Still Sinking

Every few weeks, the unemployment numbers come bubbling forth from the malarial swamp that greed and incompetence made out of our economy, and hands are wrung, brows are furrowed, and forelocks are tugged until they reach well past the kneecaps. Sympathetic grunting is heard all over cable television, and the low whirring of political calculus soon even drowns that out. And what do all these reactions have in common?

They're all performance pieces by people who still have jobs.

[...]

People who have jobs — like pundits and congresscritters — are turning rude and stupid, blaming the poor for their poverty, casting the long-term unemployed as government-addled wastrels of the public fisc, and portraying the sick and uninsured as victims of their own short-sightedness. Allowing these tactics to succeed is a recipe for political catastrophe. We are all in this together. If we don't realize that, and if we don't focus our unified dissatisfaction on the correct targets, the failed elites that Chris Hayes so ably eviscerates in his new book, we deserve what fresh hell waits down the road another month, when the numbers will suck again.
  Charlie Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.