"an irresponsible bill produced by the Old Order"

For reasons that I have not been able to make out clearly, Señorito D. Brooks has never seen his employment by the NYTC as an opportunity to vocifererate for the crude interests of the economic class of his daddy and his mommy and his aunts and his uncles and their neofriends, all the ideological allies and commercial associates of the extended Toppe-Percentile family.

One natural, or rather predictable, result has come to pass: General Arnold and Judas Iscariot would be more welcome at Rio Limbaugh nowadays than little Davey, and that without taking this latest, and most extreme, provocation into account. ’Tis rather as if B. Arnold were to lecture George III on how to be a True Brit for Master Brooks to set up as a better friend to Socialised Medicine (sic) in the holy Homeland™ than a President drawn from the ranks of America’s party. [1]

Whatever was the case yesterday, this morning all of little Davey's bridges to the Big Movement are well and truly burnt: nobody sane on either side of the now impassable ditch is going to waste fifty cents of stimulus on trying to reconstruct that very minor unit of dogmatic infrastructure.

Are we now to be treated to a lecture course from D. Brooks, in his capacity as amateurish social-scientiser, to the effect that the Party neocomrades with whom he has broken off were never really ‘conservatives’ at all? Fortunately NYTC customers are not obliged to read such tripe if the señorito does decide to serve it up. Around these parts it is at least good manners to suppose that everybody else too has long since noticed how the devil herself can play at bein’ an authentic Friend of Eddie Burke™. Mr. Norman Mailer spoofed (?) that point to death as long ago as 1964, working through Senator B. Goldwater’s libertarian scribble with a red pen that bled copiously on every page where Eddie would (presumably) have disagreed with his wannabe epigone. ("Yes, Master Davey, of course you can prove that Burke would have thought highly of the NHS. And furthermore, Queen Anne is dead. Haven't you anything interesting to say?")

Well, in a way the apostate specimen does afford points of interest. If it decides to vend a Genuine Conservatism of its own manufacture, doubtless the new snake oil will contain a stiff dose of the Unitary Executive™ theology that is laid on with a dumptruck in the second half of this article. The Brooks specimen devoutly believes that Congress cannot legislate its way out of a paper bag unassisted.

So, as it happens, do a large number of the Big Management Party neocomrades whom it has just definitively ditched. This thoroughly unconservative dementia seems more suitable to them than to it, although perhaps the militant extremist GOP loyalty to Big Management as a guidin’ principle (rather than as the social class of Harvard Victory School MBA’s) will wane after the bozos have been out of power in the Fedguv a little longer. On the other hand, a sudden conversion to Congressional Government would not get the Big Party any forwarder as long as they continue to be outnumbered on Capitol Hill. Oh, well!

Needless to say, Eddie Burke can be invoked in favour of Big-Management-by-the-Unitary-Executive, although he cannot be invoked very exclusively, considering that every Brit believer in what is called "the omnicompetence of Parliament" thinks so too. In our own holy Homeland™, of course, BMUE is not only unconservative by virtue of being (1) thoroughly neoteric, and (2) patently inconsistent with the views and intents of James Madison and the Gang of ’87, it also (3) labours under the "not invented here" stigma to some extent. If Master Brooks wants to recommend BMUE to the Homelanders anyway, I shall certainly not throw any chauvinistic stones. But it is not quite throwing stones, I trust, to point out that the apostate señorito may not have adequately noticed the way we customarily do things around here.

An hour of Constitutional ‘conversation’ with Senator Byrd of West Virginia might be profitable for little Davey. Amateur social-scientising being what it is, however, such a confrontation might easily be in vain. My shudder-quotes around ‘conversation’ are borrowed from Davey's own, after all.

Happy days.


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[1] It may not be merely an accident that Comrade Krugman sings a vaguely similar tune this morning, "America’s really big fiscal problems lurk over that budget horizon: sooner or later we’re going to have to come to grips with the forces driving up long-run spending — above all, the ever-rising cost of health care." If the señorito and the economist did compare notes in advance of this particular essay question, however, there can hardly have been any substantive meeting of minds. Though partisan, P. K. is also genuinely interested in "really big fiscal problems" and all that jazz, whereas Davey seems mostly interested in Davey.