in committee demanding to know about deficit reduction plans, all the Treasury Secretary has to do is pull out a handful of trillion-dollar coins from down the back of the sofa and tell him to keep the change....
Do you ever get the feeling America's choo-choo has jumped the tracks? Joe Weisenthal says that the trillion-dollar coin is the most serious adult proposal put forward in our lifetime, "because it gets right to the nature of what is money." As Weisenthal argues, "We're still shackled with a gold-standard mentality where we think of money as a scarce natural resource that we need to husband carefully." Ha! Every time it rains it rains trillion-dollar pennies from heaven. I believe Robert Mugabe made a similar observation on Jan. 16, 2009, when he introduced Zimbabwe's first one hundred-trillion-dollar bank note. In that one dramatic month, the Zimbabwean dollar declined from 0.0000000072 of a U.S. dollar to 0.0000000003 of a U.S. dollar. But that's what's so great about being American. Because, when you're American, one U.S. dollar will always be worth one U.S. dollar, no matter how many trillion-dollar coins you mint. Eat your heart out, you Zimbabwean losers. As Joe Weisenthal asks, what is money? Money is American: everybody knows that....
Memo to John Boehner and Paul Ryan: No one will take you seriously until you find some photogenic second-graders and read out their cute letters. "I want everybody to be happy and safe and fithcally tholvent." They may have to practice.
◼ The Authenticity of Fake - Sultan Knish
In a culture where everything is really fake, exposing the few people who seem virtuously really is an industry. The media deconstruction process establishes once and for all that all families are bad and that all virtuous people are fake. Except the virtuous people being profiled by them tomorrow and destroyed the week after that.
The more fake the culture is, the more of a sucker it is for fake authenticity....
Politics thrives on that same fake authenticity. Mitt Romney, a fake authentic politician of the old school, back when politicians were working with magazine covers, snapshots and a 30 second clip, couldn't compete against the truly fake Barack Obama, who in truly modern media style doesn't just fake 30 seconds or 30 minutes in front of the camera, but fakes his entire life going back decades.
Obama is truly fake. He is authentically unreal. There is absolutely nothing to him. If you take away all the work that was done to make him famous, there would be nothing there. And that is exactly why he is the perfect avatar for the media age.
