Simon Heffer is about a week late to the party. Also he’s an idiot.

Simon Heffer writes a piece that he presumably was keeping a drawer somewhere next to his “Dave is weak” pile, and filled in with some current names that have been swirling around. 

Seriously man, Shirley Sherrod is so last week:

Last week, a twisted opponent put out a selectively edited video of a black Department of Agriculture official, Shirley Sherrod, apparently admitting discriminating against a white farmer. Mrs Sherrod had done nothing of the sort – either the discrimination or, therefore, the admission of it – but was immediately sacked, for fear that Fox News was about to broadcast the video. This outrageous act was followed by an even more outrageous apology by the president the next day – outrageous in that Mrs Sherrod was not immediately given back her job. In the White House there were, we are told, great mutual congratulations (to start with) that swift action had stopped this becoming “a story”. Well, it’s a story now, not least because it exemplifies the incompetence and disconnection of the administration. Mrs Sherrod’s husband was a leading civil rights activist and her father was murdered by white racists in 1965, so there is a resonance to this story that is causing discomfort.

I don’t know where to begin. Heffer attributes so much to the President in this paragraph, that I can only point out with some degree of irony, that the whole thing blew up in the middle of a high level diplomatic endeavour 

It’s also kind of ironic for a man who lauds Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood Speech to claim to give a crap about Mrs Sherrod’s civil right’s bona fides. In truth, Simon Heffer doesn’t care about Shirley Sherrod beyond her ability to be a cudgel with which he can attempt to beat a politician he hates. In an alternative universe where the White House But that’s just a paragraph he inserted in there to sound current, like topical references in an Osama bin Laden recording. Onto the economy:

This immediate proof of mismanagement adds to the cumulative feeling on so many other fronts that Mr Obama and his team simply don’t understand governance.

Yep. Just as Watergate brought down Nixon, so the actions of the Agriculture Secretary will see to Obama. As a piece of trivia, this is the same position held by the guy that President Bartlett ceremoniously leaves at the White House in case the entire capitol building is destroyed during the State of the Union Speech. 

Last month Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, warned America that without more care being taken it could have a Greece-style debt problem.

But Obama renominated Ben Bernanke. Given his propensity for mismanagement, this Bernanke fellow must be wrong? Also Simon, February is not last month. Hey, maybe this was written in March…

The president seemed to regard this warning as so self-evidently absurd that he quickly asked Congress for another $50 billion for various social projects.

I had to Google this – he means to “keep poor people on their health insurance and aid struggling state and local budgets”. Though I guess he used “various social projects” to belittle the idea of cash injection into a faltering economy and imply wasteful boondoggling avoid confusion. 

Last week, benefits for the long-term unemployed were extended for another six months at a cost of $34 billion.

I’m not sure how money into people’s pockets doesn’t cost cash money. But I guess Heffer’s solution would be for them to starve or something.

The health care programme is forecast to cost at least $863 billion.

Yes, healthcare costs were projected to rise along roughly the same lines without reform and the extra spend is minimal compared to glaring inequities of the status quo. Unlike Medicare Part D, this actually makes an effort to fund itself.

The total deficit this year is to be $1.47 trillion. America’s debt is likely to be $18.5 trillion by 2020, though it will be so low as that only if growth is maintained at 4 per cent: it is currently 3 per cent, and rocky.

I’m not sure where he gets the $18.5 trillion figure by 2020 from. That’s ten years from now. Ten years ago the federal budget was running a surplus, and if you’d said it’d be funding two wars, paying for a tax cut design to increase the deficit and funding an entirely new medical entitlement (the aforementioned Bush Medicare reforms) people would have called you crazy. In other words, ten years is a long time. Also, look at this graph, courtesy of Clusterstock:

But I’ve just spent thirty minutes on that one reprehensibly disingenuous and stupid paragraph. Maybe I’ll tackle the rest of his post tomorrow evening, but that task may require a bottle of whiskey and a loaded pistol. Or I could skip to the part where he calls Newt Gingrich a serious intellectual and assume that it was all just ridiculous Hefferian parody. 

Cross-posted at Something Quotable