Invisible Empire Watch

Neocomrade(ss) 'Gettysburg' from Grant’s Ol’ Party believes in teachin’ by demonstration: it/she/he has certainly derailed this train of thought -- the gang has somehow wound up discussing, in effect, whether General McClellan (obit ann. relig. 1303/1885/5656) is qualified to conduct the War on Global Tourism (Pat. Pend.), which Little Brother and the Party of Big Management did not even get around to declarin’ until Y. R. 1422/2001/5762.

Possibly "pretty much the dumbest thing I've ever heard" is a little too harsh, criticismwise. On the other hand, possibly it fits exactly?

The Party neocomrade(ss) somehow did the derailment trick without even puttin’ a visible Lincoln penny on the tracks -- nobody but its/her/himself said a word about who is to take the blame for Fedguv mismanagement of 1861-1865 military operations. Or Rebguv mismanagement either, admittedly: nothin’ if not balanced ’n’ fair is Neocomrade ‘Gettysburg’.

How did it/she/he pull this act of rhetorical tourorrism off without even a penny? As far as I can see, it/he/she just blithely assumed out of nowhere that Dr. Gitlin had taken it on himself to expel Senator Davis and Colonel Lee (et hoc genus omne nefandum) from the American Democracy.[1] Social scientisers don’t have much use for pedantic historical accuracy, of course, but I doubt that sound maxim applies all the way down at the third-grade level where the neocomrade(ss) pretends to detect it. Why, I betcha T. G. knows what colour ocean was sailed by the 1492 Person of the Year! [2]

Unsurprisingly, what we have here is the rhetorical technique of Murdochville, just make up whatever you'd like your antagonist to have said, whatever makes her look silliest or most ignorant or ickiest, and then carry on as if it had actually been said. As to the former Real World, well, always bear in mind the gold platinum words of Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney:

''That is not the way the world really works anymore. WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- WE will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. WE are history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what WE do.'' [3]

So here am I, studying here and now exactly how Neocomrade‘Gettysburg’ has created a microcosm or nanocosm of G.O.P. Brand ®eality in which all cultivated despisers believe, or pretend, that Abraham XVI was somethin’ other than a Black ®epublican.

Either there is not a whole lot to study or I am missing a whole lot. There doesn't *seem* to be any more to this neocomradely rhetorical hocus-pocus than "Me sayin’ it makes it be so."

But I may be congenitally unfit to judge, for I fear that Neocomrade Cheney’s version has always left me dissatisfied in much the same way. Oilslick Dick does, it is true, paraphrase a little differently: "EMPIRE sayin’ it makes it be so." [4]

There is a lot of fodder here for moralists, both traditional and neoselfservative, so I shall leave it to them at this point, confining myself to a purely literary observation: Neocomrade ‘Gettysburg’ has concocted a sort of inside-out or per contra reflection of "The Emperor's New Clothes," managin’ to derail a real-world train of thought with a penny fetched straight from Foxcuckooland. [5]


Healthy days.

___
[1] Perhaps we donkeys ought to hold a general membership meeting or postcard referendumb about doing just that? "Better late than never"! Now that Dixieland has finally been succesfully neoconstructed--seven score plus five years after the neocomrade's eponym!--with the Party of Goldwater ’n’ Atwater more firmly in the saddle down there than anywhere else nearer to civilisation than Wasilla, what have good guys got to lose? Shout it loud and shout it proud, "Treason must be made infamous, and traitors must be impoverished!" (No question what party that guy adhered to, comrades: Impoverishment R US!)

An objector might object that although we can excommunicate ratfink militarist Lees and bigoted slaveholdin’ Davises from our own ranks, we cannot actually kick them into the Harrison-Grant-Hoover-Atwater sham log cabin retroactively. Beyond a certain point of loserdom in practice, not even conservatives want you on their team any more, apart from maybe the weepy-creepy Little Friends of Eddie Burke™ brand of ‘conservative’ ‘intellectual’, as for example chez_ http://tinyurl.com/3m2r64.

A replier might reply that the Lees and Davises, when they actually had a 'nation' of their own to misgovern for a few brief shinin' moments, vociferated that they had no use at all for parties and partisanship, that these were only yet another of the icky Northern corruptions and perversions that they had decided to purify their garments of. Taking the Dixieland gentry at their word, we could infer (as neutral intellectual historians) that adherence to the Rebguv tacitly involved resignation from the Democratic Party of Yankeedom. Members of the latter might optionally go on to conclude that it would be gratuitous for us to disown Slaveocracy and Treason at this point in time.


[2] Speaking of pedantry, the year of religionism in question was 897/1492/5253.


[3] http://tinyurl.com/533kj


[4] While we are collecting specimens of this species, notice what might be called the Murdoch Variation of the Cheney Gambit, "REPETITION sayin’ it makes it be so." Though that shtyk did have rather a long history even before fallin’ into the hands of weekly standardisers and Wall Street jingos.


[5] I can't resist just a tiny bit of palaeomoralizing: "What does it say about us, jennies and jacks, if we are the kind of donkey whose thought trains can be derailed by pennies visible only to the impure of heart?"

BR>

Towards a Unified Theory of Political Fiendishness

A Unified Theory of Political Fiendishness from the keyboard of Neocomrade Rear-Colonel V. D. Hanson-Blimp might have been a work of modest valuable, had it been prepared and issued several years ago, but, alas!, the moment for that has passed. Private and public misfortunes have come to pass that rule out what once was not impossible. "Tripeness is all."

On the private- or secret-sector side, L'Enterprise ideologique américaine (English acronym: AEI) has now irretrievably rotted poor Blimp's brain, which used to be quite different from the correspondin’ organs of the first two hundred names in the Wingnut City telephone book.

Out in the Naked Public Square (Pat. Pend.) , AEI and AEI’s Blimp were seriously taken by surprise, it looks like, by the P.F.’s [1] scrambling back into power. Most neoässuredly, THAT was not supposed to happen! Why on G-re’s green earth should the Daughters of Virtue and Sons of Wisdom LLC (English acronym: GOP) ever lose an election? Come to think of it, did not Neocomrade Freiherr K. C. von Rove prophesy that would not? The DV&SW were, one remembers thinking oneself to have been told neoäuthoritatively, not just "in like Flynn" with George XLIII; they were in like Palaeocomrade Major W. McKinley, Jr., was in after that Bryan fiendishness and foolishness was put down. [2]

So much from outside the Monkey House. But if I had the personal misfortune to be a wingnuttete or wingnut or wombscholar or dittomind, I think I'd be a bit displeased with the good colonel from a strict Party-’n’-Ideology angle. Surely the time to raise the alarm about "Where Did These Guys Come From?" was before the jackasses broke into the stable?

On the other hand, perhaps he did? Since his regrettable self-decerebration, Blimp’s pieces have been, from any great political distance, as indistinguishable from one another as they are from what any idiot niece or nephew of a DV&SW biggie might scribble durin’ her internship at AEI as a sort of graduation present before havin’ to face the real world, meetin’ payrolls and runnin’ railroads and possibly makin’ the occasional campaign contribution . . . . [3]

Certainly quite a number of the sweet puppies of Endarkenment, even, must have been aware well before Black Tuesday, 5 Dhú l-Qa‘da 1429 [4], that the particular Black Lagoon from which the Obaminable Creature set out slouching towards Beltlehem City DC was Cook County in the great and sovereign State of Illinois. [5]

I begin with the strictly geographical part of today’s performance, which is much the soundest based leg of the Blimpian tripod. Only secundum quid, though, only "gradin’ on the curve," because Cook County, considered simpliciter, is one of a kind -- the last refugium of classical machine politics. For the brave new Sororland of Virtue and Fraterland of Wisdom (Pat. Pend.) [6] to be overrun from THERE is almost as if the sweet puppies were to be conquered and annexed by the year of religionism 1896 come again. Or make that, more specifically and just for fun, "invasionised and occupied by the day 30 Ramadán [7] in the year of neoreligionism 1314/1897/5657." I.e., that ‘day of woe and woeful day’ [8] when William Jennings Bryan took the helm as POTUS over in Parallel Universe 54110-KX-37(b). Bill XXV promptly ran the holy Homeland™ on the rocks, of course. (I could tell you all a pretty story about it, but the e-margin is too narrow to contain it.)

Rear-Col. Blimp views his Chicagoland from a high altitude and through factious haze, however. "government channels stimuli to blue-states, key Congresspeople are bought off with tens of millions of government largess, every campaign promise is simply cynical fluff that no sane person would take seriously" -- that could be pretty well anywhere, nowadays. Like, exempli gratiâ and just to begin with some particular toponyms, take Kennebunkport ME and Crawford TX. [9]

Pitchforkin’ through the dungheap backwards, I see that Blimp summarizes his Point II as "the postmodern belief that race/class/gender oppressions require government affirmative reactions (which also abroad explains why we reach out to enemies and shun allies)."

Is that AEI-ogenic decerebration, I wonder, or is it just KSM Brand (®) agitprop as usual? [10] Neocomrade V. D. Hanson-Blimp’s tertiary-educationalist credentials are such that he ought to have some idea what an actual practitioner of Postwhateverism understands the term "postmodern" to involve. Run-of-the mill Party base ’n’ vile haven't a glimmer and are likely to swallow any malicious nonsense that a Blimp chooses to cropdust ’em with from on high.

I guess in this context most of the sweet puppies will understand their obese aëronautical guru to be revealin’ that PoMo begat Affirmative Action -- and young Affy they DO know lots and lots about. They may not know his daddy's name for sure (insert stale joke here), but they do know that Master Affy is the [expletive] [substantive] that keeps snatchin’ away all those luscious plums that ought to be their own. That, once upon a time, and not so long ago, WERE their own. That WILL BE their own again as soon as "accident, fate, bad luck, bad decisions, poor judgment, illegality, drug use, and simple tragedy" are once again properly diagnosed (and then left untreated.) [11]

That last footnote was already tottering on the brink of The Utterly Unmentionable, so let's skate on real fast to Blimp's Point I, which is so old it is positivly neo-: "Who dunnit, you ask? Why, M. Jean-Jacques Rousseau donnit! Next question."

Q. Qu’est-ce que l’ étatisme? A. L’étatisme, c’est LE VOL!

Well! One may guess that the neocomrade rear-colonel (volant himself, as it happens, though of course only in a benign way) began with that golden oldie precisely aureâ ex vetustate. His neochoir is bound to know the words to that hymn, or at any rate the first couple of stanzas. It's not as if Wombschool Normal University sets no graduation requirements at all! A passin’ grade in Chicagonomics 666 is absolutely mandatory: NO EXCEPTIONS ADMITTED EVER. Period. Full stop.

Well, ’tis a waste of energy to argue with the neochoir about the economically Wicked State, so I shall not. Instead, allow me to point out very peripherally that Blimp adores Chicagonomics but can't stand Cook County. Presumably that establishes where the neoäction is located at, if nothin' else.

Historically, to be sure, Chicagonomic neoselfservatism was almost entirely imported from Old Vienna, as Comrade Judt argues in a somewhat tonier e-forum than this present. [12] Oh, well. It does not actually matter much. Even before AEI wreaked its drain bamage on him, Neocomrade Rear-Col. V. D. Blimp-Hanson treated all history since about Procopius on the demons Justinianus and Theodora [13] as perfect bunk. Their Ford must surely be beamin’ His high approval up at VDB-H from down below where the weather is always a little too warm for comfort.

Healthy days.



___
[1] "Political fiends," Messrs. les ennemis de la Républicainique. Foreign agitators. The Muses and Dr. Bones and yours truly.


[2] Major Bill was of the non-rear variety, as it happens, although it’s a little unfair to poke at poor Blimp on that account, him bein’ really more comparable to Parteiobersturmfeldwebel Markus Alphonsius von Hanna. Who -- sure ’nuff! -- got himself a student deferment or somethin’ close: "served as a quartermaster in the United States Army during the Civil War and was always close to veterans’ organizations. (It is not true that he was awarded the Medal of Honor -- that was an unrelated Marcus Hanna.)" [http://tinyurl.com/yg3c7y2]


[3] The serious student of neocomradology is not to declare the Real World of AEI idiot nepotism ‘unreal’ simply because they instantly slam the boardroom door shut in her own silly face -- if, indeed, they ever left it open for her to peep in a little to begin with. Comrade F. S. Fitzgerald's remarks on that score are admirable, even though he never made them. [http://tinyurl.com/yjlhz3r]


[4] Bein’ the former "4 November 2008."


[5] http://tinyurl.com/yjtzjmo (for the B. L. Creature: Massa Yeats must take care of himself)


[6] English acronym: USA


[7] 30.IX.1314 will have been the former "March Forth, 1897!" Unless they use a different paracalendar, that is, naturally.


[8] http://tinyurl.com/yfff2m4


[9] Presumably Blimp doesn't really require any hard data points about Cook County beyond the notorious one that the Virtutis filiae filiique Sapientiae win municipal elections very rarely indeed. Oh, that all the world were Scarsdale and Shaker Heights and Lake Forest and Loudon County VA!

No, sorry, I beg your pardon, it should run the other way ’round: "Oh, that S. (&c.) were all the world!" The neocomrades are never goin’ta be altogether safe, after all, until the neowilderness outside their gated communities is not just a solitudo devastata, loosely speakin’, but literally uninhabited. Extra Mammonopolem nulla salus.


[10] "Kiddie Selfservative Movement" es Marca ®egistrada de la Nuevocompañería Estadounidense y de Israël.


[11] The student should bear in mind, however, that, inside the monkey house, Exhortation Therapy is almost always classified as ‘treatment’. Neocomrades who do not agree that preachin’ at the Bad Poor they ought to shape up and be Good Poor instead is a wonderdrug in itself are rare, but not quite impossible to find. Neocomrades Profs. Drs. R. Herrnstein and Ch. Murray, discoverers or inventors of the ever-immortal Herrnstein-Murray Cu®ve [dingaling, heads up!, http://tinyurl.com/zexdn], come to mind at once.

There exists, though, in my view, a certain ‘protocynicism’, so to christen it, on the matter amongst the Big Management Party’s base ’n’ vile, quite apart from what their factional betters may be up to. The sweet puppies are not bright enough to be cynics -- the theorem follows à fortiori from the fact that even card-carryin’ G.O.P. geniuses are too dumb to keep what they think and how they bark ’n’ bellow in completely different wateretight compartments. At the puppy, or protocynical level, what it comes to is that Exhortation Therapy oughtabe a Wundermedikant for the Bad Poor, but most wingnutettes and wingnuts don’t seriously expect that it actually will be.

At this point the Hegelian student of Neocomradology will notice one of her Master's most famous products at work, the so-called "cunning of reason." Or cunnin’ of selfservatism: where would the sweet puppies find themselves, after all, if Exhortation Therapy did work wonders? All the Bad Poor would become Good Poor, and then any given sweet puppy would be at least as likely to miss its plums due to the sheer number of qualified candidates, without evil Affy putting even the slightest pressure of a [expletive] Statist thumb on the scale. Randy Redneck and Cindy from Wasilla cannot possibly have worked that calculation out consciously, but they might as well have.

(( I suppose it is possible that the neokiddies still retain some last savin’ (or damnin’) remnant of the former specifically Christian Christojudaean dogma of peccatum originale, which did, more or less, amount to preaching at unregenerate folks being somehow a good thing even though true repentance and amendment of life, amongst the Bad Poor and even to some extent elsewhere as well, were never easy to spot. To believe that the Randies and Cindies of any age ever really grokked Original Sin is more than I can manage, but there can be no doubt that the 1431/2009/5770 Prod models and their predecessors, since at least YNR 1040/1630/5390 heard about it endlessly at Sabbath School. To hypothesize a boiled-down and garbled version of lofty mythological speculations that the puppy classes did not ever actually grasp at any point in their degeneration would save the appearances without any need to page Dr. Hegel. But Father Zeus knows best. ))


[12] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23519, "Volume 56, Number 20 · December 17, 2009
What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?"

"Tony Judt directs the Remarque Institute at NYU and is the author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. His latest book, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, was recently reissued in paperback.? (January 2010)"


[13] http://tinyurl.com/ylrry5o

Th. and J. would bill nicely in melodrama as moustache-twirling, stimulusmongering Wicked Statists, would they not? A pity so little is known about Byzantinomics.

Blimp was a coach in extinct languages before he was a geistlicher Militärist, before the AEIdeologues shorted most of his his circuits for him, and it still shows: he appears to know all sorts of things about "the agenda of the classical ... Roman turba." He ought to write it up for the delectation of the Muses and me (and maybe even the neokiddies as well). Assuming, that is, that he means somethin' at least a little more recherché than Mr. Madison in Federalist X, "any other improper or wicked project" &c. &c.

Doin’ the Cheney-Thing

R. B. Cheney and T. L. Friedman are undeniably two peas in the same onepercenterly pod, both located at the rich-out-of-sight end of the income and wealth distribution. Some speak of "the Herrnstein-Murray Curve," although they may be asking for litigation about patents and trademarks and the like when they do.

However the T. L. Friedman specimen, for purposes of this morning's fifteen-minute ideological zig--or, as the case may be, sentimental zag--sets up to be a traitor to its curve, as it were, a stance which is as curious as it is unimportant. By tomorrow morning, it (the TLF specimen) may be safely back inside Wingnut City with all that gated communitys many community gates securely bolted behind it. [1]

Anyhow, today it has chosen to stumble leftwards a little, possibly annoying Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney, though more probably not. His Omniexecutivity is far from bein’ Mr. Nice Guy, but he is also no dummy and has probably long since written the TLF thingee off as beneath adult attention. Or perhaps decided that it "knows in its heart", à la B. Goldwater, that neoreaction must necessarily be THE wave of the future.

In order to (even pretend to) be bratty, it has to work up some minimal sort of RBC/TLF compare-and-contrast exercise, some superficial distinction of icin’s externally laid onto the same basic cake-mix product. The specimen welcomes its opportunity, it seems to me, for it could well be sniggerin’ to itself about how elegantly its latest fifteen-minuteman shtyk about foreign and native-management policy fits into the rhetorical ploy du jour: the specimen quite agrees with Lord Undisclosure that relyin’ on one-percent probabilities can, on special occasions and under certain specific circumstances, be an admirable guide to speculation at the Grand Casino of Human Events.

It then goes on to rib His Omniexecutivity for not noticin’ that AGW, anthropogenic global warmin’, affords one of these occasions. It does not expressly mention that (for about the last thirteen-and-a-half minutes straight) it has considered that Viceroy Cheney and his Boy and his Dynasty and his Party and his AEIdeology were, after all, quite right to agress their way into the Brave New Afghanistan and the future former al-‘Iráq on the basis of onepercenterly speculations. [2] "Better safe than sorry," don't you see?

Herr Prof. Dr. C. von Sunstein--who, incidentally, looks very like a recent TLF lunchmate and plunderee--tarts that preowned old saw and trite apophthegm up as (ta-DAH!) a "Precautionary Principle." The grown-up reasons to have reservations about that up-tartin’ could probably be discussed with Prof. Sunnstein, who may not even endorse the Afghan and Iraqi neo-aggressions. Almost certainly, the distinguished shyster and tertiary educationaliser will be a serious environmentalist, and therefore not really on either the TLF or the RBC wavelength. TLF is utterly unserioius, and RBC utterly ungreen. Antigreen, even, is Lord Undisclosure.

Our Warholian jackdaw picks up the professor's gaudy bead and then . . . well, why be surprised that what happens then is far more jackadawsical than perfesserly? The TLF specimen is not actually gamblin’ about global temperatures and climatic disasters here. Close examination will reveal that it is chiefly bettin’ that maybe those overzealous subordinates at East Anglia U. were guilty much as Foxcuckooland and Rio Limbaugh charge: Master Friedman’s effective 99 percent probability is not that AGW will produce consequences not altogether intolerable, which must be what C. Sunnstein originally meant, but rather that AGW ain’t happenin’ at all -- just like Citizen Rush says!

And just like Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney can be very easily conjectured to agree!!

So the jackdaw is a sort of unexpected twofer or daily double for Lord Undisclosure: not only does the silly NYTC bird tacitly agree with Cheney (and with Cheney's Boy / Dynasty / Party / Ideology) about the good guys aggressin’, it tacitly agrees about the bad guys hoaxin’ as well!!!

Compared with these substantive Wonders of Wingnuttism, it must seem very small potatoes to Lord Undisclosure that little Tommy Wobble, and for that matter, Prof. Dr. Sunstein, agree with his lordship (and with B-D-P-I) about the soundness of selected one-precenterly speculations in lotteries and at casinos.

Croaks the jackdaw, on the formal side[3]:

When I see a problem that has even a 1 percent probability of occurring and is “irreversible” and potentially “catastrophic,” I buy insurance. That is what taking climate change seriously is all about.

It might be fun to look at Master Tommy Wobble’s real-life insurance portfolio: it has such an inflat such an exalted notion of its own self-wunnerfulness that it probably ought to have taken out several billion dollars of term life insurance with its Uncle Sam the beneficiary, "in case somethin’ happens." But I betcha it hasn't actually.

Healthy days.

___
[1] The nifty Friedmanite wobbles and ficklenesses seem to depend on exactly whom it ate lunch with most recently, although perhaps its dinner companions matter sometimes as well.


[2] Did the specimen perhaps even call up His Omniexecutivity to assure him that it is all in fun, really, so don't get made and cancel that next lunch appointment? Father Zeus knows best!


[3] Big Management Party Neocomrade R. B. Cheney and jackdaw Th. L. Friedman are, of course, mistaken to superordinate Matter over Form, in this case or in any other. Not bein’ bright enough to be sound Aristotelians, naturally ‘formal’ and ‘formalism’ are perjoratives for them, as for all holy-Homelanders™ beneath a rather high plateau of semi-demi-education. And Father Zeus knows best.

Why Do THEY Hate ‘Us’? (Chapter MXCVI)

Major S. of the NSDP, Neusemitische D*nkpolizei, [1] naturally has occasion to concern himself with the Extreme West as well as with ultrasuezian [2] phaenomena. Not a whole lot of occasion, presumably, but nevertheless, once in a while. And what could be extreme-westerner than Paddy and me? I ask thee, Dr. Bones! Paddy and me and the fiend Alistair Crooke?

Alastair Crooke has always lived between worlds. He was born in Ireland, [3] and from age 12, his parents let him attend an experimental school in Switzerland run by an Englishman named John Collette. While he chose the school for its proximity to the ski slopes, he also picked up some of Collette's antipathy toward conventional Western thought. Crooke eschewed religious services, but "instead of being sort of sent off to watch television or something like that, they made you sit down with either an Imam or a Hindu scholar, or some visiting person, to challenge you," he recalls. Collette "was explicit in saying, 'Well, the effort is to break the hold of Western thinking on you.'"

Notice how the good Neocomrade Major begins by tacitly equatin’ "conventional Western thought" or "Western thinking" with "religious services." Having noticed, reflect that he is beginnin’ a Party-’n’-Ideology scribble that must come--ostensibly and backhandedly, at least--to the defence of M. Descartes. I shall subtract seven (7) points from the candidate’s score (on a scale of one thousand) for that minor-to-minimal boo-boo. How about thee?

Such a slip as that is no big deal in itself, obviously, yet it does misdirect the attention of actual dupes and potential marks the wrong way to make WS, Western Sieve™[alisation], out a matter of overt self-religionatin’. I speak of that particular class of dupes and marks that Neocomrade Major S. is takin’ aim at here, a comparatively advanced class whose entrance requirement, so to speak, must include havin’ some inklin’ who M. Descartes was and why most tertiary educationisers of the former Christojudæandom consider M. Descartes to have been quite important in the development of the Western Sieve™ product. [4]

With no-’count trailer-trash dupes ’n’ marks, that pretended affection for religionism does no harm, though it is so patently insincere in most cases that I wonder the top-drawer neocomrades up at Castle Podhóretz persist in it so stubbornly. If EmperorJohn and Princess Neoterica and the whole Neukaiserhof, even down the totem pole as far as Major S. here, do not understand that the neoservants are well aware that their neomasters consider religionism a matter best left to servants as far as actually practicin’ any of it -- well, maybe "top-drawer" isn’t as far from the mudsills as it used to be.

Still, to figure out what Massa really thinks about what Cuffee really thinks of Massa is not as easy as it looks. Allow me to recommend Mr. Freehling, sir, on this problem in its 1776-1861 Dixieland form if I have not done so already. Plus ça change . . . .

Healthy days!

---

[1] Thee may call it "Holy Hasbara" for short if thee please, Dr. Bones.

Spoofing the manner of the more narcisisistic breed of Hebrew-Christojudaean religionists is only a secondary function of the McAsterisk du jour. Much more important is that one definitely means Dankpolizei as well as Denkpolizei. Rather more so, in fact, for the whole purpose of this nifty and first-rate slice of agitprop is to reprehend Die Undankbarkeit des Westens: the sheer ingratitude of all those silly dhimmí muddleheads too blind to see, or too perverse to admit, that the cause of Jewish Statism is the cause of us all.

Nay, make that "The Cause of US ALL!" please, sir, if thee would!




[2] "Cissuezian" ("Cis-suezian"? "CisSuezian"? "cissuezite"?) in Telavîvestán, that would be, of course. Come to think of it, though, I betcha Major S. doesn't go near T.A. and P.A. himself personally, except conceivably for vacation purposes.

Meanwhile I really wish there were some standard Dead Latin form of Suez, remote enough to be toney and upmarket and fake-neoreactionary, yet not blankly unintelligible like "Complutensian" for "pertaining to Alcalá de Henares," which latter is the sort of monnicker that a knower would have to really know some serious knowledges about Old Europe to feel comfortable with.

Far more than a Major S. can ask of his dupes, or reasonably anticipate from his marks, would another "Complutensian" be! But Father Zeus knows best.


[3] A full stop right there replacing the rest of the paragraph would have a good deal to say for itself, I think. To be sure, it would have comparatively little to say about the fiend Crooke.


[4] More properly put, in "the intellectual history of Europe," for the language of congenital subalterns, lingua dhimmitudinis, lishôn haggoyîm, better befits fans of M. Descartes, than our neobetters’ peculiar Parteichinesisch. For us backward and miserable, Cartesianism was never "a product" in anything much like the the neogentry’s chicagonomische Weltanschauung. It was, though, and still remains, at least a visible object to us, unlike Western Sieve™.

The latter neopartisanism reminds me, Dr. Bones, of an occasion I have mentioned to thee before. The present keyboard was standing in front of Apley Court gazing up (perhaps) at the ever-memorable neo-architecture of Holyoke Saunter . . . and then some earnest tourist wanted to know, "Where’s H*rv*rd?"

Unfortunately I had not the presence of mind to reply as one of the alumnuses of the fiend Colette presumably would have, "H*rv*rd, sir, is a state of mind rather than anything crude and material. Why, H*rv*rd is all around you even as we speak!"

. . . Well, I do see thee's point, Bones. The really existin’ H*rv*rd undeniably bears a good deal of resemblance to a chicagonomical/Hyperzionistical ‘product’ -- lots and lots of Vice Presidents for Development, for example. And that relentless determination to monopolise the profits of one’s self-brandin’.

BFZKB.

"Where dost thou run off to, O song?"

"I have a very bad feeling. I sense that if Barack Obama gets his way, backed by the most corrupt political party in living memory and reinforced by a seditious and cheerleading media, America will have been transformed beyond recognition as it limps into the sunset of its days."

(( Thee will not mind, I hope, Dr. Bones, if I park this vehicle here? In the abbreviated form I posted at the pajamatarians, it is scarcely intelligible. ))

Why on G-re’s green earth should a "Canadian poet and essayist" get misty-eyed if the Heimatland Gottes *does* have to sing a few verses of St. Rudyard’s "Recessional" for a change? That "Hope N. Glory" ditty of St. Edward the Less gets dreadfully tiresome when one must listen to it and nothin’ else almost every wakin’ minute of every day.[0]

Kennebunkport-Crawford’s extremity ought to be Hyperborea’s opportunity! [1] Exsurge, Ottawa!!

And, speakin’ of cheerleadin’, 

"Two, four, six, eight
 Whom do we appreciate?
    Solway!
      SOLWAY!!
         sol-WAAAAAAAAAAY!!!"

Flavour with "soulway" and "sole way" to taste -- and remember to shake well before slurpin’ it down!

Healthy days.

__
[0] One writes merrily, but nevertheless their endless wallowin’ in self-congratulation and self-exceptionalism and self-exceptionality and . . . really IS the worst single fault of wingnutettes and wingnuts and wombscholars and downdumbees. And even Kiddie Konservative ‘intellectual’ señoritos like this one


[1] ’Tis also a possible fresh start for Hyperzion, which we low-minded are bound to suspect is probably rather more to the point when far-fetched neocomrades like D. S. start hectorin’ New Yanks and Old Euros about "the West per se."

In any case, if the Neocomrade D. Solway product were really what it is labelled as, echt Qannádisch, ought it not be lamentin’ the Suicide of the South rather than keep harpin’ away at that previously owned lyre of Dr. Spengler? Ozzies’s OK, maybe, but alas! he can get quite as taedious as Lord Elgar.

A change of tune (or wind direction) might cheer us all up, and the DS product can almost certainly find itself a template to versify from somewhere in the Hispaniolated and countrereformed provinces of Italy in Century XI/XVII or XII/XVIII or XIII/XIX. "What life, what culture, now that Torquato Tasso is gone? Will the Muses ever return to Capua and Giudecca like the swallows to Capistrano CA and the buzzards to Hinckley OH?"

Indeed, why not spare Mr. McCloskey’s silly prosings and let’s smoke a little of the real thing? ’Tis a cinch to have the pet google go fetch such stichs nowadays:

    "O credenti in Christe,
Voi che d’Europa il fren tenete, aiuto,
Aiuto e pace a quelle sacre rive
Donde l’arte gentili il mondo ha tratte;
Non sien dagli empì [*] fatte
Vasta tomba d’eroi,
E più nobile in terra, e giusto e santo!

    "Canzon, dove trascorri?
Ahi!  da funesti errori
O da vani timori
Pietà prende consiglio, e indugia, e langue:
Intanto piove l’innocente sangue."

   --Marchetti, G., URL cit.,  p. 17.

[*] I believe that one would be impii (with paenultimate stress) in slightly earlier Late Latin. But Father Zeus knows best.

Sounds kinda like just yesterday in the neo-Levant, nicht wahr?

Yet the titleswipe is dated [A.D.] 1857 (== 1273 == 5618) -- and why would anybody want to forge it?

Though the poor fellow’s rime lamentabili survive, just barely, yet my little Gugghi has trouble finding his natal or obituary date, which suggests that his coprovincials don’t find the Rime e Prose del Conte Giovanni Marchetti a serious threat to the ditto of D. Aligheri.

How sua excellenza compares to the D. Solway product, on the other hand, I suppose one could ascertain if one absolutely had to.

Should some pajamatarian suffer from a really trashy taste in Dhimmí Lit., she will probably enjoy how the googlecyclists render the above gemma preziosa di Parnasso into New High HolyHomelandic.

La question de l’existence de la postérité

Let's have something pretentious, for a change, Dr. Bones, shall we?

Almost any passage in Senator Kerry's native lingo ought to do the trick, and this one happens to fit in with a couple of recent schoolboly scribbles in the holy Homeland's Fishwrap of Record :

À Diderot pour qui l’artiste est mû par l’amour de la postérité, s’oppose un Falconet pour qui la postérité n’existe pas. Et si l’on considère que la postérité d’une œuvre d’art commence avec sa réception, alors pour Diderot la création artistique est un acte d’amour pour le public des lecteurs spectateurs ou auditeurs, alors que pour Falconet l’artiste est seul et ne crée pour personne. En définitive, à travers la question de l’existence de la postérité c’est celle de la réception des œuvres qui est posée : pour Falconet l’œuvre d’art est sans réception.

Meanwhile, back at the NYTC, this morning's schoolboy, call him (Tweedle) ‘Dee’, is all agog to worm his way into Princess Posterity's good opinion. Master Dee's plan to that end goes like this

The Wrong Side of History Critics storm that health care reform is “a cruel hoax and a delusion.” Ads in 100 newspapers thunder that reform would mean “the beginning of socialized medicine.” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page predicts that the legislation will lead to “deteriorating service.” Business groups warn that Washington bureaucrats will invade “the privacy of the examination room,” that we are on the road to rationed care and that patients will lose the “freedom to choose their own doctor.” All dire — but . . . . . . . John Taber, a Republican representative from New York, went further and said of Social Security: “Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers.” In hindsight, it seems a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it? ... Similar[ly], ferocious hyperbole was unleashed on the proposal for Medicare. President John Kennedy and later President Lyndon Johnson pushed for a government health program for the elderly, but conservatives bitterly denounced the proposal as socialism, as a plan for bureaucrats to make medical decisions, as a means to ration health care.

That's enough to indicate in which direction Master Dee’s crystal ball considers the Absolute, bless Its heart!, to be self-developing just at the moment. But we had better have the laddie's peroration, whwewrin it turns out that he does not insist that Princess Posterity admire ALL of us:

It’s now broadly apparent that those who opposed Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965 were wrong in their fears and tried to obstruct a historical tide. This year, the fate of health care will come down to a handful of members of Congress, including Senators Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu. If they flinch and health reform fails, they’ll be letting down their country at a crucial juncture. They’ll be on the wrong side of history.

The Muses and thee and me must already be in like Flynn, then, for *we* are most assuredly neither blue dogs nor egomaniac Hyperzionisers! And it sure looks as if Master Dee abandons the red-state goats to Her Highness's displeasure not only tout court but also en masse. Why, there is not even the briefest ejaculation for the salvation of Neocomrade Senatrix O. Snow of ME!

It is unguessable exactly what scraps of Homelandic lore a jackdaw like Master Dee may have picked up, but pretty clearly "We’ll ALL [emph. add.] go to Glory when we go" is not likely to catch his roaming eye. Indeed, an absence (or severe shortage) of militant extremist Republican partisans could easily be part of Master Dee’s undisclosed criteria for ascertaining which side of History is to be labeled ‘right’.

Which leads to the greatest deficiency of the effusion at hand, which its not its uncharitableness, but its cocksureness about what Princess Posterity wants from us humble who are now active in the world. When it comes to knowing for sure what Her Highness wanted from ‘us’ fifty years ago, Master Dee has but to look in his heart and write. For of course Master Dee is somebody's posterity himself -- I trust the poor clueless critters honoured their Judex Venturus properly in advance! But when it comes to la postérité considered as what the bozos of Chicagonomics might call "a demand-side commodity," well, who knows? Why on Gores's green earth should anybody suppose that Master Dee knows?

I presume those in the reactionary community too near senility to have been properly wombschooled and neo-downdumbed and chicagoficated will point out with glee that the Lenin-Gorbachev Racket, R.I.P., was very fond of defending itself in Dee-like terms. To be sure, the Bolsheviki had inherited a vast epic of historiosophy to that effect on a silver platter, high-quality mitteleuropäische Romantik, good stuff that a crude and practical Slavic mob of workers and peasants would never in a dozen centuries have made up for themselves, but which they never could bring themselves to part with voluntarily. Palaeocomrade I. Suslov and Neocomrade F. Fukuyama need hardly be distinguished by those who consider it vain to anticipate Her Highness's privy judgments.

Which brings us to schoolboy number two, (Tweedle) Dumb. Master Dumb is, of all things, an avowed flat-earther! Also a shameless charlatan, as one glance at the facial hair establishes. But like his colleague kiddie, Master Dumb scribbles as if he has received a pre-publication copy of The Secret History of Times To Come. Especially fun is that the gruesome twosome do not often seem to be talking about the same book.[1]


Healthy days!

___
[1] It would offend against the very Zeitgeist of the NYTC parlour game if I were to pay more attention to yesterday's neomasterwork than today's. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that none of Master Dumb's opinions are his own, they all come from somebody celebrated or self-celebritorious with whom Dumb had lunch a couple of days ago.

Master Dee is, I presume, a jackdaw by nature and by inadequate education: the poor lad just can't help himself. Master Dumb, though, jackdaws it on purpose. "With malice aforethought," even, he jackdaws it. (Yuck!)

But watch thee's step, Dr. Bones, hereabouts. Though yuckworthy, would it be at all amazing if the authentic Secret History of Times to Come turns out rather like an abandoned outhouse full of faded fishwrap cuttings from some long-forgotten "Thomas L. Friedman"? As St. Jack said somewhere, we would all wish Life to be tragic if it can't be what we really want.

Yet with ruthless disregard of what we want, Life the Unfair is perfectly capable of being an indecorous mess. Who knows, sir? By 2059, Princess Posterity may have been, as it were, altzheimerated into the spittin’ image of Little Tommy Wobble with the big moustache. Her Highness's Court annalists will, accordingly, keep comin’ up with ten new and completely contradictory secret histories of How We Got to Where We Are annually, not counting the bonus selections. My latest health insurance coverage will be good from 1430 to 1700 hours on alternate Thursdays. As long as there is nothing seriously wrong with me, naturally . . . .

"but a child when he reflects" (Part XLII)

What all this [1] shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

That’s the latest Paul Krugman Byronism, Dr. Bones, and it strikes me as well below the usual standard of departmental infantility. If he were talking about economics, I betcha he could think of at least forty-seven intermediate stages between toney Von Kantor Herrenfolk exploitin’ wonbschooled plebeian Limbaughs in one direction and, looking the other way, the loony proles havin' "taken over" the Party of Grant and Hoover from their betters lock, stock ’n’ bazooka.

It seems plain enough that Freiherr von Kantor and the other officially billed Parteiführer present for Thursday's entertainment were only panderin’ to their internal proletariat. And the bigwigs were panderin' on a thoroughly voluntary basis: nobody from amongst the GOP base ’n’ vile was holdin’ a Kalashnikov to the heads of the country-club gentry -- or even threatenin’ ’em very plausibly with nonreëlection. All those apoplectic-lookin’ jowls in business suits could have spent the afternoon clippin’ coupons over at the Union League Club [2] and not be detectably the worse off for it back in their districts.

Assistance at such an event indicates an extreme deficiency of good taste, the sort of bad taste that one might expect of militant extremist Republicaniacs. But after all, these neo-aristos are militant extremist Republicaniacs. So that's all right.

Though it better fun to ridicule the jowl-challenged, it is rather Prof. Krugman that I want to discuss at the moment, Dr. Bones. How can he manage to be so totally a child about politics as to fancy that the comparatively respectable organised forces of TopPercenterdom (a.k.a. "Big Management") have just been defeated by their own Kiddie Konservative pond scum, when it would be far less peculiar to claim the contrary? The only scoundrel-party pol whom P.K. mentions politically is Neukamerad Herr Prof. Dr. Speaker N. Gingrich

At this point Newt Gingrich is what passes for a sober, reasonable elder statesman of the G.O.P. And he has no authority: Republican voters ignored his call to support a relatively moderate, electable candidate in New York’s special Congressional election.

Thee will be noticing, though, Dr. Bones, that the advice of N. Gingrich was good advice, not to mention that the victorious reactionaries in New Jersey and Virginia were not exactly representatives of the Weinstein-Savage wing of Kiddie Konservatism. I have no idea what Big Party Neocomrade N. Gingrich is thinkin’ at the moment, but it would not be a miracle if he thought he had done pretty well.

As I said, only the Newtster gets dragged into Dr. Krugman's potage du jour really politically. Neukamerad Freiherr E. von Kantor is mentioned, but only because of his implication in the Z-Street Demographic (Pat. Pend.), good folks amongst whom the LeoStraussian argumentum ad Hitlerum is, or at any rate ought to be, deployed with extreme prudence and careful targeting.

Of course a Hitler-Hyperzion nexus, whether sincerely imaginary or maliciously obtruded, is ‘political’ in a vague and general sense, but it is not grossparteipolitisch in the provinces of central North America, still less kleinparteipolitisch inside the ranks of Goldwaterites and Atwaterites and Gingrichoids and dittoloons.

At this point Prof. Krugman does, perhaps, come close to thinking politically a little, but alas! what he approximates to is the very bottom of the neocomradely barrel. He appears to be pretending in this piece that decerebrated Kiddie Konservatives "are all like that," i.e., all bigoted enemies of specifically Hebrew Christojudaeanity. Unlike the bejowled country-clubbers, that is, for they are surely (?) the Tel Avîv statelet's last and best (and whitest) hope.

Cuius contrarium est verum is the main trouble with that bologna. Big Management country-clubbers won't be caught dead usin’ the blessèd and mysterious word Shô’â in vain, but when it comes to ad rem, they are no more reliable, from a chauvinist Telavîvestání point view, than the Big Management Party base ’n’ vile are. The country-clubbers may even be less reliable, insofar as the dittoloons are most unlikely ever to have a chance to profit financially from sellin’ Jewish Statism down the river. Whereas . . . .

But I beg thee's pardon, Dr. Bones! I should not be going on at that level of neo-Levantine analysis because Prof. Krugman is nowhere near it. He just wants to have his Dachau (their Dachau?) to tar the dark pullulatin’ mass of wingnutettes and wingnuts with -- like 99.44% of the wombscholars and Niedergedümmte whom Krugman has in mind to besmirch, "anti-Semitism" is the worst (the least respectable) no-no that he can think of off-hand. (And if he thought for thirty minutes, maybe he still wouldn't find anything less toney or more obnoxious.)

"Anti-Semitism" is so convenient a stinkfruit to lob that few of the lobbers pay much attention to whether they are strictly speaking justified in deploying such sentimental-ideological weaponry. In the long run, this insouciance is bound to reduce the efficacy of this all but nuke-you-larry rhetorical weapon, but unfortunately the long run has not quite arrived yet.

Meanwhile, one can more or less say "Krugman is acting no better than militant extremist Republicaniacs act." I grant that Dachau abuse and bad Adolf analogies are entirely political in every sense here in our holy Homeland™ -- so thee sees, Dr. Bones, that the Sage of Mammon can do what everybody in these parts can only call ‘politics’.

Yet a grumbler may grumble, "How one wishes that Comrade Krugman were able to do good politics as well as bad! That he could do all politics well, even!"

It may be a silver lining to the cloud, or only an inadvertance, that our analyst overlooked the signbearer or signbearers at Freiherr von Kantor's Party's little human event who skipped the NSDAP and went straight for the economic jugular:

That was the main difference between the 9/12 protests and Thursday's rally. While congressional Republicans largely responded to the September event, they spearheaded this one. Boehner stood alongside Jon Voight as he called Obama a liar and propagandist. (There were no calls for a Joe Wilson-style apology.) Cantor stood there while protesters raised signs suggesting that Obama "takes his orders from the Rothschilds," the family that was once central to theories of Jewish world dominance.

While we are picking on our own good-guy analyst Krugman, Dr. Bones, we may spare a drop of vinegar or two for Mr. Christopher Beam at Slate, who evidently can't see the nose in front of his face. It sure sounds from what her writes himself as if the Rothschilds are as central as ever over in the Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy Square district of Wingnut City. That old-fashioned quarter is losin’ population as a whole, no doubt, as young loons and neoloons of all ages move out to suburbs like Rio Limbaugh and Port St. Lucie, or maybe to beautiful downtown Hooverville. Yet as long as the district continues to be inhabited at all, that splendiferous equestrian statue of St. George slayin’ Baron James de R. must stand at its very saunter.

Anybody who scribbles for a living the way Mr. Beam presumably does ought to be able to appreciate that signwavers eccentrically affiliated to the Party of Wisdom and Virtue (LLC) can speak of "Rothschilds" figuratively or generically, without knowin' or carin' whether Meyer Amstel's DNA has gone extinct, or whether, if it survives, those afflicted by it still own anythin’ worth dhimmí wignutettes and wingnuts moanin’ about.

To be sure, the wombscholars in question would have done better, probably, to pick on M. de Soros or the like, some rootless cosmoplutocrat still alive and well and rakin’ in the shekels. But Father Zeus knows best about wombscholars.

Healthy days.


___
[1]

... a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation ... large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare" ... grotesque ...ominous ... wasn’t a fringe event ... billed as a G.O.P. press conference .... [Partei-Neukamerad E. von K]antor criticism after the fact: the signs were 'inappropriate' and the use of Hitler comparisons by such people as ... conjures up images that frankly are not, I think, very helpful."

[2] My notions of what our apoplectically complected and well-bejowled classes like to do for fun and profit are probably a few decades out of date. For instance, is there a Union League Club at Washin’ton City?

Yet it is great fun to guess about such things from outside the barbed wire strung around the elephant graveyard! What can the Big-Managerial neocomrades be up to, deep inside their Gated Community?

Maybe, for instance, Von Kantor and his ideobuddies shoulda been at a prayer luncheon with Neocomrade Th. J. Donohue of The White Chamber ? Political Capitalism of the traditional TopPercenterly sort could sure do with a little boost from Father Zeus and Aunt Astarte at the moment, results from VA and NJ notwithstanding.

Mais que sçay-je?

"O.K., folks, this is it"

Prof. Krugman reflects like a child when he gets away from economics, Dr. Bones. The Muses and thee and I have long agreed about that.

On the other hand, some human events are so obvious that even Nobel Prize kiddies can scarcely avoid noticing them:

O.K., folks, this is it. It’s the defining moment for health care reform. Past efforts to give Americans what citizens of every other advanced nation already have — guaranteed access to essential care — have ended not with a bang, but with a whimper, usually dying in committee without ever making it to a vote. But this time, ....

... and so forth, and so on down to

... each player has to decide whether he or she is going to help it across the finish line or stand in its way.

At that point, P.K. has to start talking about the players a little to analyze the state of play, and quality lapses accordingly.

Is it acceptable that Krugmanite analysis should treat the Party of ¡JUST VOTE NO! as if they were invaders from neo-Mars, extraterrestrial critters with secret-sectorian motivations of Endarkenment inscrutable to merely human(e) criticism and philosophy. There exists no a priori political reason why our neo-Martian factions should want earthie scum to be particularly healthy, after all. Economically considered, however, I should think there is quite a strong case for guessing in advance that they'd much prefer their earthies poor and sick -- less competition for the lottery-winnin’ classes, don't you know?

Well, of course thee knows, Dr. Bones, the question du jour is what Prof. Krugman knoweth about militant extremist Republicaniacs. And there is no telling how much that may be when he has no more to say than this:

For conservatives, of course, it’s an easy decision: they don’t want Americans to have universal coverage, and they don’t want President Obama to succeed.

That oracle is especially remarkable insofar as its Sybil plainly agrees with us about the neo-Martians wantin’ to keep the unwashed earthie hordes at a permanent medical disadvantage if they possibly can. Not ,many pundits are willing to be that rude about Foxcuckooland, after all.

But that is just the trouble with it, considered as political exegesis. The fact that scarcely anybody else says such nasty things about the Party of Wisdom and Virtue and Goldwater and Atwater by itself brings a sort of obligation, I should think, to explain why such harsh sayings are necessary. But Prof. K. does not think like that, obviously! He feels that he can toss out "conservatives ... don’t want Americans to have universal coverage" as if this were one of Miss Austen's truths universally acknowledged, as uncontroversial as Natural Selection or twice two being four.

Anyway, there it is: Prof. Krugman certainly does have the Republicaniacs’ number down right, even if there is no clue how he calculated it.

As he moves away from America's Otherparty, he becomes more reflective, or at any rate longer-winded. Part of the wind is wasted, as I account it, on a pretty much imaginary Threat from the Left:

There are still some reform advocates who won’t accept anything short of a full transition to Medicare for all as opposed to a hybrid, compromise system that relies heavily on private insurers. And even those who have reconciled themselves to the political realities are disappointed that the bill doesn’t include a “strong” public option, with payment rates linked to those set by Medicare.

Thee will see, Dr. Bones, that Prof. Krugman is here in violation of the Kirkegaardian Imperative: is he attempting to describe these purist comrades’ position, or is he prescribing for their supposed ‘disappointment’? Plainly both -- and neither gets done very well.

Plus Paul Krugman pointing to "political realities" remains eternally on a par with Lord Byron doing metaphysics and rocket science. [1] Caveat emptor.

Since none of this is what an adult analyst would call ‘analysis’ with a straight face, there is no reason to be surprised when it degenerates into a two-pronged _ad hominem_ offensive against Neocomrade Senator J. Lieberman (I-CT) and Neocomrade F. Hiatt (R-Fox on 15th Street). Such a diatribe is far too narrow to prove anything, but at least this one is fun to read -- and no worse than the twin self-servicers have comin’ to ’em.

The trouble is that before getting down to the fun part the professor solemnly suggests that these two swallows or buzzards represent some sort of organized summer, a "group ... that, while its members are clearly uncomfortable with the idea of passing health care reform, the’re having a hard time explaining exactly what their problem is." [2]

If one were to start with the child's ‘group’ rather than with its gruesome twosome, one might make something of that as political analysis. Unfortunately neocomrades of, and fellow-travellers with, the Party of Big management, specimens like J. Lieberman and F. Hiatt, would not belong to the analytically plausible group. Good typical folks who "are clearly uncomfortable with the idea of passing health care reform" simply say nothin’ about it, as why on earth should they say anythin’? If they luck out, the Wingnutticans will manage to defeat it, and yet they themselves, the good typicals, won't be on record as actually havin' said anythin’ rude about their socio-economico-educationalistico inferiors. And obviously they will also better placed that way if perchance the repulsive obamanation does somehow slip through the neo-Martian mesh and get enacted. [3]

Holy Joe of Hartford and NeoEditor Freddie of F-15 come trailin' long paper chains behind ’em, as by their respective professions they necessarily must. To make those two neocomrades poster boys for the Buzzards of Silence crew is absurd analytically.













___
[1] To specify the puerility: our wannabe analyst has overlooked the pretty obvious point that this doctrinaire factionette does not exist in the Senate or the House of Representatives, and thus can scarcely affect the outcome at this late stage of the match.

But it's possible, I guess, that the child is really just apologizing to a person or persons unnamed who (very unreasonably) expected it to adopt an attitude like "I am disappointed! This bill is utterly unacceptable!! Harrrrrrrrrrrr-UMPH!!!"


[2] There is no way to save the grammatical appearances there, I think, with or without recasting it for use in Mr. McCloskey's sentence rather than in Dr. Krugman's. Oh, well: transit [sic] gloria mundi . . . .


[3] Though not very useful as is, the kiddie account does have the peripheral merit of directing one's attention to what comes next -- at least, it directed my attention that way. Though to be sure I was out looking for deficiencies in the P. Krugman product line at the time.

Among the things the child has overlooked is how the Party of Grant and Hoover (and Wisdom and Virtue) will have placed itself permanently at odds with ‘America’ if the damn thing does pass. Especially if ‘America’ were to decide -- Father Zeus forfend so awful an outcome! -- "passing health care reform" has been quite a success and are happy that ‘we’ did it back in '09.

Under the circumstances, the neo-Martians will have not a prayer of grabbin’ credit for it themselves. They have made their bad attitude perfectly clear to everybody except possibly Neocomradess Senator O. Snowe of ME. (Why, even Prof. Krugman got it right!)

It follows that all the Daughters of Virtue and Sons of Wisdom, the whole Party pack of Goldwaterites and Atwateroids, cannot possibly leave it alone afterwards. They must do everythin’ they possibly can to sabotage it. "In mere self-defense," they would say.

One cannot fairly say that Foxcuckooland and the Wall Street Jingo "will go nuts," for of course that has happened already. But doubtless whole new vistas of militant extremist wingnuttiness will open before us on a regular basis until the neo-Martians either manage to discredit and nullify the whole affair or else arrive at a point where ‘America’ despises them for continuin’ to try to take it away, thus making further perseverance in preachin’ vicarious rugged individualism an absolutely unmistakable route to the elephant graveyard.

The closest thing to it in the annals of the holy Homeland™ is, I take it, the so-called Civil-Rights Movement, and that is not very close. The Foxies and the Jingos have no trouble stealin’ a lot of the anti-segregation credit for their Party of Big Management. And it is not even all stealin', since St. Ike and Mr. Chief Justice Warren and the rest of the "l*b*r*l Republicans" that have been subsequently flushed out of the Big Party like so many used contraceptives to make more elbow-room for Goldwaterites and Atwateroids were authentically anti-segregationist.

But the biggest difference is not that on this occasion the ranks of the neo-Martians are monolithic, but rather the identity of the beneficiaries. Very few of those who have personally benefited from "civil rights" have ever felt strongly tempted to vote for Republicaniac candidates. But if "the idea of passing health care reform" were ever to achieve the general respectability that still attaches--despite all the heroic efforts of Foxcuckooland!--to Medicare and Social Security, why, neo-Martian politics would at once become almost impossible.

The GOP geniuses and certain layers of their Party base ’n’ vile could still wish that their own voters died young and thus got out of the way of their predestined betters, but they could not possibly say so out loud. Unless democracy and liberalism and the party of America are destroyed by some extraneous force not yet visible at all, that will be no more a possible politics in 2028 than it was in 1828, when the League of Lottery Winners first ran into General Jackson of New Orleans and Mr. Van Buren of New York.

"They just aren't smart enough to recognize it"

(( Once again, Dr. Bones, I have decided to store my supposed pearls here rather than cast them before possibly unappreciative swine over yonder )).

---

---

It is not helpful for analytical purposes, I think, to take so peculiar a specimen as little Tommy Wobble with the big moustache [1] as the representative of a class, as typical of anything or anybody much beyond the specimen itself.

To be sure, as an outrageous instance of what it *means* to be grossly overrewarded for being decidedly undertalented, TLF will do nicely. But I think we all have an adequate notion of that syndrome in advance and do not absolutely require invidious particular examples. Fun though they always are.

Considered as a class, economic or moralistic, protected "movers and shakers with real initiative" are not likely to recognize themselves in a creature that seems to have no initiative of its own, but merely rehashes the views of whomever it last had lunch with at the Union League Club or the Chamber of Protectionism. (Or the local equivalent thereof at whatever capital city of capita..., of globalism, I mean, Tommy jetted to last.)

Often the jackdaw makes plain who he is swiping the ideas in ‘his’ New York Times Company column this morning -- hi there, Mister Lawrence Katz of H*rv*rd! -- but quite often he doesn't.

It would be handy for Dean Baker's argument (Prosecutor Baker’s indictment?) if it could be shown that little Tommy F. always drops the names of the seven-to-twenty-digit Manhattanite or Ivy League overcompensateds when they are allowed to do his thinking for him, but hushes up mere five-and-six digiteers from, say, Bangalore or Xiamen. Although I suspect this is more or less the case, and although it is probably a sort of case widespread out there in overcompensated-mover-and-shakerdom, Mr. Friedman can always fall back with some plausibility on a ‘journalistic’ excuse about not troubling his corporation's customers with too many names that they never heard of before.

Run-of-the-mill protecteds and overcompensateds have no need to make any sort of public disclosures at all, at least not before they take to it on their defense attorneys’ advice. Whereas if we humble did not hear from T. L. Friedman fairly regularly, why, even the _Times_ might begin to wonder about that salary of his.



Moving on to the gloomy Dean's general conclusion,

"Th[is fairy] story of the elites doing well in the global economy is not one about their education and savvy, it's about protectionism. They just aren't smart enough to recognize it,"

I wonder if ‘protectionism’ is the exact right word for what is going on. For what has _always_ been going on in the world. The good folks who are OnePercenters already much prefer that that the OnePercenters of tomorrow should look more or less like themselves. To call such commonplace human self-preferencing ‘protectionism’ instead of, say, _peccatum originale_ makes it out a good deal more specifically economic and legal and indeed, conscious and deliberate, than it really is.

I don't think it is altogether accidental that our preacher wanders off into an unsatisfactory by-way in which he admits that the ascendancy of our own local OnePercenterdom is not primarily a matter of laws and law enforcement: "Maybe no one enforces the [‘prevailing wage’] law today, but there is no guarantee that it won't be enforced tomorrow."

No *guarantee* against enforcement, to be sure, yet few things are less likely to actually happen. If the likes of T. L. Friedman were, collectively, in any serious danger of law enforcement they would already have lost their ascendancy. They would then be in the position of the French First- and Second-Estaters of about 1788, their doom irrevocably decreed even if not yet executed upon them.

But that is a fantastic idea, or looks fantastic to me at least. Surely Friedman, Rove, Cheney & Associates. are quite as securely _legibus solutus_ as ever? Not each one of them individually, of course, but the whole crew of gentry and neogentry taken together?

I certainly *wish* that the OnePercenters of 2009 were a little more afraid of their financial and social and educationalistic/credentialistic [2] inferiors then they act, but that is far from the same thing as supposing that they have any serious need to worry about preservation of their exalted status. Plainly they do not. [3]

Healthy days.


___
[1] Tommy's wobble side I shall leave alone. Also the facial hair, although the former would be the most important point about the specimen if considered in isolation. The appearance of infinite zig-zagging results naturally enough from Master Tommy's rarely stealing from the same data bank twice.


[2] ‘Credentialistic’ is important. In a country as large as ours, it is out of the question to expect all incumbent OnePercenters to know one another personally even at second or third hand. So there has to be some impersonal or ‘objective’ mechanism to help them recognize one another reliably and not admit somebody from the scheduled castes by mistake.

In fact, there are scads and scads of such mechanisms available. However one should bear two points in mind: (1) none of them are backed by the force of law, and (2) the gentry and neogentry will short-circuit these devices as much as possible when they can, as for instance with that off-the-record (hopefully!) phone call or e-mail that makes quite clear what the formal letter of recommendation REALLY meant to imply about the candidate.

That is to say, our Friedman-Rove-Cheney-H*rv*rd-NYTC classes do not really depend on "wink, wink; nod, nod" much more than they depend on formal legislation, despite the way their characteristic operations tend to look from the outside. Their true _modus operandi_ lies somewhere in between.


[3] This is our fault, not theirs, obviously. If we were less tame, our betters would be less insufferable and more immune from Dean Baker zingers. No doubt about it!

Considered as a pure moralist (which is the way I myself consider him, even though I understand that it is not quite what he intends), the Dean runs off the rails at the very end of his sermonette with "They just aren't smart enough to recognize it."

That won't do, because not wishing to know anything against oneself has little to do with ‘smart’ unless the word is twisted like a pretzel. Worse -- from a purely moralistical standpoint -- is that this formulation tends to suggest that we good guys ARE "smart enough."

Like everything else that tends towards self-flattery and self-exceptionalizing, that product is to be avoided.

Let's leave the whole self-wunnerfulness _shtyk_ to Rio Limbaugh, shall we?

"performing a valuable public service in calling attention"

Once again, Dr. Bones, I think I shall store my pearls here rather than scatter them abroad. Look what patrons of the TPM Café were spared:

The shorters were actually performing a valuable public service in calling attention to the bad financial state of these companies.

The technical economics of that is over my poor head, yet talk about the nature of The Valuable can perhaps be taken in an inferior, a purely moralistical, kind of way. (Adam Smith of Edinburgh got the whole Ec. 10 racket started in that way, did he not? I mean, by rising above commonplace right-and-wrong into loftier and more distant spheres of neo-speculation . . . .)

At that level, assuming the level exists, to assent to Dr. Baker's proposition would involve believing that it is always better to know any available bad news in full.

To get away from Lord Mammon altogether: it would be better, for this brand of moralist, to be aware that she will be in the cemetary on this day next year rather than scrape through ten of the twelve months thinking her disease to be indigestion rather than cancer.

That sounds edifying, in a rather godawful way. It may well be over one's head as being too stern and Spartan for actually living up to, but there are not, I think, any intellectual difficulties about maintaining that IT IS ALWAYS BETTER TO KNOW FOR SURE. In particular, it is better to know when there is nothing at all that the knowledge can do to ward off some fate at least as bad as death.

Anyway, I find that sort of stance edifying, and assume that one must always pretend to want to know the bad news in full at the earliest possible date, even if one would really much rather play "wink, wink; nod, nod" games. To put oneself in the public position of wishing to be deceived is unworthy of a rational creature. It invites contempt from other rational creatures --does it not? -- to get caught acting "like an ostrich" rather than like Leonidas at Thermopylae. Even knowing that most of the others are privately quite as cowardly as oneself does not take all the sting out of it.

However things look a little different when one turns away from rational creatures in the abstract to, say, militant extremist Republicans. Or even only as far off "the Bernanke, Paulson, Geithner crew." Such gentry cannot think only of themselves the way M. Pascal [1] and you and I can. Our managerial betters are in the position of having to manage the news for their subjects, not just know it and live with it themselves.

Now although I have only a foggy idea what precious truths are inculcated into M.B.A. candidates over at the H*rv*rd Victory School, I feel pretty sure that perpetual full disclosure on the down side is not among them. Our Big Managers may or may not be able to confront fiasco and calamity as individuals with a steeady glance and a stiff upper lip, but when it comes to big-managing bad news for the benefit of their social and economic inferiors, they pretty well never do anything of the sort. The slogan "Boost, don't knock!" may be fifty years or more out of date philologically, but as far as I can see, it still describes how those good folks behave.

If, for example, Big Management is entirely sure that Acme Widget LLC will be gone with the wind six months from now, they will try to keep that information from their own hired hands as long as possible. (This is rather tough on the hired hands, actually. Though perhaps in the present state of the economy they could not find another position no matter how soon they learn that they are going to need one.)

I don't think I am letting technical economics in the back door again by saying this, because what is getting big-managed here is rather employee psychology than anything directly to do with balance sheets. Happy are they who have never had anything to do with employee psychology from the bottom side looking up!

Still, it is quite true that the B. M. gentry would only make their own lives all the more difficult if stockholders and suppliers and customers and so forth -- persons standing in a more strictly economic relationship to Big Management --were to learn about the impending Doom of Acme prematurely. Though I do not much care for our incumbent economic OnePercenters, there is no need to suppose that "Boost, don't knock!" is solely a matter of making life up in the executive penthouse less stressful for them. H*rv*rd Victory School lecturers can appeal to a number of cases in which the weaker side won (literal, military) battles partly because the rank and file had no clue how badly they were outnumbered. Gen. Leonidas was rather an extreme case than the typical case, after all.

On the other hand, circumstances have changed at least a little in the course of two dozen centuries. For a start, Gen. Leonidas did not have to worry about what crazy -- or, worse still, what entirely accurate -- notions about the Persians his troops might be picking up on the Internet. Whereas nowadays any ignoramus who starts by wanting to think that "the Bernanke, Paulson, Geithner crew" are hopelessly out of touch with reality will have no difficulty in gathering lots and lots of ‘evidence’ to that effect out in WWWonderland. Though naturally BP&G loyalists can muster quite as much favorable tripe and baloney. Though nobody is, perhaps, quite as ignorant in 2009 as the traditional "Boost, don't knock" panacea requires, it may be that a universal self-knowledge of things that are not actually so is even worse.

The main point, though, is that the instincts of Big Management have not changed at all in the sixty or seventy years since they shoved the legal owners of our secret-sector business corporations out of their path and began to rule more or less unchecked. [2] Full disclosure pretty well never strikes your HVS MBA as a good idea, and least of all when she would have to disclose negative information. Information that might even be used against her, should it fall into the wrong hands.

Happy days.



___
[1] Travaillons donc à bien penser: Voilà le principe de la morale.


[2] Berle and Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, New York, 1932.

Read what he wrote, and reach your own conclusions

"Read what he wrote, and reach your own conclusions."

That is only too easy to say, Dr. Bones, even when the sayer does not actually live far out in Foxcuckooland. But it can be not easy at all to follow through.

I mean, to read what the G. O. Party neocomrade wrote, -- the conclusions part is no trickier than usual. Indeed, sometimes I get the feeling that my own conclusions about the militant extremist GOP come first, and that I do not go about to examine each new bill of goods from Hooverville and Wingnut City and Rio Limbaigh with Arctic or Martian dispassion.

Nevertheless, it was a whole new experience (for the present keyboard) to be referred to a tendentious URL by a cultivated despiser thereof, and discover that its proprietor/perpetrator has neither left his original-intent contemptibility alone, nor silently and undetectably patched it up, but rather ...

... but ....

Well, there IS a strong temptation to say 'Go look for yourself!' at this juncture. And it would do nobody any harm if she did.

Still, one ought to be able to describe such things, and not be reduced to wordless wonder each time Kennebunkport-Crawford Dynasty gentry, or one of their hired-hand or volunteer dubyapologists, discover a new twist.

So then: Neocomrade M. Ambinder has gone hog-wild with that STRIKEOUT gizmo from HTML in his second paragraph. One might, perhaps, call neo-Ambinderism the ‘journalistic’ equivalent of an octopus retreatin’ behind a cloud of her own ‘ink’.

I'm not even very interested, it turns out, in drawing my own conclusions about this ploy. It is a lot more fun to wonder what impression this specimen can have been hopin’ to cause folks to draw about its off-beat behaviour. There may not even be a definite conclusion yet, I won't know for sure until I work through the stage of patting my political pocket to make sure the wallet is still there. So to speak.

Though the ploy be off-beat, the plight of the ployster is not. Neocomrade M. Ambinder has merely discovered that somethin’ he originally dismissed as rubbish because it was advanced by a sentimentally or ‘ideologically’ displeasin’ source. [1]

This might have happened to anybody. In fact, it does happen to somebody often enough to get included in Prof. Fisher’s Historians’ Fallacies several decades ago. Fisher has, as I recall, a crazed Polish chauvinist caught claiming, out of sheer Bircher-worthy dottiness, that Germany invaded his holy Homeland, 1 September 1939. In spite of which, that DOES happen to be what actually happened.

Or at least there was a firm consensus that that is what had happened back when Dr. Fisher wrote the book. Now that on has encountered the Invisible Empire of Karl Rove -- "'That is not the way the world really works anymore. WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- WE will act again, creating other new realities..." &c. &c. -- one would rather like to ask Dr. Fisher if he has reconsidered the supposed fallacy.

It occurs to me as I scribble that Neocomrade M. Ambinder might conceivably be buildin' deliberately on foundations laid for himself and for the Party of Big Management by Neocomrade Karl, Lord Rove. That is to say, the aspirin’ neoteric leaves a few fragments and ruins of her ‘journalism’ in its bad --its pre-invisible and subimperial-- manner around to set off the main attraction. Like the Kaiserwilhelmkirche in Berlin, don't you know?

I can frame no clear and distinct idea why a neocomrade M. Ambinder would wish to do that, but then, I have never altogether understood about the Kaiserwilhelmkirche either. So that’s all right.

Perhaps Coventry Cathedral would be a better analogue, though, since we get the Revised Standard Version set down right next to the picturesque rubble, as follows:

[Addition. That's a hasty generalization. Many of the loudest voices were reflexively anti-Bush, but I can't accurately describe the motivations of everyone, much less a majority, of those who were skeptical. There were plenty of non-liberals who believed that the terror threats were exaggerated.]

Unless I am mistaken, Dr. Bones, we do not have complete repentance of sin and amendment of neo-life here, because the neocomrade ‘journalist’ still manages to give the impression that he can "accurately describe the motivations" of most folks. It's only maybe thirty-eight per ten thousand cases in which Dr. Ambinder gets his diagnoses wrong.

More importantly, it appears that charter members of the neocomradely community do not look at this matter the way Prof. Krugman and Dr. Fisher and you and I do. For decent political grown-ups, the chief point would be that Germany really did invade Poland. For the like of M. Ambinder, however, it is rather that M. Ambinder still cannot detect the secret- or private-sector motives of the heart with perfect reliability. At least, not when it comes to spottin’ rabid Polak patriotism.

We humble want to hear about ‘facts’ or "objective reality" or the like. Something of that sort, despite all the critical and philosophical problems. Whereas Neocomrade Dr. M. Ambinder much prefers talkin’ about the current state of Neocomrade Dr. M. Ambinder’s diagnostic methodology.

It really does look as if subtle degenerative influences from the Rovan Empire may be at work here, does it not?

Yet perhaps not, after all, for this nifty neoism of Ambinder’s may be at bottom no more than that same old tune that Shakespeare set words to in his day: Richard loves Richard. That is, I am I.

Mais que sçay-je?

Happy days.


______
[1] That's my own cultivated-despiser type formulation, obviously. The exact words that get the Striveover Therapy (Pat. Pend.) treatment were "those folks based on gut hatred for [President Bush]" -- intelligibility requires that the name of George XLIII be crossed out too, but possibly the neocomrade aimed at intensifyin’ his rhetorical shtyk by leavin' the ostensibly corrected sentence ungrammatical?

As I have moaned already, Dr. Bones, it is not given to me to grasp exactly what Neocomrade M. Ambinder is aimin’ at ‘journalistically’ when he behaves like this.

Also sprach 'sbvpav'

Mr. Poster 'sbvpav' illustrates how even good guys listen pretty selectively. His summary of the health care agenda of President Summers and Mr. Obama is half right. Since 'sbvpav' is a good guy, the other half is not wingnuttified into "false witness," it is just plain AWOL, omitted altogether.

Mr. Poster says (P-0) "no one is going to be forced into the public option," which merits being numbered as zero because S&O are not, of course, starry-eyed libertarians out to increase the sphere of everybody's self-freedomisation.

His (P-1) "keeping private insurers honest by providing competition, where there is none now, and over time lowering the over-all cost of insurance for all" is more to the point, unless you think it is two points. Here one can actually find Mr. Obama saying more or less the same thing,

"Point number two, it has to bend the cost curve. What that means is that we've got to create a -- a plan that experts credibly say will reduce health care inflation. Because if all we're doing is adding more people, but we're not controlling costs, that will blow up the deficit over the long term, and it will blow up the burdens on individual families and businesses. We've got to get control of our costs. We spend $6,000 more than any other advanced country per person on health care. That's number two."

Then there is Mr. Poster's (P-2), universality of coverage, "not [to] lose sight of the goal: health insurance for all, a right not a privilege." That paraphrase does not, as it happens, correspond to anything that Mr. Obama said to Neocomrade M. Smerconish on Thursday afternoon, although probably he and President Summers are indeed for universality in principle. (Mr. Obama may have been pandering by his silence to the passionate desire of many at Wingnut City to have uncredentialled wetbacks drop dead in the street rather than crowd the emergency rooms. But God knows best.)

(P-3) is "the ability to purchase affordable health care for yourself and your family even with a pre-existing condition; assurance and the security of knowing when you get ill, your insurance will be there for you and not canceled." This one is soundly based. Mr. O. said

Number three, we've got to have the insurance reforms I talked about for people who already have health insurance, and that means making sure you can get health insurance even if you've got a pre-existing condition, making sure that you're not burdened by lifetime caps, making sure that insurance companies can't drop you just because you get sick or because you're older or because you're not as healthy. So making sure that there are basic insurance protections, that's very important."

Mr. Poster's (P-4), "preventive care such as routine yearly exams and nutritional counseling," was not in Mr. Obama's 20 August bullet points at all. Unlike universality, I don't think that angle was left out merely by accident or as part of a deliberate anti-reactionary strategy of persuasion. Probably Summers and Obama really do take only a contingent interest in medical prevention: if it helps cut costs, fine, include it under that rubric. But prevention may not cut costs, and in any case it is not an end that S&O seek for its own sake.

(Presumably 'sbvpav' does think of prevention as an end in itself. That passage sounds to me as if Dr. Procrustes wants to fit the Administration’s program into a preconceived agenda of his own and finds the job a bit challenging: wrench, twist, fold, staple, mutilate! But God knows best.)

Finally (P-5) is another one that might be numbered zero, "the financial security of Medicare sustainable for all when they reach 65 and the closing of the doughnut hole in prescription drug prices." That is great stuff and I'm all for it, and so is Mr. Obama, almost certainly, and maybe Larry S. is for it as well -- BUT this is "flowers that bloom in the spring" stuff as regards the actual case at hand.

Unless I have misunderstood radically, Medicare and Medicaid, pensioners and poor folks, are simply not what the now fuss is about, though no doubt universality will require that certain persons who are already eligible for these programs get hooked up to them. Plus naturally if closing "doughnut holes" in them saves money that can be spent on the actual objectives, that is OK too. But bucks are fungible: patching holes in the Pentagon budget, or that of the National Endowment for the Arts, would do just as well.

***

I have already cited Mr. Obama's second and third bullet points, (O-2) "bend the cost curve" and (O-3) regulate the secret-sector insurance industry with unrelenting rigor.

As I began by complaining, that leaves half the Administration’s stuff out. The other half went like this, as told by Mr. Obama to Neocomrade M. A. Smerconish and the dittoheads:

(O-1)"Now, Tracy, you had a good point about, what are the bullet points that I want? Number one, it's got to be deficit-neutral. This has to be paid for, because in the past some of the health care plans that we've put forward have not been paid for. A good example of this was the prescription drug benefit for seniors. That was an important thing to do, but we never actually figured out how to pay for it. That just went directly into the deficit and the national debt. We can't afford to do that. So that would be point number one." (O-4) "Number four is, I want to make sure that we have a health exchange, as I just described, that is similar to what members of Congress have, where you will have a set of options. If you're a small business, if you're an individual, self-employed, you have trouble getting health insurance right now, you can go and look at a bunch of options, and we've got to make it affordable for middle-class families. So part of the plan has to be that, if you can't afford a market-based premium, that we're giving you a little bit of help and you're able to get health insurance."

I daresay President Summers feels quite as passionately about "deficit-neutrality" as Mr. Poster feels about "Death to obesity!" But, life being unfair, it is Larry who gets to set the agenda.

Mr. Obama's fourth bullet is admittedly not as clear and crisp as one would wish. "A health exchange" may or may not be the same thing as "a public option that people could sign up for." It may or may not be the same thing as "a coöperative." (The first quoted scrap is from Mr. Obama, the second, from Neocomrade M. A. Smerconish.)

Mr. O. never mentioned coöps at all, which falls in with my own guess that the Administration is not really much interested in that particular gimmick. But I could be wrong. If avoiding the subject was intended as another wingnut-management technique, why Mr. Obama should think coöperatives particularly obnoxious to Rio Limbaugh would be a puzzle: the GOP base and vile would, I think, need a stiff course of agitprop before they grasp how monstrous a threat to the blessèd AEIdeology coöperative medical insurance would be. At the moment the typical neocomradely response would be along the lines of "Huh?"

Hearing Mr. Obama live, I thought it plain that he did not have his bullet points written down in advance of Neocomradess ‘Tracy’ askin’ him to set them forth. (Mr. Obama has been getting better at ex tempore lately, I am happy to imagine.)

In context it sounded as if the phrase "health exchange" came in as a description of the current program for (civilian) Fedguv employees, Neocomrade ‘Ernie’ havin’ set the stage for it as follows:

"Congress has voted, to my understanding, not to join the public plan once it passes, because they want to keep their good federal plan. Would you be willing to either urge Congress to have the federal employees join the public plan or would you be willing to urge Congress to somehow open up the federal health plan to all Americans?"

Now strictly speaking, USAID is beside the point for the same reasons that Medicare and Medicaid are beside the point. Probably the Veterans Administration can be tossed in as well, to make four parts of the existing system (or ‘system’) that do not urgently need to be fixed because they are not obviously broke. Mr. Obama was perhaps alluding vaguely to the non-brokenness of USAID when he promoted "a health exchange" to the status of an ad hoc bullet point. He gave the Smerconishian dittohead (what I thought) rather a good exposition of how and why USAID works, culminating as follows,

"Now, what we have said is, let's make a public option one choice of many choices that are available to people who are joining the exchange. And I see nothing wrong with potentially having that public option as one option for federal employees, as well."

I am not entirely sure what is going on here, although it does look as if Mr. Obama thinks a longer menu to choose from is always eo ipso a better menu. Call it ‘diversity’! Maybe. [1]

But God knows best.

Happy days.


___
[1] President Summers is not likely to be quite so great a fan of diversity. With him, "bend the cost curve" is, as befits a past master of Chicagonomics, pretty well the whole megillah. Presented with an immensely long menu of options, I betcha the first thing Larry would do is click to sort them by "Price: Low to High" just as we humble do over Chez Amazon.

(But God knows best about President Summers!)

"Wow! There is a real American Neo-Fascist Movement abroad."

Picking on other people's epiphanies is a dubious game. It is awfully likely that one will just make them angry when they figure out that one is not really impressed by, say,

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.

That little gem happens to be the late Mr. James of H*rv*rd self-intoxicated with nitrous oxide [1].

A critic might plausibly crititicize that the N2O tale gets even funnier when wild Bill, restored to cold blood, more or less, attempts to discredit poor Herr Prof. Dr. Hegel with a Jamesocentric pseudepiphany. Tastes may, however, vary on such funninesses.

***

Meanwhile, back at the ranch,

"Do you think people should be able to bring a loaded gun and sit in the first row of a President Obama event? And the gun owners flack says --"Yes."

Not quite on the same level as literature, is it? But perhaps to weigh it against the laughin’ gas would not be too imbalanced and unfair? Let's try it a little and see what happens, shall we?

I have to wonder, myself, what Dr. Taplin thinks Neocomrade G. O. Flack might have said, had he said anythin’ other than YES. There might be something to be said, of course, if there existed a municipal or state or Fedguv law against how these alleged ‘people’ behaved in the presence of their POTUS. Yet if the seer has omitted that small point when he rehearses the revelatory narrative, we could safely ignore the Visions of Taplin now and forever.

More to the point, militant extremist Republicans will, as I conjecture, take the line that if the gun-totin’ was not illegal, there is simply nothin’ more to be said.

As usual, I’d take the sweet puppies of the Right to be perfectly sincere subjectively when they take that line. Sincere or not, most of ’em are far from clever enough to notice, let alone exploit, the fact that they could put decent political grown-ups on the defensive by snappin’ right back with "And just what the [expletive] do you think was wrong with it, if it's not illegal, Mister?"

Not a hard question! One can think of the answer in a flash. The trouble is that, having thought of it, one does not much want to say it out loud. So excuse me if I try to hush it up in a footnote. [2] Wink, wink, nod, nod!

(...)

Reverting to the Visions of Taplin, I maintain that he cannot have beheld Fascism proper, only something that maybe looked a little like it to him.

The F-word gets squabbled over endlessly by boobs and loons, but if we try to apprehend it at the level of a Prussian-style graduate school instead, it is pretty safe to say that Fascism, taken as a generalized brain disease and not just Prime Minister Mussolini, was an Old Euro phenomenon. As Yank-style gun-totin’ and the smelly orthodoxies of the National Rifle Association are not.

The whole ethos is different. For one thing, in Italy and Germany and Hungary and Roumania &c. -- even in France and Britain -- if you did spot a 1930’s Fascist toting a gun, the odds were about ten thousand to one that she would be wearing a uniform as well. Very likely a private- or secret-sector uniform rather than a State uniform, but a uniform all the same. Portsmouth NH is not much like that.

In Germany, furthermore, there was a lot of "street fighting." All the books say so. On the other hand, the books never make this street fighting sound much like Al Capone on St. Valentine's day. Presumably the petty heroes of the proletariat and of the Kleinbürgertum went at one another with clubs and daggers and tomahawks -- or possibly Junker swords, inherited or fresh from the pawnshop -- rather than with semiautomatic firearms. The old joke about revolution being impossible in Germany "because the police would never stand for it" cannot be defended by any ideologue who wants his ‘Fascism’ to be ‘revolutionary’, but there is a little something to it all the same. Above a certain level, quite a low one by NRA standards, a State monopoly on the means of violence was successfully maintained from 30 January 1933 all the way down to 8 May 1945.

Italy, and especially Spain, were somewhat less completely devoted to Sicherheit durch Recht und Ordnung, but let's face it, they were Old Euros too -- meaning sad-sack wimps in the eyes of Rancho Crawford and John Galt wannabes. Venereal rather than martial, like Neocomrade Dr. Whoziz put the point.

Five Glocks, two Uzis and one Kalashnikov per household is a scheme that has no connection worth mentioning with Fascism. I should guess off-hand that it is a frontier or settler-colonialist phenomenon at bottom, a provincial and peripheral nastiness whose roots would be far better sought at Johannisberg and Tel Avîv and Alice Springs and the Alamo and the O.K. Corral rather than at Rome, Madrid and Berlin.

If, that is, one is looking for roots in the spirit of a Prussian graduate school seminar room, and not just for some blunt verbal object to throw at the enemies of one's Big Party or one’s tiny factionette.

Mais que sçay-je?

Happy days.


___
[1] The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Psychology, p. 294.

... With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the [laughing-gas] experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. (...) [A]s sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand....

Read Bill's whole NOTE -- it's a hoot any time, but especially suitable for the Silly Season.


[2] Here goes, with emphasis added for the sake of discussion: "NICE people do not gratuitously bring it to an interlocutor’s attention that they could ASSASSINATE her if they chose."

Should they ever stumble across that formulation, no doubt the sweet puppies will bark loudest at me about my crudely saying ‘assassinate’ when that is what I mean. Inevitably they will "know in their heart" (like their late Party neocomrade, B. Goldwater of AZ) that Mr. McCloskey takes for granted that bloody murder is what they crave and that they are thinkin’ of it all the time.

It would avail me not at all to protest--to them--that I take most of their crew to be no worse than rabid self-servicin’ impeachsters left over from ’98. And some not even that.

Which is why I think NICE is even more of a key word than ASSASSINATE. It was not nice for gun-toters to behave like that, but to point out unmistakably that that is how they are behavin’ is an offense against civility as well. If Neocomrade G. O. Flack was five times smarter, he would have thought this ploy up consciously as a way to embarrass such a cultivated despiser of Party and AEIdeology as myself. That idea is merely ridiculous, given the sweet puppies’ average level of mental evolvedness.

All the same, I betcha they knew in their hearts that puttin’ on a show like that one would embarrass liberals and democrats and Democrats generally, and Barák Husáyn Obáma specifically. Exactly how the embarrassment process works few neocomrades will have calculated. Perhaps they did not get much beyond figurin’ that BHO would not think ostentatious gun-totin’ is very nice -- and that it was therefore it would be the perfect thing to do. The Party of Grant and Hoover (of Goldwater! and of ATWATER!!!) have been positively wallowin’ in "No more Mr. Nice Guy" for years, after all. Why, without his I-hate-niceness shtyk, Neocomrade Dr. R. Limbaugh would be out of business in six weeks. (The puppies often bark "politically correct" when we would say ‘nice’. That, too, they’ve been doin’ for years.)

In the small part of the Stupid Party iceberg that is visible above the water, there are a few bright neo-whippersnappers who could consciously think of ASSASSINATE. But doubtless they would tone the thought down and tart it up, even for their own private mental consumption, along traditional holy-Homelandic™ lines of "the people's right to rebel" and A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State ... and so forth and so on. The whippersnapper element will not have intended the fiend Obama to worry about his personal safety, only about maybe finding his régime changed out from under him if he does not start showing Them the People of Wingnut City the respect and deference that they deserve for bein’, like Citizen Rush, infallibly right more than 99.1% of the time. (Not to mention bein’ the only TRUE holy-Homelanders™!)

The whole circus ought to please Prof. MacLuhan down there below where it is always too warm. Gun-totin’ is what a certain specialized kind of wicked elitist would call "symbolic speech." Or call it "picture think." It allows your run-of-the-mill wingnutettes and wingnuts, as opposed to a few señorito-class clevers, to look at the pictures without, I think, EVER formulatin’ anythin’ clearly and distinctly to themselves in old-fashioned words. (Certainly not in icky words like ‘assassinate’!) When the sweet puppies bark offendedly that they certainly never intended to send any message of that sort, they bark honestly enough -- PROVIDED that there cannot be intention without clear and distinct verbal formulation. However a study of the behavior and psychology of lower animals, "dumb beasts" in the narrow sense of wordless beasts, makes this a very questionable proviso.

Be that as it may, picture-think makes analytical difficulties insofar as one can never know for sure what a frog, or a chimpanzee, or a militant extremist Republican, sees in the pictures that she is lookin’ at.

In the case at hand, perhaps the picture thought was (to crystalize it in mere words) that all those bulgin’ pockets visible in the front row of the auditorium reflect great credit on Neocomrade So-and-So for makin’ sure that the citizens with the best politics also got the best seats. How the fiend Obama or the "drive-by media" would react to the bulges may have been quite secondary, although I do not find it easy to imagine that it was absent altogether.