Dinner Party Syndrome Strikes Again

Did Sen. McCain and former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan both fall victim to the same syndrome?

For lack of a better term, I'll call it Dinner Party Syndrome.

DC is not just "Hollywood for ugly people" it's also the Dinner Party Capital of the World.

The number of official, semi-official, and informal dinner parties that proliferate in that town are staggering.

It's a wonder that anything ever gets done.

The problem with dinner parties is that folks feel a need to chit-chat. Chit-chat is just slightly removed from blather, and the blathering that gets done is almost always from a mostly left-liberal vaguely statist viewpoint.

Blather is not viewpoint neutral in DC. If you want to remain unshunned and hang out with the 'cool people' you need to at least nod your head when folks spew the latest in left-liberal-academic consensus.

When conservative viewpoints come out, they come out as blurts, rather than blather, and blurts are about as welcome at dinner parties as loud farts. The blurting happens for much the same reason as farts happen, constantly hearing liberal nonsense, if one isn't inclined to it, causes mental indigestion. This mental indigestion builds and builds, and the head can only nod so many times, and the mouth can smile weakly for only so long until finally in one slightly too loud outburst one finds themselves saying, "but Iran, North Korea and Iraq really are/were an Axis of Evil".

The silence that follows can only be withstood by the most hearty of souls (or socially boorish).

So I suspect that Greenspan and McCain got tired of blurting and instead began blathering. Once you start mouthing left-liberal consensus, those non-ideas begin to drive the actual ideas in your head out (think of it like a mental Gresham's Law).

So when McCain says our soldiers lives are being wasted, he doesn't mean it, but he's just repeating the blather that hangs in the air in DC like a miasma off of a bog.

When Greenspan continues to talk down the economy despite evidence to the contrary, he's not thinking, he's just nodding his head and repeating the blather that he hears at the various dinner parties he surely attends with his oh so viewpoint neutral wife.

At least that's my theory, I don't have first hand experience with the DC dinner party scene, but it's easy enough to extrapolate what it must be like based on what it's like out here.