Joe Nocera's Cancer

NY Times Vet Recounts His Insular World: Didn't Meet Any Republicans Until Well Into Adulthood

“ Growing up in heavily Democratic Providence, R.I., in the 1950s, it was hard not to absorb the values of the Democratic Party — the party of Roosevelt, as my parents often reminded me, who had gotten the country through the Great Depression. My parents and their friends believed in a progressive income tax, in the importance of unions (my parents were public schoolteachers), and in a government that helped those who couldn’t help themselves. It wasn’t until I moved to Washington after college that I got to know any Republicans. Not until I was nearing 30, and living in Texas, did I see how conservative most of the country truly is. Joe Nocera states that he learned that  it was important for liberals to criticize various wrongheaded tenets of liberalism.  He once wrote a story about out of control teacher unions that was so strong that his teacher mother complained to the editor.  "I came to see myself as a pragmatist who favored common-sense solutions over ideology," says Joe. So this newest New York Times OP-Ed writer will act as a counter balance to the paper's band of left-wingnuts?  No. Good intentions will not, can not, overcome a life of Libthink.  “ Then came the financial crisis. I like to joke that there’s nothing like a good financial crisis to turn you into a liberal. But it’s not really a joke. The more I learned the back story that led to the crisis, the more horrified I became. The lack of regulation and oversight of Wall Street and the big subprime companies like Countrywide, driven by the ideology of deregulation, was thoughtless and irresponsible. The refusal of bank regulators to stop subprime abuses bordered on the criminally negligent ... That anger reached its apex on Tuesday, when I wrote a column comparing the Tea Party Republicans to terrorists. ” Sorry Joe. Liberalism is harder to treat than pancreatic cancer. (See story below, Joe)