Good Taste v. Good Government

Thee may have noticed, Mr. Bones, how little our prescriptive betters care for

the peasants-with-pitchforks shtyk. It is rather a happy coincidence that the first image the pet google turns up should feature the Rev. Luther. One can scarcely think of a Prescriptive Better in all the annals of Western Sieve who got burned worse by playing like a sorcerer's apprentice with ‘populism’.

Neocomradess Sh. G. Stolberg is bound to find the inventor (discoverer?) of Lutheranianity pretty crude himself, yet obviously if the hero had been so polished and refined as to qualify for a New York Times Company scribbler--had he been more like that sad wimp Melanchthon!--the idea of mucking about with populist matches would never have crossed his mind in the first place.

This neocomradess possesses such exquisite good taste herself that she declines to rebuke democracy and liberalism as tasteless. By her account what is wrong with them has to do with "The Art of Political Distraction." Those exact words come from an NYTC headline editor, but, for once in a way, they reflect the Stolbergite substance accurately enough. Still, let us hear straight from the horse's anatomy, at least a little smidgen of the scribble:

[S]omething else about the scene rang familiar: it was a sliver of news, seemingly a side issue, run amok. In the grand scheme of today’s taxpayer expenditures — $787 billion for economic recovery; another $700 billion to shore up shaky financial institutions; who knows how many more billions tomorrow — the A.I.G. bonuses amount to small change. But the small change became a big deal in an instant, dominating the talk shows and threatening to undermine Mr. Obama’s domestic agenda. (...) Mr. Obama is hardly the first American president to grapple with a distraction, a diversion — an outright red herring, some might call it — that grew bigger than itself.

Sh. G. Stolberg then continues ballistically along the trajectory implied by the last sentence: she is far more interested in how the neorégime of George XLI Bush was obstructed by distraction-mongers than by our current Troubles. Along with the general good-tastiness, the Big Management Party narrative emphasis makes clear that this is one neocomrade who will not be altogether heartbroken if "Mr. Obama’s domestic agenda" does get undermined. I take it the unum necessarium is that somebody shore up her portfolio; that done, who cares much about the rest of what Comrade POTUS has proposed?

Of course a frank admission along those lines would be almost as crude and indecorous as heftin’ a physical pitchfork. Nice people simply do not talk about (their own) money, for all that, if their money failed altogether, their niceness would probably go along for the ride--and depart sooner rather than later. Perhaps thee and I, Mr. Bones, might try to look at a copy of today's Times in the fishwrap version, so as to gauge the range of Neocomradess Sh. G. Stolberg even better by knowing what sort of advertisements appear in "The Week in Review" during the Crawford Crash Troubles. A priori I should not expect to find many products on display that we humble could afford even if thee or I craved them.

Sh. G. Stolberg seems to me to misplay her hand even after inventin’ the rules of the game herself. ‘Distraction’ was to be the theme of this pudding, yet somehow she never gets around to specifying what it is that ‘we’ are being distracted from. The closest she comes to settin’ out the general correlation of farces runs as follows:

Yet by week’s end, it was clear that the furor had exacted a price. As the House passed legislation imposing a 90 percent tax on bonuses after bailout, the White House ducked questions about whether Mr. Obama would sign such a bill. Mr. Geithner’s credibility was badly damaged, in part because of his shifting explanations of how he learned of the bonuses. Mr. Dodd suffered as well, for his role in writing legislation that, in the end, allowed the bonuses to be paid.

I daresay she joins a great many other Big Party neocomrades in hopin’ that the snatchback bill will be vetoed, or Th. Geithner von Hindenburg be dismissed, or Sen. Dodd clobbered in a primary -- and ideally all three! In the real world, hoverever, none of the above is particularly likely to eventuate.

Meanwhile, back on Planet Stolberg, it cannot be a pure accident that the neocomradess fails to imagine and mention any damage that might be done to even a single militant extremist Republican. It would not be goodtasty for Sh. G. Stolberg to expose her factional attitudes unmistakably in this kind of a performance, to do that would be almost as fort mauvais as discussin’ her personal finances or joinin' the Pitchfork People. Yet it is clear enough what one is up against here, Mr. Bones, is it not?

Happy days.

Tiger Timmy's Trident

Thee can relax, Mr. Bones: our intrepid friends, the hedge-fund Democrats [1], now have the Crawford Crash as good as licked:

The plan to be announced next week involves three separate approaches.
(A) In one, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will set up special-purpose investment partnerships and lend about 85 percent of the money that those partnerships will need to buy up troubled assets that banks want to sell.
(B) In the second, the Treasury will hire four or five investment management firms, matching the private money that each of the firms puts up on a dollar-for-dollar basis with government money.
(C) In the third piece, the Treasury plans to expand lending through the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, a joint venture with the Federal Reserve.

An extraordinarily interesting agenda! I ought to be scrupulous, though, and mention before any analysis that all this comes straight from our old buddy Major Leaker, now evidently the War Department's mole at Treasury. The NYTC scribblers say nothing more about where the press release came from than to mention "people briefed on the plan" and "administration officials" eventually -- in their sixteenth paragraphette, unless I have miscounted. To dodge mentioning the good major, the scribblers make it sound as if two little birds named Hope and Expectation had been whispering in their ears:

The Treasury Department is expected to unveil early next week its long-delayed plan (...) The plan is not expected to impose restrictions on the executive pay of private investors (...) it is expected that the government will provide the overwhelming bulk of the money (...) The hope is that such a generous taxpayer subsidy will attract private investors ....

That brings them down to the point where Maj. Leaker dimly appears as "people briefed on the plan." Thee will perceive, sir, that Expectation and Hope and the passive voice are quite adequate to bear aloft the banner of nontransparency unassisted by even the vaguest allusion to particular organisms. Naturally we shall have to wait for some time to see whether the whole community of hired scribblers take to this dolce stil nuovo en masse. I rather wish they wouldn't, but possibly my reluctance only indicates the imminent approach of Dr. Alzheimer: one cannot seriously expect the journalism schools to pick one set of banalities and stick with them forever.

Anyhow, it is clear enough what is going on here; to have such a press release signed by Tiger Timmy [2] himself, attested in deficituary red ink by seven witnesses, and solemnly sealed with debt-ceiling wax is not indispensable.

I suppose there is some slight possibility that this is a

trial balloon rather than a plain press release, meaning that the whizkids and President Summers will reconsider, if the autoleakage goes down very badly with Wall Street and/or Televisionland. On the other hand, the fact that they released it after business hours on a Friday does not suggest that they are attempting to gauge public opinion. What it suggests is that they expect nothing very good from Vox. Pop. or from universal Hooverville and intend to go ahead anyway. (But God knows best about hedge-fund Democrats!)

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Moving on to analysis, I think the first thing to point out is that Geithner von Hindenburg wants to work around the pestiferous Legislative Branch as much as possible. Where it is entirely constitutional for the FDIC and the Federal Reserve Board to conduct themselves as Secretary von Hindenburg and Bernanke von Ludendorff would have these independent agencies would be a matter to hesitate about if they were me, but of course the Twin Titans are not thee or me and cannot be losing any sleep over quaint Madisonian technicalities. Perhaps Sen. Byrd might look into it, however. In practice, the bucks for (A) have already been authorized under the species of TARP, and with (C), why, Marshal von Ludendorff has the right to print as much monopoly money as he likes -- everybody knows that!

That leaves only prong (B) of Timmy's trident. I suspect his whizkids stuck it in the middle so as to attract as little notice as possible, on the model of that list of AIG counterparties the other day. To be sure, being the middle item of only three seems a little thin, camouflagewise. It does look, though, as if Major Leaker did no more than mention prong (B) to his NYTC enablers. There seems no elaboration of what I have already quoted about it anywhere in the rest of the press release, whereas (A) gets lots and lots of attention, mixed with background material not really required by anybody who has paying attention lately.

Perhaps we had better have Sam play that one again:

[T]he Treasury will hire four or five investment management firms, matching the private money that each of the firms puts up on a dollar-for-dollar basis with government money.

I smell something decidedly fishlike here: Secretary Geithner von Hindenburg is to ‘hire’ so-and-so, whereupon so-and-so ‘puts up’ money. That very curious division of labour sure sounds to me as if GvH were "hiring investors," which is not, I believe, the sort of language that Hoovervillains typically talk. What do thee think, Mr. Bones?

It would be patently corrupt for Timmy to hire (say) the perp Blankfein in his personal capacity in order that (say) Goldman Sachs quâ corporation should help fund Geithnerio-Bernankean schemes. Even if they were really President Summer's schemes or Mr. Obama's -- or even Uncle Sam's thoroughly bipartisan schemes, endorsed by Representatives von Böhner and von Cantor both, and by Neocomrade Senator M. McConnell of KY to boot! -- that arrangement would stink to high heaven. Whereas it would just be nonsense for Scrooge to hire Cratchit to make widgets (or to keep one of the various sets of ScroogeBank books) and then expect a revenue stream to flow from Cratchit to Scrooge instead of in the other direction.

Thus the CliffsNotes version of Prong (B) does not parse or construe, Mr. Bones, and the CliffsNotes version must have been all that Major Leaker was authorized to convey to the New York Times Company. After Neocomrade R. Santelli and Mr. Cramer of CNBC, who can be surprised that the NYTC’s business ‘journalists’ seem not to have noticed anything remarkable here that might demand a little clarification? Not crooked, only dumb, that is how I diagnose Messers "EDMUND L. ANDREWS, ERIC DASH and GRAHAM BOWLEY."

So it looks as if we humble are on our own, sir. Thee will remember my own tentative hypothesis about Bailoutgate, which may be a tad more paranoid than Crawford Crash times absolutely call for: whoever gets shafted, it sure as [exp. del.] won't be Goldman Sachs. If we take Geithner von Hindenburg's ‘hire’ in isolation, he has already made it plain that GS is his very favorite employment agency, has he not?

Thinking of ourselves as potential shaftees of the hedge-fund Democrats, however, we probably ought to worry more about Timmy's "put up" than about his ‘hire’. The perp Blankfein and his corporation are to supply "private money that each of the firms puts up on a dollar-for-dollar basis with government money." OK, sure, fifty cents from GS and fifty cents from USA, so far it is plain enough -- but what on Gore's green earth does the GSA, Goldman Stacks of America, DO with her mixed-economy dollars once they have been forged? Since this mystery meat is listed as a separate prong, it would seem natural to suppose that the GSA will do something other than what the FDIC does under prong (A) and the Federal Reserve does under prong (C). But what that "something other" would be, who can conjecture?

Doubtless we will just have to stay tuned and try to figure out what the Twin Titans are actually doing with their Uncle Sam's money and the perp Blankfein's corporation's loans and gifts from Sam.

Meanwhile it has occurred to me that prong (B) is, in a minor and peripheral way, yet another Geithnerio-Bernankean end-run around Congress, inasmuch as Timmy and Ben and President Summers and Mr. Obama cannot possibly intend to ask the Senate to confirm these proposed hires. Why, even a Neocomrade M. McConnell of KY might accidentally think to ask the candidates some potentially ruinous question about just what it is that they understand themselves to be hired to do! Fort mauvais that would be, obviously. (Yuck.)

Happy days.


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[1] Remind me, Mr. Bones, to have the pet google go try to dig up the name of the inventor of that near-Homeric epithet.


[2] Our own epithet is hereby extended to cover Herr Teodor Geithner von Hindenburg at the U.S. Treasury as well as Mr. Timothy Gorton Ash of Hooverville West and the Guardian.

Findin’ Their Level At Last

“Much of this is of Obama’s own making,” said Professor Paul Light, an expert on the White House appointment process who teaches at the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at New York University. “We’re now seeing a dramatic pendulum swing. This administration used a lot of political capital for getting some [nominees] through [the Senate], and that created an issue for REPUBLICANS AND LATE-NIGHT COMEDIANS.”

Happy days.

Those were THEN, This is NOW!

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Happy days.

"a fairytale from the past"

Q. "Can [militant extremist Republicans] actually stand up a say that these people believe in a [Keynesian] fairytale from the past?"

Amendment I to the Fedguv Constitution permits the neocomradely community to utter whatever tripe and baloney strikes their fancy. (And I don't mind either.)

Would this particular tripe be well received? That is the real question, presumably, though it may be a slightly silly one to ask. Are Televisionland and the electorate seriously expected to make an informed judgment as to which mammonologists are telling "fairy tales" and which are purveyin’ the Infallible Truth product?

So it will not do for the neocomrades to simply "stand up a[nd] say" that Chicagonomics is right and everythin’ older or invented elsewhere or otherwise divergent is _eo ipso_ rubbish, they will have to call upon the Agitprop Arm to make sure the patients take their medicine correctly. "Life is unfair": the patients will probably know that Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold are fiends to be booed and hissed, but respond with a __________ to the mention of Mr. Keynes.

But Life is not 100% unfair, for the neocomrades’ plight here is to some extent their own fault. They failed to make sure that all their wombscholars and downdumbees knew who Keynes was and that his name is to be instantly hissed. It is natural to conjecture that the neocomrade spinsters were quite sure that that taxsuckin’ vampire was dead with a stake through the heart and would never be heard from again. "What went wrong?"

Well, no, we can discuss the Crawford Crash as a thing-in-itself some other time. At the moment our concern is with the Big Management Party’s agitprop and indoctrination efforts in the sphere of economics, efforts which appear in the rear-view mirror to have been slightly miscalculated. The upshot is that the neocomrades must now tell tales themselves -- tales entirely free of fairies and other supernatural exuberances, doubtless, yet nevertheless tales. Before their dupes and marks can boo and hiss the Beast of Bloomsbury, they will have to be told who Mr. Keynes was. No way around it. (Is there?)

Now many of us with experience of the pricier brands of tertiary education tend to become preoccupied in such a case with whether the Tales of Hoffman (or, more to the immediate point, those of Neocomradess A. Shlaes about the FDR Depression) are wie es eigentlich gewesen or not. That must be what Neocontender #7 meant by draggin’ in his fairies, after all. It is quite clear, though, even if it is not frequently said out loud in public, that the truth or otherwise of tales told in Homelandic politics is of very subordinate importance. Televisionland and the electorate are rarely in a position to judge the veracity of tales, and thanks to peccatum originale and all that jazz, Televisionland and the electorate don’t really much care about the veracity angle unless it becomes the subject of a tale-about-the-tale, a ‘metatale’ that is a different story. (And speakin’ of peccatum originale, she who will not tell a few fibs for her Party and her Ideology cannot be very devoted to them: so easy to do it, so churlish and self-regardin’ to refuse!)

In general, then, neither the mob nor the mob’s pols care too much about accuracy in narrative-mongering. Though a product came from Rabbi Ben Trovato rather than from the goddess Veritas (whose name invariably appears on the package), it will probably pass muster in the Naked Public Square™ well enough. More exactly, Tale T will thrive or perish by strict Darwinianity, it being understood that adaptation to _wie es eigentlich gewesen_ confers little or no reproductive advantage.

That generality, being general, applies to decent political grown-ups as well as to neocomrades and other militant extremists; it even applies to your occasional miscellaneous tertium quid like M. de Perot. Accordingly I shall not waste any breath impugning the accuracy of neocomradely and GOP narrations. What I want to question is rather the Big Management Party’s deployment of those narrations best labeled ‘tales’, namely those that might begin "Once upon a time, long long ago." "A week is a long time in politics," of course, but one ought to allow a sort of Extended Now with ten years or so both backwards and forwards. (Certain neocomrades are much enamoured of the Tom Clancy sort of scenario set in a tendentiously alleged future, which I suppose counts as a ‘tale’ too, and which becomes tale-like well short of the ten-year mark. We can work out the details of that brain disease some other time; for the moment, a ‘tale’ must be retrospective.)

So, the, what is to be questioned or impugned about the Party of Big Management’s deployment of tales -- tales true or false, with or without pixies -- is whether it is consistent with the broader self-presentation of the PBM gentry. Emblazoned on the banner of militant extremism (as it appears from outside the monkey house) are two famous soundbites: (1) Their Ford's "History is bunk!" and (2) the anonymous (?) "That was THEN, this is NOW!" Does it befit spinsters who spin for a Cause that so presents itself to tell their wombscholars and their downdumbees and their projected marks and dupes any tales whatsoever about Mr. Keynes, who has now been dead over five times that proposed hedge around the Extended Now? What, by neocomradely lights, can it possibly matter who Keynes was? Has the Beast of Bloomsbury not been swallowed up in his own notorious "long run"?

Furthermore, one must bear in mind their far-famed Destructive Creationism© product. To impugn and question on the basis thereof does not involve strict logical contradiction of the sort that arises with the above maxims of Their Ford and their Neocomrade A. N. O’Nymous, but as a practical matter, encouragin’ their wombscholars (&c.) to worry about what has long since been creatively destroyed would be a strange and self-defeatin’ sort of pædagogy, would it not? Should not the kiddies be indoctrinated ever to look forwards rather than back? (Or possibly to look sideways for additional targets of neocreativity?)

Finally comes a question or impugnment of much less importance, but one that has been bothering the present keyboard ever since the onset of the Crawford Crash. Though I proposed a ten-year Extended Now in general, who am I to propose? Did not the neocomrades’ own Boy draw a line through history at 11 September 2001, with everythin’ subsequent to be the Brave New Now™, as it were, and everythin’ earlier abandoned to the dustbin or bunk repository of Shabby Obsolete Then? To be sure, George XLIII Bush could be accounted a trivial tale-worthy matter of Then himself, especially by a really thorough-goin’ Destructive Creationite. And the whole pack does seem to agree that Master Dubya is only the bunk of yesteryear whenever Comrade POTUS happens to allude to him or any of his residual destructivities.

But I digress: the daily botheration is my inability to reconcile the neocomradely celebration of the Big Bang, 11 September 2001, all that bang-based Kiddie Krusadin’ and Long Warrin’ and jihád careerism of theirs, with the economy-centered universe that everybody, even the neocomrades, has been living in since last September.

Reading through the peanut gallery at Pajamas Media about the CPAC circus, I found that some of the weaker siblin’s at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh still prefer to be at ‘war’ with M. bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí rather than Dr. Tobin and Mr. Keynes. There can be no doubt at all that it is these trailer-trash peanuts who are out of step with The Conservative Movement™; their predestinate PBM betters are quite certain that Psocialism in One Country is a far clearer and more present danger than Islamophalangitarianism ever was. (It was perfectly predictable that the GOP geniuses would take that Party line, though naturally one had to possess an accurate theory of elephant anatomy to get one's predictions perfect.)

Still, one sympathizes a little with the peanuts’ inability to pivot on an ideological dime.

Similarly, but at much loftier level, one thinks of poor ol’ Neocomrade F. Fukuyama, who must, by this point, be goin’ mad tryin’ to decide whether Ms. Clio is dead, or alive, or somewhere in between like Schrödinger's cat.

Happy days.

March First! (and think later)

Today is not just a date, Mr. Bones, today is an injunction from the Warlords of Wingnuttia! from whose number Rear-Colonel V. D. H. Blimp has now most clearly drifted away.

Alas, poor Wingnuttia! A blimp is a terrible thing to lose,

and especially when it was pretty well the only item left in stock. If Mars and Bellona are not to be fervently adored and disinterestedly worshipped by Rear-Col. Blimp, why, the spiritual-militarist branch of the neocomradely community may as well shut up the shrine and use the oracular cavern as a garbage dump.

Alas, poor Blimp! A mind is a terri . . . .

But not so fast, for doubtless the ex-AEIdeologue thinks himself quite as compos mentis as ever. AEI rots the brain, there can be no doubt about it, but the patients usually don’t even notice that they are declinin’ and often imagine exactly the contrary, as we are told that ‘consumptives’ used to do back in the Good Old Days when men were men and tuberculosis was a death sentence. AEIdeology is like that, a silent killer, the invisible hand that strangles by stealth, &c. &c.

I myself arrived at this diagnosis of VDH-B well before the Crawford Crash, as it happens. If one was to start now on his case -- well, but of course here in the midst of the latest Endkrisis des Kapitalismus, who on Gore’s green earth would worry about the plight of one individual Blimp?

Work it from the other end, O Pajama Folk! Imagine that you had no idea of the good colonel, not even an inklin’ of his rear-colonelcy and his (now former) geistige Militärismus, before encounterin’ this mornin’s scribble. What would you think of such a scribble absolutely in isolation?

From here outside the monkey house the doin’s of the inmates may seem unaccountable at times, so let us work through the peanut gallery and see what more like-minded peanuts make of it . . . Aha! One need venture no farther than Neopajama #2 to detect serious sales resistance:

"No. Conservatives did not ‘creat[e]’ Barack Obama and the vision of europeanized America."

VDH-B said "Let me explain!" but either #2 did not read the explanation or she could not take it seriously. Nobody should sympathise with reviewers who don’t read the book, but there may be a little somethin’ to be said for Blimpian unseriousness. Pontificatin’ about PILLARS OF WISDOM and tossin’ in lots of boldface is all very well in its way, but ’tis not the Way of Strict Demonstration, now, is it?

The good rear-colonel was rather askin’ for his blowback, I’d say: "Balancing budgets and saying no to always expanding government, first, is a MORAL issue." (Emphasis added)

The Big Management Party’s wombschoolin’ and Niederdümmung projects have not, it appears, yet been perfected to the point where some of the victims, at least, cannot work out that VDH-B must here be sayin’ that Master Dubya was a bad boy. A bad boy morally, not merely a naughty lad fiscally. (Golly!)

Neither as a gaudy militarist butterfly before nor as only another Denkpanzer economic caterpillar now has Blimp ever much cared about the neocomrades’ Boy and their Dynasty and their Party as such. (I assume there must be somethin’ in the tax code that compels the AEIdeologue to dissemble her partisanship.) What the historians of Princess Posterity will write about George XLIII Bush centuries hence concerns Blimp hardly at all. Indeed, I doubt he gives a hoot what the intellectually respectable ("mainstream") press says about George XLIII next Tuesday. Blimp pushes those fine Big Party slogans "History is bunk!" and "That was THEN, this is NOW!" hard, despite not bein’ specifically a Party neo-ideologue. The result is that Blimp does not have to think half a second about tossin’ the Sublime House of Kennebunkport-Crawford off the back of his sledge onto the ice, a proceedin’ which is bound to displease the likes of Neopajama #2.

Perhaps one may suggest to #2 through the bars of the asylum fence that she riposte to inmate VDH-B with, say,

¡THE (first or chief) PILLAR OF CONSERVATISM IS LOYALTY!

or the like? If #2 knows about the colonel’s butterfly period, he could make somethin’ of loyalty as a virtue of the violence profession in particular, although naturally that would be only icin’ on the cake. Should she be an acolyte of the Witch Doctor of Democracy, she might also work in some of Himself’s recent thunderations against Neocomrades D. Brooks and Wm. Kristol (plus even N. Gingrich, perhaps?) for their ratfink treachery. Like Blimp himself, none of those three stooges is likely to emit the faintest discouragin’ word about "fiscal responsibility," despite which it is becomin’ questionable whether they are still marchin’ with The ©onservative Movement at all.

Passing silently over the weaker sistern, we come to Neopajama #7, who seems largely concerned to defend the cocktail-napkin economics of Ronald XL Reagan. Blimp had said no more than

"One of the apologies for the Reagan-era deficits (besides the new emphasis in calibrating them in terms of more palatable percentages of GDP rather than in actual red-ink dollars) was the notion of “starving the beast”: cut taxes so that federal revenues shrank (but I thought that supply-side economics always ensured greater revenue?), and redundant and ineffective federal entitlements and bureaucracies were starved into oblivion."

The colonel bein’ scarcely on speakin’ terms with Ms. Clio, as noted, I doubt he attached too much importance to that little paragraph. Yet part of the AEI brain rot consists in attachin’ vast importance to the dogmata of Chicagonomics without necessarily understandin’ them very well. Neocomrades are to "think with the Church," as it were, assentin’ to this proposition and that one on the sure and certain grounds that somebody else they happen to like knows all about it for sure. (If Blimp really thinks that "percentages of GDP" was some kind of swindle by the purveyors of supplyside, the brain rot has gone even farther that one feared.) Though I am tempted to insert my prepared speech on the Voodoonomics Epoch of the militant extremist GOP at this point, probably it would be mostly irrelevant to #7’s distress, which I take mainly to be that St. Ronald gets thrown to wolves along with Master Dubya -- as indeed he does. "That was THEN, this is NOW!"

Moving right along, Neopajama #25 might be of use to Col. Blimp as a specimen of his auditory. #25 goes on longer that the rest of the weaker siblin’s, but is not materially different from them. I infer that the whole crew likes their brain-rotted Blimp much better when he is attackin’ America’s party [*] than when he scrambles to work out what the Otherparty ought ideally to stand for. Of course even if "The first thing we do, let’s kill all the liberals!" could be put into practice without stint or limit, there would still be a few minor non-private-sectorian problems left on the mornin’ after the night before.

Blimp is at least tryin’ to cope. In his sadly decerebrated condition, however, he does not seem (as viewed from outside the monkey house, of course) to be copin’ very well. The chances that the Party of Grant and Hoover and Goldwater and Atwater will ever become indistinguishable from the Concord Coalition are very near zero, and even if that miracle were to come to pass, would the Concordican Party ever win an election outside maybe South Wyomin’?

There are faint hints in this scribble, especially in the vicinity of Libya, that the colonel may now be poised to sink further still and take up with Miss Rand of Petrograd and Mr. Nozick of Harvard. To shrug the atlas is not an impressive stance even in those adolescent nerds who--in this keyboard’s experience, no doubt thoroughly unrepresentative--are most prone to it, but at the same time one can actually imagine a real-world politics correspondin’ to Randianity, a feat quite impossible with "fiscal responsibility" of the CC type. Mais nous verrons. And God knows best.

Happy days.

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[*] Prior to today’s oracular deliverance, the chief symptom of the AEI brain rot was precisely poor Blimp’s devotin’ so much time and energy to bashin’ America’s party in a fashion that any idiot GOP nephew or niece at any Wingnut City Tank of Thought could have done as well or maybe better.

Hence the present keyboard’s little joke, now a number of years old in substance, about "a blimp is a terrible thing to lose." The VDH geistliche Militärismus shtyk was priceless, if only for its rarity; there was never any question of some Mlle. de Podhóretz or Jungherr von Cheney comin’ up with anythin’ one tenth as worthwhile as that!