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From Jonathan Gruber to Kim Kardashian: Why American Leadership Is Broken
ABC ^ | November 17, 2014 | Matthew Dowd, founder of ListenTo.Us, ABC News analyst and special correspondent

Posted on 11/18/2014 1:16:43 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife

"....Kim Kardashian, a celebrity by virtue of having accomplished not a thing substantive, but having been an expert at using a voyeuristic culture to make herself well-known, decided to sit for nude photos, apparently to make sure she stayed in the limelight. Did she do this to raise awareness about women's body image issues? Did she get nude photos taken to highlight the abuse of animals for expensive fur or clothing? Of course not, to both of these. At a time when women want to be taken seriously and enter into leadership positions,Kardashian apparently merely wanted continued fame and fortune for their own sake.

Jonathan Gruber,the MIT professor and adviser for the Obama administration on health care policy,seemed to claim in videotaped comments from 2013 that it was OK to play hide the ball with the public, with assumptions made about "the stupidity of the American voter" in the process of getting the Affordable Care Act passed. He may as well have quoted Machiavelli by getting the health care reform accomplished by any means necessary because he and others knew that it was the right thing for an ignorant public. When asked about his comments in a television interview,Gruber said, "I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately."

In election after election in the last 10 years, Americans keep saying the means of governing and leadership is broken. Citizens across the country know leadership is desperately needed to accomplish some big ends in the United States, at this time. However,they know that the only way this can be done is by changing the means of governance. Once the means are fixed, the good ends will flow naturally and inevitably. Americans,while divided on some of the answers in public policy, are united on the dysfunction they see in leadership nationally......

(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: gruber; media; msm; socialmedia; statemedia
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Kim Kardashian is a well paid social media exhibitionist.

Professor Gruber is a well paid, elitist slight-of-hand exhibitionist.

ABC News analyst and special correspondent Matthew Dowd (author of this drivel) is a well paid "insider" who bragged about bedding a Kennedy.

But "American leadership is broken?"

It is to laugh.

Yes! Don't think about what this administration is doing to the country, the world, just relax and think about Kim Kardashian, a silly MIT loudmouth and a washed-up Louisiana Senator.

More on Matthew Dowd's wild ride.

Nothing to see here that we should tie to Obama, just the usual "squirrel!" journalism that brings nothing to the discussion, contributes nothing to the national dialogue but fills the pages of ABC News.

1 posted on 11/18/2014 1:16:44 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: All

A sample of the discussion following Dowd’s piece:

” Tin Tin • 4 hours ago

America cannot make a credible claim that it is more moral than ISIS.”


2 posted on 11/18/2014 1:39:44 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

classic equivocation by MSM’s ABC.

:-(


3 posted on 11/18/2014 1:40:21 AM PST by SteveH
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

Federal supported schools have been dumbing down America for decades...

Its only a wonder that America has become STUPID by those that do not want to know..

Civics and american history are no longer taught as non electives..
Sooo they are not taught.. even if they are taught..

And any real challenging subjects are degraded or gold bricked..
Kim Kardashian is a SYMPTOM...


4 posted on 11/18/2014 1:46:15 AM PST by hosepipe (" This propaganda has been edited (specifically) to include some fully orbed hyperbole.. ")
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

Kim K....has zero talents. No singing, no acting, no fashion sense, no sports ability, no political stance, no business sense, nothing. But the same can be said for Paris Hilton, and at least fifty other characters who now appear as some reality star or imaginary American.

Gruber? He’s a Harvard grad who knows how American society thinks (or doesn’t think)....so he helps political folks achieve perfect harmony by designing various programs which achieve the results required. He could probably design a program to convince most Americans to pay an internet tax, in the idea that it’d achieve some type of fairness across the nation....without any definition of fairness attached to the gimmick.

We’ve had characters around like him in US politics for 200 years and they aren’t going away. The space program was a gimmick. The drug war is a gimmick. The social security and wide dispersal program of today is a gimmick. The school lunch program requiring federal help to function is a gimmick. The Keystone episode is a gimmick. The gay marriage agenda is a gimmick.

If anything...maybe we’ve awoken from this slumber to ask ourselves what else did the Gruber-crowd think we were stupid-enough on?


5 posted on 11/18/2014 1:47:46 AM PST by pepsionice
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To: pepsionice

“If anything...maybe we’ve awoken from this slumber to ask ourselves what else did the Gruber-crowd think we were stupid-enough on?”

We have not awoken and we won’t awaken. Everybody just looks at their fellow countrymen and agrees with Gruber about American’s stupidity. It never even crosses most of American’s minds that he’s taking about them, too. And the one’s insulted about his and the government’s elitist attitudes have no intention of doing anything about it. Why? Because, insulted by it or not, they do believe these people really are the elite.


6 posted on 11/18/2014 2:21:01 AM PST by jacknhoo (Luke 12:51. Think ye, that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, no; but separation.)
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To: jacknhoo

The recent mid-term (and democrat drubbing - and very close races in democrat strongholds) shows that Americans who vote (and many who just didn’t care to show up) are awake.

Gruber’s “revelations” expose how leftist elites (who see themselves as our betters) work behind the scenes. And the exposure of his YouTube videos (and the reluctant, subsequent digging through his history) shows how the state media carries the water for those working to drive the country into European socialism.


7 posted on 11/18/2014 2:28:42 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

OMG....Dowd and Maria were having an AFFAIR Before the news of Arnold’s affair!!! I always thought Dowd was GAY!!!!


8 posted on 11/18/2014 2:30:26 AM PST by Ann Archy (ABORTION....... The HUMAN Sacrifice to the god of Convenience.)
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To: jacknhoo

Immoral Kim hasn’;t cost us any money or freedom.....Obamacare has cost us a ton of both, money AND Freedom!! We will NEVER get either back UNLESS the New Congress STOPS THIS MADNESS!!


9 posted on 11/18/2014 2:32:32 AM PST by Ann Archy (ABORTION....... The HUMAN Sacrifice to the god of Convenience.)
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To: jacknhoo

Gruber was even talking the Senators...knowing full well they were too stupid to grasp the whole deal. That ought to be a four-star campaign ad in 2016 for the next senate episode.


10 posted on 11/18/2014 2:40:20 AM PST by pepsionice
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To: pepsionice
.....The space program was a gimmick.....

No. It gave Ronald Reagan the club that he needed to beat the USSR with.

"......Some view the Apollo Moon landings solely as a “stunt” – a demonstration of American technological prowess. In this view, the lunar landings achieved little except for global public relations. While this aspect of the program is true, it certainly is not the entire story. The real value of Apollo was that it demonstrated to the Soviets both our technical abilities and our national resolve. A human lunar mission is an enormously difficult technical undertaking, something that the Soviets themselves had seriously attempted and failed to accomplish. That failure, underscored by America’s success, led the Soviets (and other aggressive regimes) to conclude that Americans could achieve any technological goal that they set as their goal. A decade later, to defend America and our allies against nuclear annihilation, President Ronald Reagan announced an effort to develop a shield in space. Many of the same American intelligentsia who thought Apollo to be “silly” loudly proclaimed the idea of a ballistic missile defense system as ludicrous and unworkable, calling it “Star Wars” and labeling Reagan an out-of-control “foreign policy cowboy.” However, the Soviets took “Star Wars” development very seriously. In fact, an opportunity for a major breakthrough in nuclear arms control was missed at the Reykjavik summit in 1986 solely because Reagan would not trade away SDI for a proposed elimination of Soviet nuclear missiles. With prospects of Reagan’s “Star Wars” neutralizing their nuclear arsenal, the Soviets commenced on a self-imposed race to develop their own missile defense system, which in turn sped up their nation’s eventual fall into financial collapse.

Why would the Soviets have insisted on such a provision at Reykjavik if SDI were merely some cowboy fantasy? Tribbe completely misses this concrete, substantive benefit of Apollo – American technical credibility and the power it wielded. In his mind, although the Apollo “stunt” was successful, it had no lasting effect on the state of the Cold War and even less effect on long-term spaceflight (to which it was only incidentally relevant). In fairness, this is a common perception in the current academic community; I simply find it a pity that someone who has studied this period so intently could miss a development of such an obvious significance......" Source

11 posted on 11/18/2014 2:48:40 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

These idiots still talk messianic, like a need for a leader to take back America, when it should be a curbing of executive powers and business regulations which would do it.


12 posted on 11/18/2014 3:00:05 AM PST by lavaroise (A well regulated gun being necessary to the state, the rights of the militia shall not be infringed)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

The original space program....saying since Sputnik launched....we needed to compete, and we had to have a guy on the moon by the end of the decade....was a gimmick. I agree, there’s tons of technology gained from the episode, and things we have today only because the program jump-started technology development across the US. But it’s all because we engaged in a totally different direction out of the early 1960s, via a gimmick.

As for Reagan’s Star Wars? He brought the right people into the room, who laid out enough of a project that would require massive gov’t funding, with the end-result being the Soviets being out-bluffed at the poker table, and figuring they’d maxed out on military spending. He was right...thus ending the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and first-world status of USSR. The value of the gimmick did pay off, in this regard, I agree.

I think in the long term....this single episode opens the door for people to continually ask now...am I stupid enough to believe this Senator, this President, or even this TV news commentator? The President got his successful gimmick because he rode the news media wave all the way onto the beach, with a really nice-looking surfboard. At this point, there’s nothing much to believe in anything he says, period. He’s beyond lame-duck status. We might even have to invent a totally new word to fit a guy in this position.


13 posted on 11/18/2014 3:06:13 AM PST by pepsionice
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

The assumption libtards make erroneously is right there for all to see. “The GOOD that feral gummint can do”. Our Founders knew better. See George Washington about fire.


14 posted on 11/18/2014 3:08:54 AM PST by wastoute (Government cannot redistribute wealth. Government can only redistribute poverty.)
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To: jacknhoo

The answer I got from talking about how Gruber thinks we are stupid is: “well nobody gives a fck...”

I was shocked but it is true. But why is it true? The person telling me that is of the selfish traitor type.

People do not care because their selfishness as lead them to look no further than the next paycheck relationship and comforts, and not have this bothered by important issues.

The cowardice and treachery is uncanny. If these types were cops in France, they would belong to Vichy.


15 posted on 11/18/2014 3:09:47 AM PST by lavaroise (A well regulated gun being necessary to the state, the rights of the militia shall not be infringed)
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To: Ann Archy
"Immoral Kim hasn’;t cost us any money or freedom.....Obamacare has cost us a ton of both, money AND Freedom!!" Agree. To those who are hating on Kim; she's a net revenue generator. She and her family are self sustaining and as far as I know none are on the dole. The Kardashian family is a small business which employes people and/or their services. Probably pay a bunch of taxes. Sooo, be nice to Kim and the Kardashian's 😀 .....
16 posted on 11/18/2014 3:15:26 AM PST by snoringbear (E.oGovernment is the Pimp,)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

We can all agree that the state of American media is dismal, and ABC deserves much of the blame for that state.


17 posted on 11/18/2014 5:23:20 AM PST by Pietro
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To: Cincinatus' Wife
The principle quality of a Leader is to inspire. America's leaders of today lack that quality.
18 posted on 11/18/2014 6:56:48 AM PST by 2001convSVT (Going Galt as fast as I can.)
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To: Cincinatus' Wife

Gruber had BOTH Obama and Romney’s ear.

We are so screwed.


19 posted on 11/18/2014 6:59:04 AM PST by dfwgator
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To: snoringbear

It’s the people who care about the Kartrashians that are the problem, just as the problem is the people who vote for Obama.


20 posted on 11/18/2014 6:59:49 AM PST by dfwgator
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