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.

___
[*] 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!