Tom Clancy’s fiction has never really been my cup of tea, and his rightwing ideology even less so. Clancy, a gun-toting NRA member who famously blamed 9/11 on left wing politicians, has made a vast fortune writing military thrillers. But like a lot of rightwing military fans, Clancy never served in the military, enrolling at Loyola College at the height of the Vietnam War to earn a bachelor’s in English Literature before becoming an insurance broker. His wife of nearly thirty years divorced him after she discovered his affair with Katherine Huang, an assistant district attorney in New York he’d met on-line. He then married Alexandra Llewellyn, twenty years his junior and a cousin to Colin Powell who introduced them while Clancy was still married to his first wife while having an affair with his mistress. Charming.

His personal ethics are reflected in his fiction, not only by its literary content but by the questionable professional practices of its author. His novels gleefully espouse torture such as waterboarding and inducing heart attacks, where every liberal character is an idiot and a buffoon snorting cocaine, scarfing tofu, and determined to raise taxes on the wealthy (the b-stards!), and all the conservative characters are heroic patriots with impeccable principles. Then again, Clancy can’t actually be considered a real writer anymore, since he’s far too busy milking his various cash cows to ever sit down at a keyboard. It might be because since 2002 and the release of Red Rabbit the quality of his novels has greatly deteriorated. “If you haven’t read the new Jack Ryan novel yet, do yourself a favour. Don’t,” read one particularly acrid critic. The following year, his book, The Teeth of the Tiger (where the so-called “good-guys” are an FBI agent who murders a suspect in cold blood, and his cousin, Jack Ryan Junior, a lacklustre foul-mouthed frat-boy with the intellectual acuity of roadkill) was likewise savaged in reviews; the Washington Post calling it a “bloated, boring, silly novel” with “inane dialogue, gossamer characterizations, endless repetition and bumper-sticker politics.”

Ouch. On the other hand, Putnam paid him a cool $50 million for the two new books, which I’m sure did much to assuage any bruising to the ego.

Even so, Clancy didn’t come out with another Jack Ryan novel until 2010, which he didn’t even write – instead, it was written by Grant Blackwood, with his two follow-up novels, Against All Enemies and Locked On written by Peter Telep and Mark Greaney, respectively. That the true authors’ names appear on the cover in squintingly teeny-tiny print dwarfed under Tom Clancy’s name in huge typeface is actually quite remarkable, since Clancy didn’t even previously acknowledge his novels were being ghostwritten by other people past a brief mention in the acknowledgments to their “invaluable contribution to the manuscript.” Raymond Benson and David Michaels wrote the first two books in his Splinter Cell franchise, for which Clancy received millions from his publishers. No idea how much Benson and Michaels got for their work-for-hire hackery. The only thing Tom Clancy has to write these days to ensure a bestseller is two words: his name.

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The framing in this video and the accompanying article is so utterly dishonest that I have to believe it came straight out of the Pete Peterson foundation. It is that disingenous. However, in this case I think Bank of America and Merrill Lynch might get credit for the actual content, based on the ad at the beginning.

If anyone happened upon this travesty of an "explainer" of a video and actually trusted what was said because it came from a source that is heavily trafficked, they might actually believe the nonsense they spew.

Beginning with the title, where they state as fact that Social Security is running out of money. Except it isn't running out of money. It's the most solvent government program there is. The most solvent.

Then there's the pyramid graphic they show in the video. Nothing subliminal there, is there? This is the thing they forgot to mention called a surplus in the trust fund. As to the unexpected deficit for 2010, that was simply the result of a slow economy and lower than expected payroll tax collections.

But here's the real clue about where they got their tips about Social Security:

The money you pay towards Social Security does not go into a personal account for when you retire. Instead, Social Security is a "pay as you go" program meaning the money that is collected now is used towards current payouts. So…current benefactors rely on the current work force to fund their payments. As baby boomers continue to retire at a record clip, approximately 10,000 on any given day, this model becomes harder to maintain. Back in 1950, there were 7.11 workers per retiree. That number today is 4.5 and in 30 years, economists estimate that number will be 2.6 workers for every retiree.

This is the Peterson connection right here. It's a top talking point of Peterson Foundation devotees. And it is not true. Simply not true. When the tax code was "reformed" in 1986, baby boomers were factored into the equation. They are already paid for.

While it's true that no one anticipated the oligarchs shipping thousands of jobs overseas leaving some baby boomers without an income for the final years of their working lives, it's still not cause to start sounding the SOS alarms. It means that some adjusting will need to be done but not the kind of adjusting that involves "personal accounts." Adjusting the wage base upward will fix it easily.

Yet. Social Security is fully funded until 2036, by Peterson's own documentation. There is no other government program funded 24 years into the future. None. Zero. That projection is exactly on target with what was expected in 1986 when all of the "reforms" were made law. The reforms that screwed people like me into having to defer retirement for two extra years in order to make sure the funds were there to pay my benefits.

When your friends send you these nonsensical emails hysterically screaming that Social Security must be fixed, just remember that the only people who hate social welfare programs are billionaires. Everyone else sees them as their weapon against poverty in their old age.