Rand Paul: Mr. Macro Insensitivity

One has to really admire U.S. House of Representative Rand Paul for telling anyone willing to listen that anyone receiving unemployment benefits past 26 weeks is some kind of malingerer, because living that way is so much fun. Shows real gumption, what some might call gall, yes, but inspired.

He's a real little Lord Fauntleroy. Truly profound, academically speaking. He's the Tea Party's appointed "intellectual," as he speaks from the mighty heights and tipsy perspective of a Kentucky bourbon-sucking state, the security of having a politician dad. He's as streetwise as a college professor might expected to be as he comes from the embryonic magic bubble of the elite, asking the suddenly impoverished to avoid the disservice of having the too-big-to fail economies of a global catastrophe, a world, basically, gone cash-free, to pull themselves with their own bootstraps and ignore the facts of life, just as he has.

As an politician, which now means infotainer, he's a natural. He goes up on the stage of one-thousand points of light; and when he speaks, no doubt seeking donations for the cause of the now-launched 2014 political season, he has become one of the first great voices for the Tea Party, ah, Libertarian, bellweather: a kind of gift that keeps on giving.

That polls fails fail to reflect this gift, this talent for saying completely insensitive things bound to ignite a far greater opposing public outcry ... that this gift isn't reflected in the current polling, which lives only in the moment (happily, there is nothing to vote on today) should come as no surprise.

Glitch in "Obamacare"? No worries, folks. Concerns on that score eleven months from now depend upon the rolling storm of the moon, the sun, the stars. Want to overload the judicial system with a giant class action lawsuit over surveillance society, good luck! Both ex-presidents Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Richard Nixon will need to be listed as defendants for a whole world hell-bent on listening in for any signatures of terror and fear. Surely, cutting the unemployment checks for millions of Americans will get the radical right plenty more votes. Nobody ever remembers cold treatment like that over the Holidays. Sure. Sure. Sure.

Like I say: The gift that keeps on giving.

Because it's so much fun having your livelihood jerked around by a bunch of sycophants of corporate-nation state privilege. It's so nice to be among the floating decoys amid the big bad karmanomic sea of the unfortunate, trying to keep your sanity intact while these walking historic aberrations with full medical and economic armor, silvery, gold and intact with their boquets of red, white and blue, arguing "No, we don't need to change, you do." And if the luckless earth kidnapped by a cold-blooded band of lawless lawyers in Congress won't inspire you, the urgency of impending homelessness, maybe even a wish to die, will certainly calm you down and make you a prime candidate for that job that doesn't exist.

It's so nice to look forward to that once-a-week call to your state's make-sure-your-not-a-deadbeat zombie unemployment hotline. Which says it's a federal prison waiting for you if you do not answer honestly that you sucked, again, this week at life, that you applied for at least three paying tasks which your are, quite obviously, being such a loser, bad at.Your personal responsibility for the global war on terror, the international bank bailout, and yes, the Kennedy assassinations, Reaganomics (I and II) being so visibly acute. You, as children, should have known better. It's so fun hoping that, since you can't afford a land line anymore, you have to stand for three hours at the last pay phone in America in some dirt-poor apartment complex, your ear burning red from the Depression era jazz on hold, to speak to an actual human being about WTF!

With any luck, a distant dog bark won't create the incorrect signal when you are on that telephone line, because that might either create a sonic bump causing a sound that is the exact opposite answer of your sad situation, or, perhaps, with an even stronger sound, perhaps a passing jet noise, the need to start over, your jittery self an emotional wreck as you stand there, alone, by the phone.

It's so nice to go month after month to the internet to see if some kind job creator can lift you out of your disgrace, Mr. Big Bootstraps, since for a long time you had been wondering if your e-mail account had been locked inside some kind of cyber-bubble, your hundreds and hundreds of job apps for strange (probably illegitimate Craigslist "employers") to answer. It's so much fun listening to the latest lecture from professor Rand Paul about this.

Oh yeah, it's a hee-haw good old time.

Among other things, Douglas McDaniel is the author the book, "Human Search Engine."