Is there a worse spin doctor hack on this site than Pbrower?

[Alexander Hamilton]

No, of course not.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Oui... vous.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Hamilton is too new to have read J. J.'s posts.

[Associate Justice PiT]

Hamilton is too new to have read J. J.'s posts.

     Even though he is an Atlasian scholar versed in its complete history.

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Oui... vous.

[Alexander Hamilton]

Oui... vous.

How did your dumb arse get to be a mod?

[DariusNJ]

Was there really a need for this?

[Lunar]

YOURMOM

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Oui... vous.

How did your dumb arse get to be a mod?

DWTL Wannabe...........PM Mr. Leip........he asked him to be one.

[pbrower2a]

Hacks don't explain their methods. Hacks don't rely upon history as precedent. No perfect model of history exists -- but we ignore history at risk of being caught dumbfounded.

Every Presidency is different -- indeed, unique. Every Presidency operates in a different context of time.  Heck, even with essentially an unchanged personality of the President, each of FDR's terms was very different. 

I see history as partly cyclical. Almost every quarter-century or so the political climate changes dramatically. That climate is partly cultural, partly economic, and partly related to partisan rises and falls. Consider the time around 1980; the Consciousness "revolution" had played itself out as people got full of themselves while neglecting economic realities. Do you remember the psychedelic art, the platform shoes, the bell-bottom jeans, and the shag haircuts? They are silly now -- and archaic, arguably as archaic as 1870's culture today.  People were convinced that all that they had to do to succeed was to ride some technological tide...like personal computers, semiconductors, or new forms of entertainment, and they could question every manifestation of authority wherever it appeared.  Smart people forgot that the basics were just as essential as the glamorous new wave -- which meant that people ignored that doing things cheaply  but with complete dedication could do real good. People who had thought themselves too well-educated to be in anything other than the economic fast track had to learn to smile while flipping hamburgers even though they hated their lives. Men had to cut off their shag haircuts and put on three-piece suits to be file clerks. People had to learn to kiss up to bosses and recognize the legitimacy of hierarchies that preferred that people not understand the inner workings. People learned to accept trickle-down economics for lack of alternatives In essence, America re-learned the Golden Rule as expressed by the still-living oilman H. L. Hunt:

He who has the gold makes the rules!

Carter resisted the tide and drowned politically. Reagan rode the tide and succeeded.

That went on with little abatement for about a quarter century. George Herbert Walker Bush may have been an echo and not a choice. The slightly-liberal Bill Clinton tried to take away a few of the rough edges, but the rough edges prevailed, and they came back with full force with George W. Bush. But over time, the Reagan-era model for political and economic life became increasingly authoritarian, inegalitarian, mystical, anti-intellectual, high-risk, and ultimately corrupt.  Failures began to emerge from the model -- failures largely moral. People quit trusting the model to do anything other than enrich the rich. America seemed to become the sort of society in which success depended more upon being born into the Right Family than upon toil and personal dedication.

He who owns the gold made the rules, but the methods of enforcement of the gold-owners became increasingly harsh and the results get increasingly capricious and inhuman. The Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) for income (because survival generally depends upon income) for the United States has gone from one typical for Europe to one typical of Latin America. America has begun to look as if it has an economy based on plantations and share-cropping again. Poverty has become more commonplace -- just as executive compensation goes into sultan-like levels.

It's your guess as well as mine how the next few years go... but we are heading into something very different. 

[Hash]

Nann, but he's definitely up there. But you have worse, obviamente.

[Mint]

Hamilton is too new to have read J. J.'s posts.

That's all that needs to be said.

[JSojourner]

Lots worse.  Lots. 

[Mechaman]

Hacks don't explain their methods. Hacks don't rely upon history as precedent. No perfect model of history exists -- but we ignore history at risk of being caught dumbfounded.

Every Presidency is different -- indeed, unique. Every Presidency operates in a different context of time.  Heck, even with essentially an unchanged personality of the President, each of FDR's terms was very different. 

I see history as partly cyclical. Almost every quarter-century or so the political climate changes dramatically. That climate is partly cultural, partly economic, and partly related to partisan rises and falls. Consider the time around 1980; the Consciousness "revolution" had played itself out as people got full of themselves while neglecting economic realities. Do you remember the psychedelic art, the platform shoes, the bell-bottom jeans, and the shag haircuts? They are silly now -- and archaic, arguably as archaic as 1870's culture today.  People were convinced that all that they had to do to succeed was to ride some technological tide...like personal computers, semiconductors, or new forms of entertainment, and they could question every manifestation of authority wherever it appeared.  Smart people forgot that the basics were just as essential as the glamorous new wave -- which meant that people ignored that doing things cheaply  but with complete dedication could do real good. People who had thought themselves too well-educated to be in anything other than the economic fast track had to learn to smile while flipping hamburgers even though they hated their lives. Men had to cut off their shag haircuts and put on three-piece suits to be file clerks. People had to learn to kiss up to bosses and recognize the legitimacy of hierarchies that preferred that people not understand the inner workings. People learned to accept trickle-down economics for lack of alternatives In essence, America re-learned the Golden Rule as expressed by the still-living oilman H. L. Hunt:

He who has the gold makes the rules!

Carter resisted the tide and drowned politically. Reagan rode the tide and succeeded.

That went on with little abatement for about a quarter century. George Herbert Walker Bush may have been an echo and not a choice. The slightly-liberal Bill Clinton tried to take away a few of the rough edges, but the rough edges prevailed, and they came back with full force with George W. Bush. But over time, the Reagan-era model for political and economic life became increasingly authoritarian, inegalitarian, mystical, anti-intellectual, high-risk, and ultimately corrupt.  Failures began to emerge from the model -- failures largely moral. People quit trusting the model to do anything other than enrich the rich. America seemed to become the sort of society in which success depended more upon being born into the Right Family than upon toil and personal dedication.

He who owns the gold made the rules, but the methods of enforcement of the gold-owners became increasingly harsh and the results get increasingly capricious and inhuman. The Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) for income (because survival generally depends upon income) for the United States has gone from one typical for Europe to one typical of Latin America. America has begun to look as if it has an economy based on plantations and share-cropping again. Poverty has become more commonplace -- just as executive compensation goes into sultan-like levels.

It's your guess as well as mine how the next few years go... but we are heading into something very different. 

tl;dr

[Antonio the Sixth]

Pbrower has nothing to do with a hack. He's a formidable and intelligent user who always develops his arguments.

[muon2]

...Consider the time around 1980; the Consciousness "revolution" had played itself out as people got full of themselves while neglecting economic realities. Do you remember the psychedelic art, the platform shoes, the bell-bottom jeans, and the shag haircuts? They are silly now -- and archaic, arguably as archaic as 1870's culture today.  People were convinced that all that they had to do to succeed was to ride some technological tide...like personal computers, semiconductors, or new forms of entertainment, and they could question every manifestation of authority wherever it appeared. ...

This section strikes me as a bit odd. You seem to connect the 60's countercultural thinking with the 90's tech boom economy. They are in fact a full generation apart, speaking as someone who  lived through both. Semiconductors were just beginning as a new industry during the 60's and 70's and few of the hip culture had any recognition of where tech would take us. The PC didn't even come onto the market until after Reagan's election.

By the late 80's a new generation of entrepreneurs looked to a the model of a very few pioneers before them. In the 90's the new hip was tech, far removed from the old hip of bell-bottoms and psychedelics. It's appropriate to look at the young adults of every generation as a group prone to question authority. However, the individualistic tendencies in the tech-savvy generation were rooted in a different set of driving values the ethos from the young of the previous generation.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Pbrower may give the most one-sided, "glass is half full" analysis possible, but that's nothing on J. J. At least pbrower's posts are based facts, albeit very misleading ones. J. J. on the other hand used arguments full of factual errors that could be honest mistakes (assuming you had the intelligence of a 6th grader granted), yet it was rather obvious that he was aware it was incorrect information when writing it, and of course refused to never own up to it, even when it was quite blatant. Any attorney or accountant using the type of logical and mathematical nonsense he pulled out would've been disbarred/decertified long ago.

[Tender Branson]

Probably myself, according to East Coast Republican ...