Confidence game

There's a knowledge debt that swamps the national debt:

What this means is that if you’re worried about the US fiscal position, you should not be focused on this year’s deficit, let alone the 0.07% of GDP in unemployment benefits Bunning tried to stop. You should, instead, worry about when investors will lose confidence in a country where one party insists both that raising taxes is anathema and that trying to rein in Medicare spending means creating death panels.

But it's condescension for me to call raving lunatic wingnuts, well, raving lunatic wingnuts:

The truly sad thing, though, is the way much news reporting goes along with the condescension meme. That’s Waldmann’s point. You really, really might have expected that the Bush experience would give reporters pause — that they might at least ask themselves, “Isn’t it my job to ask whether a politician is right, as opposed to how he comes across?”

Y'know, when they actually grapple with reality, I'll stop condescending. Until then (never?), all they deserve is condescension. And they claim they're really big on people getting what they deserve.