28 April 2009

All Hail! (starrin’ Al Hale and Señora Teresa Salutaria)



Neocomrade L. Kramer has (I think) opened new vistas of unity for Wingnut City!

Everybody knows that the sweet puppies of the Right are divided into a number of different covens and conventicles, of which the "neocomrades of the strict observance" -- i.e., Commentariat and Weekly Standardisers -- are far from bein’ the most numerous. The gentry used to think that they could make up in tertiary-educationized quality what they lack in quantity, but that has been a pretty ridiculous idea for quite a long time now. [1] But perhaps one has dismissed them prematurely on the cogitation front? for here comes L. Kramer with a really nifty notion!

The Kramer Plan will need some fleshin’ out, I daresay, but the general outlines are sufficient clear from this preliminary draft.

My only reservation from the agitprop standpoint is whether L. Kramer should have begun by bad-mouthin’ that broad Antipopular Front in which his own factionette finds its niche. He tells the Big Tent neocomrades that they are ‘weak’. This is unlikely to go down well at Rio Limbaugh in particular, unless the poor dittoheads take the "We Americans" of the neocomrade’s preamble to refer exclusively to Comrade POTUS and his groupies and the "drive-by media." True, Neocomrade L. Kramer only mentions weakness in order to ballyhoo his own patented strenthenin’ regimen, a neoproduct that this keyboard have already testified to the niftiness of from outside the monkey house altogether.

Unfortunately a large number of the Big Party base and vile get discouraged when their sky becomes cloudy for even a few minutes daily. And there is worse still in prospect for them, since the Kramer Plan involves, among other things, that all that Limblovian barkin’ and bellowin’ about the niftiness of torture simpliciter cease at once. The is no reason to assume that Neocomrade L. Kramer does not mean to be perfectly even-handed and shut up (for example) Neocomrade Professor A. Deshowitz, Esq., of the H*rv*rd Law School on the same terms that he shuts down Dr. R. Limbaugh of Wombschool Normal U. [2]

Shuttin’ down and shuttin’ up is the keystone of the Kramer Plan, at least after this keyboard has finished clearing away the oracular mists in which it comes packaged. The heart of the darkn... of the niftiness, rather, is, "I cannot get to the place where official disclosure of interrogation techniques is a salutary thing." My amateur mist clearance in effect deletes ‘techniques’ and ‘official’ from Neocomrade L. Kramer’s own formulation. Let nobody associated with the Antipopular Front mention the T-word at all!

The intrepid student of Neocomradology bold enough to violate the "History is bunk!" taboo of the militant extremist GOP is free to classify 2009 Kramerism with a much earlier political movement, whose adherents were always to respond "I know nothing" when asked anything the least bit interesting.

The beauty of "know-nothingism" for the barbarus tortor extends far beyond the obvious "Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies," although that is no small advantage in itself, one that this keyboard would not knock it for an instant.

Nevertheless, what really makes Kramerism the jewel in the head of a toad is that, as already adumbrated, it puts lowly dittoheads and lordly Baní Dershowitz on the same plane for once. All neocomrades are to be EQUALLY silent whenever they are accosted by the dread T-word.

Naturally even this coarse and illiterate keyboard appreciates that the Antipopular Front would disappear in about ten minutes if the neocomrades suddenly perverted to l’égalité tout court. What could be more self-evident than that? Yet since wingnutettes and wingnuts and Heritagitarians and and AEIdeologues and Hoovervillains &c. &c. find themselves livin’ in a holy Homeland™ where to come out against equality head-on is not likely to be ... well, to borrow an expression, ‘salutary’ for them. Silence on Torture would give the whole Party of Goldwater and Atwater one more thing to be genuinely equal about -- and Father Zeus knows they could do with a little more of that product! Silence on Torture is a more political sort of thing for the (broader) neocomradely community to be equal about than, say, night bread and sliced baseball, and at the same time it is a rather specialized affair that is most unlikely ever to metastasize into pernicious equality-across-the-board or into "any other improper or wicked project," such as the Madisonian ‘Publius’ forewarned against.

I have left the best and niftiest to last, though, and it consists in how beautifully Silence on Torture bridges the greatest of the many fissures inside the Party of Big Management. If asked at gunpoint to simplify the anatomy of the political elephant down to a gruesome Manichee twosome and "twenty-five words or less," probably pretty well everybody competent to answer at all would distinguish Big Management proper, the core conspiracy of economic OnePercenters, and all the rest of militant extremism. The Kramer Plan for Silence on Torture has the immense merit of treatin’ torture in a sound or salubrious or ‘businesslike’ (i.e., a bigmanagerial) way, removin’ it from the public sector where that detestable ‘transparency’ stuff keeps gettin’ in one's way. Yuck!

Kramerism exalts torture up into the empyrean of the Secret (or so-called ‘Private’) Sector, where it obviously belongs. One is not bigmanagin’ really bigly, after all, when one can be required to talk about what one is up to.

An objector might object that Silence on Torture is unfair to the rank-and-file base and vile, who are to be deprived of all that barkin’ and bellowin’ that they adore in exchange for ... it is not very obvious what. And I suppose the Gospel Accordin’ to Larry can not be preached at Rio Limbuagh exactly as I set it forth here: the inferior sort might get the idea that if torture be strictly a Secret Sector affair, why, they can set up in that line themselves down in the basement.

The OnePercenters’ previously niftiest scheme was to reshape all the various circumambient penumbrae and emanations of the Party of Grant into an Investment Society™, which was also, in its way, an attempt to create a small patch of non-inequality in the midst of the Herrnstein-Murray Curve.[3] Even a Catoholic might blanch at a Torture Society bigmanaged along those lines! Still, perhaps one ought to classify that nightmare under "petty management" or some such rubric?

And God knows best. Happy days.



___
[1] Perhaps since as long ago as Christmas Day, 1991, when the NSO lost their great adversary of stature, the Lenin-Gorbachev racket. The first degeneration of the Homelandic Hate-’68 Movement™, whose parents had been (?) fans of the Fourth International, made some positive mileage out of their generally mitteleuropäisch flavour, a matter in which the Great Adversary figured as well. Te former Second World was not exactly run by WASP God Folk from Kalamazoo and Kankakee, after all. Minsk and Pinsk and CCNY were much more à propos.

"That was then, this is now."


[2] We have agreed (have we not?) about the niftiness of it. Practicability is a separate question.


[3] "Where's the non-inequality?" Not a hard question! If the Investment Society Express had not been suddenly derailed by the Crawford Crash, all neocomrades, great and small, would possess an equal -- and equally ‘unalienable’ -- right to win the lottery. (Actual outcomes might have varied.)


27 April 2009

Concerning ¡Nie Wieder Appeasement!



For the señorito (or Young Fogey™) element of Commentariat and Weekly Standarisers to thunder against ‘appeasement’ without stint or limit or prudent choice of occasion is logical enough. A rhetor might rhetoricize that it is in their very DNA, our previous degeneration of neoterics havin’ given that same therapy to the Lenin-Gorbachev racket. [1] LIke a remarkable collection of other improbable Walter Mittys (notably including M. bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí), Homelandic neocomrades fancy themselves the slayers of Bolshevism, a fantasy that must make it even more gallin’ for them at the moment that they have somehow lost control of the means of invasion and must therefore sit on the sidelines watchin’ while Barry XLIV loses Pakistan. [2]

I have myself occasionally compared the courage and good judgment of the neocomradely community to Ms. Chicken Little in the childrens’ story. That still seems sound enough as a picture from outside the institution, but when the inmates are feelin’ especially self-sorrowful (like about 90% of the time since 4 November 2008), they may notice a nonparallelism of no great interest to me, namely that Neocomradess Ch. Little is never traditionally represented as being in possession of a Secret Anti-Skyfall Plan. Whereas the Baní Podhóretz and Bnê Bint Ye’or . . . !

Turning from invidious gossip about them to their policies and their knavish tricks, the serious student of Neocomradology ought to begin, I think, by wondering with me whether ¡Nie Wieder Appeasement! can truly be said to amount to a policy. Even its credentials as a knavish trick can be questioned, not because it isn’t tricky, but becuase it isn't properly knavish. The Brit chauvinist ditty (the hat-Tiqwah or Vltava of Airstrip One, as it were) refers to a proverbial distinction between fools and knaves, and from here I sit in the cheap seats, ¡Nie Wieder Appeasement! looks far closer to folly than to knavery.

It looks, moreover, like exactly the sort of folly that has characterized the vast hordes of Hooverville and Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh of late, not some exalted Quixotic brand of neofolly that only up-market Commentarians and Standardmongers, legitimately descended from the original Hate-’68 Movement™, are likely to wish to purchase. "The wider the market, the shoddier the goods" ought to be a maxim of Chicagonomics, if it isn’t one already, and ¡Nie Wieder Appeasement! would do nicely for a "case study" after the famous methodology of the H*rv*rd Victory School.

The shoddiness consists above all in the self-omphaloscopy of it: Master Narcissus Dexter is determined not to be perceived [3] as an appeaser, and so he barks and bellows ¡Nie Wieder Appeasement!. That aspect of the sloganizin’ is far clearer than anythin’ objective or ‘objective’ out there in the former (pre-Rove) Real World that is to be confronted rather than endured. It is not an accident that Jungherr von Greenwald avoids the obvious formulation "Let us resolve never to appease X!"

At this point the student of Neocomradology may reasonably differ from me by supposing that Von Greenwald is bein’ knavish rather than foolish when he so avoids. The knavishness would consist in the señorito and his neocomrades havin’ such a long enemies list that to specify any one X in particular might be perceived as lettin’ enemies A through W and Y and Z off the hook: inclusio unius exclusio alterius.

Well, it is certainly true that Commentarians and Standardmongers have lots of lists and that a concatenation of them all would stretch from Kalamazoo to Kankakee. Beyond that, however, I fear Ms. Student deviates into erroneous analysis. One particular type of erroneous analysis, in fact, namely the conspiratorialist type. Presented with an obnoxious factionette like this one, it is only too easy to lapse into detecting a conspiracy where there is really only a herd or flock or gaggle. Looking in through the barbed wire fence around their neo-institution, one seems to see them all marchin’ in step while the Wingnut City Noise Machine keeps them in steps with a paramilitary blare of drums and trumpets.

Now right here, if anywhere, is where one finds the Wingnut City Noise Machine in action. If Ms. Student would attentively examine how Princess Neoterica and Jungherr von Greenwald go about earnin’ their daily bread, she ought to be able to see that it is inept to talk about conspiracy. (After that, the next lesson should be to decide that the notion that the aggression of March 2003 into the former al-‘Iráq was perpetrated at the behest of a "Neoconservative Cabal" is no better warranted. This, however, seems to be rather an advanced exercise, considering that otherwise sensible observers like Professor Juan Cole refuse to relinquish it.)

At any rate, misdetecting conspiracies is usually a slippery slope. Once she starts down that path, Ms. Student is only too likely to begin inventing more and more detailed knavishnesses to attribute to the neocomrades (while in fact inventing them herself.) Though her subjective sincerity remains unquestionable, her analysis remains wrong. When tempted to wander off in that direction, Ms. Student might do well to repeat out loud ten times "But are they SMART enough to have thought of that?" The answer I presume to that question is "NO, of course they are not!" Ms. Student will not, at the beginning, see any "of course" about it, but I venture to expect that if she perseveres with the plan suggested, she will come to agree with me fairly quickly.

This therapy can be recommended for all occasions of temptation into conspiracy-think. It is true that the neocomrades of the strict observance (offsprings of the first degeneration of the Kristol-Pipes-Podhóretz Hate-’68 Movement™) tend to brandish their academic and paracademic and pseudacademic credentials in a disstessing and unseemly way. But this is a sham that has little to do with their true case, as the neocomrades can be found admittin’ themselves if you get them started barkin’ and bellowin’ against lefty perfessers who can't park a straight bicycle.

On this very point, the neocomrades are only a natural gaggle and not an artificial conspiracy: it would be dotty to suppose that they ever deliberately *decided* to make themselves out less undereducated than they are. If Ms. Student supposes the contrary, let her explain the way they have been fellow-travelin’ lately with numbskull ‘populism’ of the type so beautifully embodied in Neocomrade Governess S. Heath-Paling of Alaska and Neocomrade Baron S. J. von Wurzelbacher of Faucetville OH. [4]

At the moment Jungherr von Greenwald and Princess Neoterica might confuse their havin’ an antiskyfall ‘plan’ with them bein’ smarter than Chicken Little is, but that innocent self-kiddin’ is surely no problem to trouble anybody outside the asylum with!

Happy days.


___
[1] Recall Pipes Major and that "Team B" for the Central Intelligence Agency that managed to be even more mistaken about the Soviet Union than Team A was. Not an easy feat! Yet the difficulty of a performance is not interchangable with its merit.



[2] George XLIII ought to thank his Father Zeus that he is out of the kitchen at last, because once the neocomrades get really worked out, their fair-weather friends are not much safer from them than decent political adults are. The latter do, however, have the consolation of knowing in advance that they cannot be stabbed in the back.


[3] Remember how Princess Neoterica Herself stumbled over the ‘perceived’ pea the other day!


[4] I suspect I waste my breath, though. If Ms. Student really wants a conspiratorialist explanation of Joe and Sarah and Commentary magazine and The Weekly Standard, she can invent one easily enough, making what I consaider the same mistake as ever. Kristol Minor may (just barely conceivably) have been tryin’ to use Mr. Quayle of Indiana as his private Charlie McCarthy, but the idea that the whole neocomradely horde are tryin’ to pull the strings of Televisionland and the electorate leads nowhere. Or at any rate, it leads to no better destination than Waltville Junction and Castle Mearsheimer.


23 April 2009

Mammonology Chez Marty



Here, Mr. Bones, is a titbit from one of those toney gentry folks who make one conclude that The New Republic would do business as The Neo-Republican if the staff and management thereof thought honesty in labelling mattered:

[Neocomrade N. Scheiber is] just a little uncomfortable with ... the logical chain [that] is typically something like: 1.) I've seen corrupt elites prevent governments from resolving financial crises in emerging markets. 2.) The financial crisis dogging the United States shares some features with emerging-market crises--for example, overleveraged institutions enjoyed an outsize share of corporate profits prior to imploding. 3.) Ergo, it must be the case that corrupt elites are preventing the U.S. government from resolving the crisis.

Problem is, the third point doesn't necessarily follow from the second. Logically, it's like saying: 1.) Cancer patients don't get well when they're treated by witch doctors. 2.) The top oncologist at Mass General has lost a few patients lately--some of them inexplicably, under mysterious circumstances. 3.) Ergo, the top oncologist at Mass General was practicing witchcraft. Maybe, but it would be much more persuasive if you could establish causality.


"Logically" always sounds swell, and never sweller than when used, as here, to cover up egregious hormone-basing.

What's really going on is chiefly that the scribbler simply cannot imagine what he would describe to Neocomrade M. Peretz of H*rv*rd as "people like us" (the very salt of the earth -- President Summers, First Quartermaster-General Bernanke von Ludendorff, Field Marshal Geithner von Hindenburg!) as being the least bit like witch doctors or corrupt elitists.

This failure of individual imagination and class self-perception doubtless raises no question about the TNR neocomrade's subjective sincerity, but all the same, it remains only silly self-servicing to drag in "logically."

’Tis no great surprise that the voodoo that N. Scheiber is concerned to ward off should come from well outside the pale of Their Gang:

[Simon Johnson's] PhD is in economics from MIT, while his MA is from the University of Manchester and his BA is from the University of Oxford. [1]


Happy pays.

___
[1] For that matter, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is itself beyond the 02138 pale.

The Cantabrigian microgeography of Their Gang can get tricky, however, considering that a Neocomrade N. Scheiber can casually alludes to MGH as if lying within it, as in fact it does lie. Medicine is not exactly ‘technology’, it appears.

Economics of Professor Johnson's (new lefty) sort clearly is, whereas naturally economics of President Summers’ (stale old) Democratic Leadership Council sort is not by any means to be filed under 'T' for technology.

Neocomrade N. Scheiber wants to file that product under 'L' for logic, but he may just be buttering up his boss classes.



22 April 2009

Princess Neoterica on Rabinowitzin’



Rabinowitz suggests that Obama is forfeiting his moral standing with ordinary citizens (Americans, that is). We (sic) expect our president to defend and explain our country to the world; in failing to do so he has, in a sense, abdicated his role as the chief spokesman his voters. The danger, as Rabinowitz argues, is that ordinary Americans will become angered at what is perceived to be a betrayal of them. To paraphrase the Godfather, Part II (from which much wisdom can be extracted), presidents should not take take sides with any other nation, against their country . . . ever. It is perceived as unseemly, at the very least.

We (sic) have seen this before from Obama – as he condescendingly described the gun and Bible clingers during the campaign. He is, he tells his posh friends, quite above that sort of thing and is intellectually sophisticated enough to explain what the little people are up to. His high-brow analysis of American faults does not stop at the water’s edge. Indeed, he fancies himself such a cosmopolitan that he believes he can bond with foreign leaders outside the confines of nationalism and thereby ”get along.” He takes no offense to (sic) the anti-American book Chavez gives him because he’s a reader — even Leftist vitriol can make it onto his nightstand. (Stop and think: if this had occurred before the election, could Obama have won?)

It remains to be seen what lasting impact, if any, this trip will have. Is Obama smart enough to change course, as he did when a chorus of both supporters and critics told him to stop the gloom-and-doom routine about the economy? One (sic) hopes he will recognize that he is not simply [P]resident but our (sic) [P]resident — and begin to sound like this is a source of infinite pride.


As thee can probably work out for theeself, Mr. Bones, a good deal of the self-servicin’ brain disease of Rabinowitzers and Rupertoids and of the insolence of Commentariat and Weekly Standardisers, boils down to a blithe preëmptive unilateralism about other folks’ pronouns of the first person plural.

" 'Kindly allow me to know best' who US are," chirps the neoharpy.

Happy days.


The Trouble With Rabinowitzin’



(A) Rabinowitzers think like Neocomrade Rupert Lord Murdoch’s Wall Street Jingo:

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.


(B) Rabinowitzers extend the customary self-exceptionalisin’ and self-indispensin’-with of Hooverville and Rio Limbaugh and Wingnut City generally to the point of claimin’ a special relationship with Ms. Reality:

That this [1] is so, and that it is not good news for him, is truth of a kind not quite fathomable to this [P]resident and his men.


(C) Rabinowitzers read minds, especially the minds of those on one of their factionette’s many enemies lists:

... the superior ethical and moral leadership the world can expect from this administration as compared with that of presidencies past. This exercise in comparisons is one of which Mr. Obama may well never tire.


(D) Rabinowitzers double- and even weekly-standardise:

Then came the memos. With his decision to release them, Mr. Obama guaranteed an instant explosion of outrage of a kind that could never have happened otherwise, notwithstanding his claim that most of the contents were already public. The results of the president's decision were predictable. Each day now brings, in the usual media quarters, fevered exhortations calling for the trials and punishment of Bush administration officials. [2]


(E) Though Rabinowitzers would presumably assent, Mr. Bones, to our own notion that one cannot sanely hope to convince anyone above the age of puberty that she is seriously mistaken about distinctions of right and wrong, they do their characteristic self-exceptionalisin’ shtyk at this point also, and blithely assume that they can reliably pull it off:

By revealing the memos, [Her Imperial Highness snarked,] with their detailed information on those interrogation techniques (now banned), we had elevated our moral status in the eyes of the world. (...) There is always danger [Her Imperial Highness observed, now snarklessly] in repeating propositions like this often, among them the likelihood that their irrationality will begin to make itself clear to anyone hearing it over time. [2]


(F) Though a cut or two above the rank-and-file Party base and vile in other respects, Rabinowitzers have no reservations about MEGOP [4] by-laws #665 and #666, "History is bunk!" and "That was then, this is now!":

... arrogance, dismissiveness, Guantánamo, deficiencies in its attitudes toward the Muslim world, and the presidency of Harry Truman and his decision to drop the atomic bomb, which ended World War II. No sitting American president had ever delivered indictments of this kind while abroad, or for that matter at home, or been so ostentatiously modest about the character and accomplishment of the nation he led. [5]


(G) Rabinowitzers never tire of lamentin’ that they had failed to take over tertiary education long before failin’ to take over the holy Homeland™ lock, stock and barrel under George XLIII:

Five decades of teaching in colleges and universities across the land, portraying the U.S. as a power mainly responsible for injustice and evil, whose military might was ever a danger to the world -- a nation built on the fruits of greed, rapacity and racism -- have had their effect. The products of this education find nothing strange in a president quick to focus on the theme of American moral failure. He may not share many of their views, but there is, nonetheless, much that they find familiar about him.


And now, enough of the Baní Rabinowitz!

Happy days.




___
[1] The neocomradely ‘this’ refers to

The images of that trip, in which Mr. Obama dazzled ecstatic Europeans with citations of the offenses against international goodwill and humanity committed by the nation he leads, are now firmly imprinted on the minds of Americans. That this is so ... &c. &c.

That is to say, Her Imperial Highness understands "the minds of Americans" better than some no-’count trailer trash from Cook County who merely managed to climb to the top of the greasy pole.


[2] A copy of that neoïdeological gem should be inserted into pigeon hole (B) also, insofar as Her Imperial Highness has evolved well past any ability to gauge accurately what such outsiders as "the usual media quarters" are saying and doing. Only a very few of us fiends have lapsed into "fevered exhortations," even if one counts Mr. Glenn Greenwald as a host in himself.

At the same time H. I. H. neostandardises by omittin’ all mention of what noises--and what thoroughly predictable noises!--UMQ, "unusual media quarters," at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh have been emittin’ on the same topic. The ftiny actionette of Rabinowitzers is not to be tarred by any loose association with the rank-and-file GOP base and vile, but what could be better balanced and fairer than to take Mr. Greenwald as the Voice of the Left?


[3] Since thee and I moralize with M. Pascal, sir, I lump the two Imperial oracles together. Members of other schools would distinguish the Rabinowitzers’ self-privilegin’ in respect of moral insight with their fathomless self-esteemin’ on supposed possession of the (more all-’round) Herrnstein-Murray IQ product in a degree that lesser breeds without can never hope to rival.

Exactly what views are held within the inaccessible fastnesses of Castle Podhóretz and the Rupertschloss about whether moral propositions are purely a matter of rationality or involve some additional flair or "moral sense," I dunno. Despite all the tertiary-educational airs and graces of the Rabinowitzer factionette, it is quite possible that these fashionable and upmarket neocomrades have never thought about such a question long enough to arrive at a definite consensus or tentative Big Party line.

Inside my ellipsis, Her Imperial Highness condescended to ridicule Mr. Emmanuel’s notions of the realpolitisch implications of autoleakage of the George XLIII torture memoranda, "This would undermine al Qaeda ... because those interrogations of ours helped to enlist terrorists to their cause."

The Rabinowitzer stance appears to be that Mr. Emmanuel is self-evidently mistaken, or so it is natural to infer from the absence of any attempt to argue against it. The factionette’s eternal and ubiquitous self-preferencin’ is patent rather than inferential: a Rabinowitzer completely appreciates the self-evidentiality of the self-evident whilst we humble are still puzzling over it, unable to grok it without lots of time and repetition.

If taken to result from philosophy rather than from factious hormone-basin’, this stance would commit the Rabinowitzer crew to a non-rationalistic theory of moral judgment. But of course there is no positive reason so to take it.


[4] MEGOP == "Militant extremist Republican(s)."

Thee will notice, Mr. Bones, how nicely the first half of my new pet name for the sweet puppies of Endarkenment works in the omphaloscopy of Master Narcissus Dexter. Also the neo-Levantine obsessions of the Rabinowitzer-Rupertoid factionette.

’Tis a twofer, begorrah!


[5] Her Imperial Highness is relyin’ rather heavily on Her tone of voice and Her pseudogentility at this point to distinguish Herself from the rabble of Dr. Limbaugh. "Ostentatiously modest" is about as ostentatious a sarcasm as one is likely to encounter in six months of searching. And similarly with the sentence that follows, "He was mediator, an agent of change, a judge, apportioning blame -- and he was above the battle."

Let's see, it ought to be easy enough for the pet google to find how the Witch Doctor of Democracy™ worded the same sentiment . . . :

RUSH: So not only is [President Obama] unlike anybody we've ever had, he's so far ahead of us that we are blinded by the light, as we look at his trail. He's so far ahead of us, folks, that all we see is the dust in which he is leaving us. He's so far ahead of his time. And people ask me, "How the hell could he have gotten elected?" I give you Elijah Cummings who represents the mind-set, the ignorance of the average Obama voter. This kind of idolatry of political people has happened before, but it's not healthy, pure demagoguery.

CUMMINGS: ... I think leadership, you know, I've always believed that leadership, true leadership is always before its time, and I think that you have to -- and I think Barack believes it -- that you've gotta act on what you believe is right, and then sometimes you gotta wait for the critics to catch up.


(( The two speeches occurred in the opposite order during the radio neocomrade's performance of yesterday. Comrade Cummings is a non-paleface U.S. Representative from Maryland. ))

Notice that in subsequent specimen (G), the way Her Imperial Highness phrases Herself is indistinguishable from limbloviation, an identity that I tentatively attribute to Rabinowitzers, like Bin-Ládinites, havin’ both a "far enemy" (Comrade POTUS and the American Democracy and l*b*r*lism and psocialism) and a "near enemy" (evil perfessers who can't park a bicycle straight).

Most of the real bile and venom are reserved for the foe closer at hand, who has, after all, done the sweet puppies more real harm over the years.

21 April 2009

The Princess and the Spiders



(( I refer to the sinister and spooky spiders of Under the Volcano, Mr. Bones, not by any means those loveable fuzzball caterpillars of Rio Limbaugh. Her Imperial Highness of Pajamastán and Podhoretzia Minor thee know already. As previously, I have decided not to share my pearls with the . . . with the neocomrades. I did, however, attempt to vex ’em with a severely truncated scribble, which appears here between the illustrations. ))


A great many of the intestine divisions of Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh are on display here, a great convenience for the student. But she should first of all notice one neo-dog that is NOT barkin’ ’n’ bellowin’, namely Hooverville. That seems reasonable enough, for it is very questionable whether anybody ever got rich (as opposed to powerful) by readin’ other folks’ mail. [1]

The term "blackmail" does come to mind, perhaps by way of "black chamber," but blackmail seems to be entirely a private/secret sector behaviour. Neocomrades of every ilk will be wantin’ to bomb or invasionise some LBW, "lesser breed without," whenever their taxpayer-funded snoopin’s work out, not extort money from their patients or victims.

In theory, a spookmonger could blackmail for her country, extortin’ the international equivalent of washing behind the ears: "If M. de Sarkozy at Paris and Gospodin von Liebermann at Tel Avîv do not want certain curious pictures that have come into my possession released to the press, let them modify their régimes’ policies as outlined in Addendumb B before 15 May 2009 at latest! (Signed) Liza of Langley"

That plan was fun to invent and would be more fun to elaborate, and as the fantastic off-hand examples suggest, vulnerable patients or victims would be easy enough to find. Oddly enough, nobody in the Old Euro tradition of war and diplomacy comes to mind at once as having done anything the least bit like it. The Richelieus and Talleyrands and Bismarks and Cavours (plus closer to home even Herr Staatsekretär von Kissinger of H*rv*rd and MEGOP, the "militant extremist Republican Party") have much preferred a quite different scheme, indeed almost the diametrically opposite scheme. They have traditionally paid pensions to the Sarkozy/Liebermann class of victims or patients in hopeful expectation, usually disappointed, that the recipients of their bounty will STAY bought.

Worse, such pensions have often been both political rather than pecuniary and openly disclosed rather than classified, in which case they are pretty much what our neodogs like to bark-’n’-bellow against as ‘appeasement’. Under George XLIII the Old Euro practice was curtailed, downgraded from the Kissingerian level to that nifty Bribe-a-Tribe™ program to reinforce feudal and other retrograde social elements amongst the subjects of the Postinternational Zone Neorégime in the former al-‘Iráq. BaT™ was OK, but it would not have met with the approval of Boy and Dynasty and Party and Ideology to make substantive political concessions to poor M. al-Málikí at New Baghdád instead of to Shaykh Ibn Fulán out in the boondocks somewhere.

In any case, the main thrust of ‘intelligence’ in MEGOP colonial and imperial administration, even at the village level, has run to bombs rather than bribes. Native A drops a dime on Native B not because she expects a check from the paleface aliens, but because she would like to see that ratfink B kidnapped and locked in a cage. Or, if possible, worse.

Likewise, MEGOP spook groupies are far indeed from wishin’ to collect the sort of intelligence that would conduce to so-called "nation building," a concept so distressin’ to the neocomrades that it seems proper to use the non-Party verb inflection for it in all cases. The sort of ‘intelligence‘ that Princess Neoterica and her Commentariat courtiers and her Big Party inferiors generally would like to see centralised at Langley is, for all practical purposes, exclusively military in nature.

Indeed, a quick fix for all those C.I.A. deficiencies that the peanut-gallery contenders have discovered from watchin’ the toob yesterday [2] would be to clean all those unreliable chickenhawks out of the spook coop and let the violence pros have a total monopoly on "central intelligence."

Balance and fairness require somethin’ of that sort, do they not? Of course they do!

Happy days.


___
[1] Palæocomrade H. L. Stimson lived at about the latest possible date (1929) when a MEGOP could still wish wistfully to be gentlemanly or ladylike after the High Sassenach manner. Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Chamber


[2] The inferior ranks of neocomradedom seem to be emulatin’ Señorito D. Brooks of the New York Times Company with this sudden surGe of two-bit amateur sociology.

Unlike his wannabe chelas, however, the guru is always too prudent for it to be obvious which gutters he has gone a-fishin’ in. Judicious vagueness decently drapes the whole empirical side of Master Davey's social-scientisin’.




Princess Neoterica is at odds with her own e-peasants over the Central Intelligence Agency in an interesting way. Both take for granted that there is and ought to be a special affinity between spooks and the militant extremist Republican Party. So far, so good for them, but unfortunately the peasant notion of MEGOP diverges from the landlordly notion of MEGOP.

All the neocomrades crave a C.I.A. that looks like Wingnut City. That much goes without sayin’. But what does Wingnut City look like, exactly? Naturally its appearance depends which side of the tracks the viewer lives on. Wingnut City is, for all practicin’ wingnutettes and wingnuts, "people like us" -- a sub-par political notion that has caused difficulties for the American Democracy as well on occasion.

For the Otherparty, though, the stakes are higher, because, as Signore Barone pointed out the other day, the MEGOP hordes must not merely be people like themselves, they must be ‘normal’ people like themselves. A fallacy of composition arises at once: very few (statistically) normal people live on both sides of the railroad tracks at once. The Fabulous Flyboy of AZ, with his wife's half dozen houses, can presumably pull the stunt off, but in this, as in more important respects, he is sui generis. Anyway, to admit J. Sidney McCain as canonical on this point would be to award the golden apple of normalcy to the landlordly classes and banish the peasants to outer darkness: anybody who can afford to keep up property on both sides of the tracks is eo ipso an Upper.

Princess Neoterica (and presumably JSM) yearn for a C.I.A. that looks like the upmarket side of the Wingnut City tracks, somethin’ like that "Team B" that Pipes Major was involved in thirty years ago, the crew that got everythin’ about the decadent USSR even wronger than the real pro spooks had managed to.

To impugn the potential technical competence of landlordly neoreaction would be beside the point, however. Our issue is what the C.I.A. ought to look like, not how well it is to function.

In the fashionable parts of town, up Herrnstein-Murray Hill in the immediate shadow of Castle Podhóretz, "normal people like us" implies a C.I.A. run by Pipes Major clones, H*rv*rds or at least Ivy-Leaguers -- the scum from the top of Mr. Harvey Mansfield's pond, as it were.

Across town, and out in beautiful suburban Rio Limbaugh, "normal people like us" means, roughly, Fordhams rather than H*rv*rds.

I borrow ‘Fordham’ from the accounts of a previous fit of MEGOP distemper, that of the late 1940's and early 1950's, when the C.I.A. and most of the other alphabet soup agencies were run by the likes of Dean Acheson and Alger Hiss. Fortunately for Wingnut City, if not necessarily for the Republic, there were J. Edgar Hoover and Senator McWhoziz of Wisconsin to keep everybody snooty in line. [2]

Spookery is only a small department of raison d’état, though naturally one of supreme interest to the Commentariat and the Weekly Standardisers, the landlord-class neocomrades of the strict observance for whom international or intergalactic libido dominandi always comes first. The e-peasantry are more interested in runnin’ the holy Homeland™ itself, or rather, in gettin’ somebody they feel comfy with back into the White House to run it nominally on their behalf. Logically, then, they ought to defer to Her Imperial Highness about the C.I.A. but insist on havin’ somebody more sarahapalingesque run the F.B.I.

Quite illogically and unnaturally, however -- and certainly ‘abnormally’ in Baron Michael’s sense -- no neocomrade of any sort is in a position control the pertinent appointments at the moment. "Life is unfair." [3]

Happy days.


___
[1] abest


[2] Oddly, the learnèd wikipaediatricians don't mention where either of these grand old Heroes of Terror obtained his undergraduate degree. I daresay ‘Fordham’ was a private bee under the commentator's bonnet eons ago when I first heard the funny.


[3] In a Big Party so devoted to the proposition that "History is bunk!" there can not have been many who have reflected how much less unfair Life would seem to them in 2009 if they still possesed some facsimile of Director Hoover, some invisible hand workin’ diligently behind the scenes in Beltway City DC towards the ultimate triumph of illiberalism and antidemocracy and other common Wingnut City values agreed to on both sides of the railroad tracks.

Indeed, I just thought of this slightly subtle, because negative, point myself. It cheers me up not a little to have done so.

Combining the absence of J. Edgar (by death) with the absence of old-fashioned Dixiecrats in Congress (because neocarpetbaggers and neoscalawags hold all those seats now), the student will notice that nowadays there remain pretty well no "eternal Powers, not themselves, that make for righteousness" as Wingnut City conceives political righteousness.

On the other hand there is MurdochNews, but that is at least an open enemy:


"Oh king! Oh father! hear my humble prayer:
Dispel this cloud, the light of heaven restore;
Give me to see, and Ajax asks no more:
If Greece must perish, we thy will obey,
But let us perish in the face of day!"


19 April 2009

"Steeped in deferral"



Contender #3's "steeped in deferral" is not bad at all, Mr. Bones!

It would make excellent sense, ¿no es verdad?, if the Mañana People were finally to have their day. A. Greenspan and B. Madoff and all the witch doctors of Chicagonomics from 'C' through 'Z' have rather discredited the world mastery of premature ejaculators. So a little "steeped in deferral" might hit the spot exactly. (The neocomrades can steep theirs in that ten years supply of teabags that they will have equipped their estate bomb shelters with.)

Speaking of the landed gentry, Princess Neoterica is gettin’ haughtier than ever, it seems to this peasant: many of the nonorganisers of Death and Teabags Day proclaimed (nonauthoritatively, quasi radices graminis) that nobody they knew (and would not of course ever dream of pretendin’ to speak for) simply frontin’ for the militant extremist Republican Party. Or frontin’ for RupertNews either.

Her Imperial Highness is not in the Market for that wishy-washy unpartisan product (or bumptious Putsch attempt by a few dotty dilbertarians.) Extra Crawford nulla salus!

The quarrels of the ideogentry -- ((dip pitchfork here as token of deferral)) --are far over one’s own humble and overeducated head, naturally, but H. I. H. may be makin’ a slight miscalculation. Since Señorito D. Brooks lives in the third McMansion down the hill from the Kaiserhof, figuratively speaking, Princess Neoterica might ask the lad in for tea and a Soc. Sci. pow-wow some afternoon. By Her Highness’s own acount, she is at present waitin’ for the holy Homeland™ to rise against Comrade POTUS as one wingnut, which means that she ought to be able to squeeze in a half-hour audience for Master Davey.

I do not recall the amateur sociologist-in-residence at the New York Times Company ever addressin’ himself to the mysteries of Planet Dilbert (vulgarly called ‘libertarianism’) directly. It is not needful that he should have, however: Señorito Brooks thinks about the world (this world) in an amateur-sociological kind of way, and he must at least have heard the names of the late Miss Rand of Petersburg and the later Mr. Nozick of H*rv*rd. That ought to be adequate for a preliminary readin’ of the tea leaves, extraterrestrial in origin though they be.

This coarse and illiterate peasant inclines to view Death and Teabags Day largely under the aspect of a dilbertarian revival, after the micromovement had nearly gone extinct altogether in the immediate aftermath of the Pentagon-WTC attacks. Roughly the same emotional satisfactions were provided by Kiddie Krusadin’ as by dilbertating, and, for a change, the Daughters of Ayn and Sons of Bob could emote in company with their nominal compatriots. So far the analysis is easy going, though naturally I deference ((dip pitchfork slightly)) to Master Davey’s disagreement, if he disagrees.

One might have guessed in advance (though in fact this peasant failed to) that Planet Dilbert was not dead, only restin’. And now it looks as if they’re back. Obviously an economic exuberance like the Crawford Crash is up their traditional alley, Dilbert Street, in a way that some mere feigned Islamophalangitarian Menace™ could never have been permanently under any circumstances. Like a great many others in the neocomradely community, not to mention the disciples of M. b. Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí (and ultimately the Rev. Ibn Taymiyya), the Baní Nozick and Bnê Rand have been in a mild state of cognitive dissonance ever since the Big Bang, all their hormones torn between hatin’ a "far enemy" and hatin’ a "near enemy." The far enemy is, of course, the dread Islamophalangitarians themselves. The near enemy is America's party, or perhaps l*b*r*lism generically. People like Comrade POTUS and the present peasant, don't you know?

I assume the learned señorito of NYTC will will confirm both that this configuration is unstable in itself, and that when it eventually breaks down, the "far enemy" will almost invariably wind up on the back burner. Accordingly, the Crawford Crash ought to have been a twofer for the Dilbertarians: (1) they now get to talk about their crank economics, a subject-matter they much prefer to exotic considerations adduced by jihád careerists, and (2) they get to loathe somebody near at hand of whom they have a reasonably clear and distinct mental picture, not just a Danish cartoon.

That is what one would expect antecedently, and that seems to be what is actually coming to pass.

This peasant’s own experience, which happens to include 45 minutes of a Death-and-Teabags Day event beside Boston Harbour, is in accordance with theoretical expectation. In Eastern Massachusetts, at least, very little of the anti-Obama windbaggery professes to be specifically in the path of the militant extremist GOP. One bozo after another callin’ in to Neocomrade H. Carr (WRKO 680) or Neocomrade the Duke of Sanseverino (WTKK-FM 96.9) announces that she is some kind of ‘conservative’, yet not the strict Grant-McKinley-Hoover-Dubya kind. This far down into the sewer of Romulus, the word ‘libertarian’ is echoed and re-echoed often enough, but the peasant impression is that the talk-show fodder are scarcely prepared to recite on exactly what it means. Still, they kinda know what they like. Presumably the wombscholars kinda like ‘libertarian’ because they do vaguely grasp that it means somethin’ conservative that is yet NOT tainted by asociation with the Party of Goldwater and Atwater.

The objection is obvious: Eastern Massachusetts may not be typical. And indeed the whole Commonwealth actually IS atypical insofar as windbags and wombscholars and regular Republicans between them cannot manage to elect even one Congressman out of eleven. This makes it especially amusing when the Duke of Sanseverino, who is an avowed slave of Dilbert and who can be quite rude about the Party of Prescriptive Wisdom and Virtue (and Áyatalláh Bill Bennet) on occasion, does that Herbert Marcuse impersonation of his, threatenin’ to withdraw toleration from the rest of us. [1]

Hence the peasant suggestion that Her Imperial Highness of Pajamastán confer with Master Davey of the New York Times Company about the current status of dilbertarianism in the holy Homeland™ viewed from sea to shinin’ sea. Are there enough Homeland™ers who want to be Kiddie Konservatives without bein’ militant extremist Republicans as well to matter? And even if they do not matter today, how about mañana?

And even if they won’t matter any quadrennium soon, one would still like to know how many of Her Highness’s "hundreds of thousands of tea party attendees" actually gave much of a hoot about Her Highness’s Big Management Party as such.

Turning the tables 180 degrees, Planet Dilbert as such cannot reasonably be expected to appeal to the up-market tastes of the Commentariat and the Weekly Standardisers; everythin’ about the Baní Nozick and Bnê Rand reeks sadly of banausic Trade, and Miss Rand’s ludicrous attempts to make banausic Trade seem romantic only aggravate the underlyin’ incongruity. Though standards have been slippin’ badly lately and continue to slip, yet Princess Neoterica and the whole Imperial court still retain some traditional notion of what a novel should be like, a notion that overlaps with Miss Rand’s curious fictional productions not at all.

Mr. Mansfield of H*rv*rd might serve as a litmus test for ‘libertarianism’: any patient who knows approximately who that toneyest of livin’ neocomrades is may safely be pronounced free of infection. Alternatively, the patient might be exposed to some brief Mansfieldian scribble [2] and then acquitted of suspicion if she can get to the end of it without actually breakin’ out in hives or tossin’ the book / magazine / computer across the room in exasperation. (Like everything else here, that humble peasant suggestion should be flown by Señorito Dr. Brooks of NYTC for a thorough Soc. Sci. vettin’ before actual implementation. But it sure seems to me that this plan ought to work!)

Happy days.


___
[1] His Lordship is a very typical dilbertarian, though of course the peasant notion of ‘typical’ is once again parochial, and has a lot to do with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in particular, especially MIT as viewed from the best college in the county (of Middlesex), the one which lies two subway stops farther west.

Neocomrade J. Severin combines an I.Q. of 150 with an over-all developmental age of about fifteen years. Folks like that want human events to be as easy to grasp as quantum physics, and they do manage to get the sort of product they want from Miss Rand and Mr. Nozick. Dilbertarians are not, to put it gently, picky about quality in a political product, so long as it exudes a strong whiff of steel-claptrap-mindedness.

The generic brain disease can happen on the other side of the aisle as well, though it is rarer chez nous. Consider Jimmy XXXIX Crater, the soi-disant nuke-you-larry physicist.


[2] The Weekly Standardisers keep a good deal more in stock on line than Commentariat Centre does, a fact which mildly surprises this peasant. Anyway, Neocomrade H. C. Mansfield's most recent e-performance, as retrieved by the pet google, ought to make perfectly servicable litmus paper, despite bein’ specifically about an economic topic. There is, after all, economics and then there is economics: few if any denizens of Planet Dilbert know much about the recondite Chicagonomic points that this Renaissance neocomrade refers to.

Best of all, the word ‘virtue’, sine quâ non!, makes a personal appearance.

16 April 2009

Conservatives mount anti-tax 'tea party' protests across the US

This keyboard would almost certainly not comment if some fringe of the Stupid Party on Airstrip One were to show off its quaint tribal dances and its ideological handicraft work in a comparable way. ("Comment is free," to be sure. And one usually gets about what one pays for.)

Speaking of value for money, e-comradess ‘amacd’ with her CORPORATE ELITES (a product only available in majuscules, for some reason) purports to be from the former Massachusetts, but who can accept that claim? Anybody who seriously believes that yesterday’s dogs and ponies were trained and harnessed by the razor-sharp managerial minds of Harvard Victory School MBA’s must live a long way from the nearest business corporation. At Havana, possibly, or on the Moon.

A few individual lackeys and runnin’ dogs of Wall Street may have sent the Teapers a little money out of misconceived ideological solidarity (or Alzheimer's, or a congenital brain defect), but if CORPORATE ELITES had actually been involved in a managerial rôle, it would have been a very different show. Notice that Neocomrade A. Mudrick of Oregon, whom Mr. Nasaw will have picked by the lucky dip method, is no friend to CORPORATE ELITES, though cranky enough nevertheless: he "carried a sign describing the US Federal Reserve as a clandestine puppet master. ‘This is a civil liberties issue. This is an issue of our freedom, and breaking the chains of taxation without representation.’ "

Perhaps Citizen Abe of OR and Citizenness ‘amacd2’ of ME (?) should schedule a conference committee to iron out their differences about which side Herr Generalquartiermeister B. Bernanke von Ludendorff is fighting for.

Meanwhile, if some C. Wright Mills Power Elite® actually existed and ruled the holy Homeland™ from an undisclosed location (which is not the case at all, though the proof is too long to fit in the margin), are not the antecedent probabilities heavily on Abe's side? Imagining the Fed as a clandestine puppet with its string pulled by (say) "Eric Odom, a Chicago-based internet activist who helped organise the protests," is the sort of mental stunt best left for Miss Alice to practice before breakfast. (Say I.)

E-comrade ‘orangebag’ cannot be a holy Homelander™, so I trust Citizen Abe will not be too annoyed about "the dumbest sounding quotation." The neocomrade probably stands well over towards the right edge of the Herrnstein-Murray IQ Curve© -- cranks often do.

Q1. "How would anyone actually take someone like this seriously?"

A1. Anyone must speak for himself. The present keyboard takes Neocomrade A. Mudrick of Oregon seriously because his vote counts as much as the keyboard’s own. That is admittedly not quite the same as respecting wingnutty Rand-Nozick (‘libertarian’) opinions in isolation.


Q2. "Do they believe they didn't lose the election?"

A2. That is a very hard question, unless it is meant strictly literally. Those of us who do not much care for the denizens of Hooverville and Rio Limbaugh and Wingnut City are always tempted to exaggerate when attempting to imagine what goes on between their ears. One might start by doubting whether the GOP geniuses and their Party base and vile (plus extraterrestrial fellow-travelers from Planet Dilbert like A. Mudrick of Oregon) attach the same importance to elections that decent political grown-ups do.

The Konservative Kiddies know that they lost the election, but they do not (as I conjecture) altogether understand why that misfortune should prevent them from runnin’ most departments and divisions of America Inc.

The present keyboard was physically present at the Teaper rally beside Boston Harbour, though it went home before they chucked the vile contraband. One of the (smallish) crowd’s favorite collective barks and bellows ran "YOU WORK FOR US! YOU WORK FOR US!", starrin’ poor old Uncle Sam (a.k.a. "The Fedguv") as ‘you’.

On the whole, that is about what Wingnut City really has in mind: most of ‘government’ is a matter of contractual obligations of the wicked public sector to the Noble Private Sector. Elections are all very well in their way--sort of, maybe--but they are certainly not to be made the occasion for an orgy of infringments of the sanctity of contract!

That account would have to be extensively revised, however, to be applicable to a presidential election that the kiddies managed to win. If that ever happens again, doubtless the militant extremist GOP will be even more militant and extreme than ever before, buildin’ upon the Unified-Executive Branch Theory (Pat. Pend.) developed under George XLIII by Neocomrades R. B. Cheney and A. Gonzales and J. Yoo, Esq., and the rest of that crew that some dotty Spaniard would like to prosecute.

When the kiddies are locked out, in short, the word ‘government’ means scarcely more than lighthouse maintenance. When they can get their paws on the wheel, however, that narrow notion goes out the window like an oblongus pie, and the GOP geniuses start applyin’ the methodology of the Harvard Victory School MBA gentry: the holy Homeland™ is to be run like a railroad by grave and sober statesman of industry, folks who have actually met a payroll (or wrecked a global financial system), unlike Comrade POTUS. The Big Managers of a private business corporation are unencumbered by anythin’ very like Congress or courts, so "of course" when the Party of Big Management graciously condescends to bigmanage the USA, the very first thing to do is to minimize interference from those incompetent directions.

"Heads they win, tails we lose."

As noted, there is a temptation to lay it on with a trowel or a dump truck whenever one starts reconstructing the neocomradely state of mind. Perhaps it is over the line to notice that our HVS MBA's are also (almost completely) unconstrained by elections. I should hesitate to claim that Yank reaction would like to abolish elections, or even bring back poll taxes and property qualifications so as to restore a proper Hamiltonio-Murdochoid balance and fairness. But still ....

... still, it is not easy to avoid suspecting that the underlyin’ grievance of Kiddie Konservative could be boiled down to approximately "What’s really wrong with God’s Country is that too damn many people (or: ‘losers’) in it are allowed to vote!"

Happy days.

15 April 2009

Not Freepers, But Teapers!



O frabjous day! Here we are, Mr. Bones, present at the recreation!



To amuse themeselves, and to exalt the horn of the haute bourgeousie, the entire population of darkest Pajamastán will turn out as one wingnut and . . . .

. . . and . . .

....

Hmm.

Neocomrade Field Marshal J. Emmanuel does not exactly say what his shock trooperesses and troopers are goin’ta do once they are turned out. Perhaps we may take it as given that, on each separate tribal reservation, some high officer of their Big Management Party or their AEIdeology will inspect the formation to make sure that nothin’ is amiss. Only a low mean cynic, or a dupe of the MacLuhan Cult, would suggest that this inspection is more or less the main event, that the whole shebang will succeed or fail accordin’ly as it is reported on Party-and-Ideology Television for the convenience of print-challenged nonparticipants. Far be it from me to say any such thing, Mr. Bones! Although you will remember that I have been wrong about such questions in the past.

In any case, if the good field marshal (scheduled to pontificate at the Chicago wigwam, it appears) and his subordinate officers, scattered at various outlets of economic reaction all across the Fruited Plain™ of Neocomrade Dr. R. Limbaugh, should omit to conduct such an inspection, they will be makin' a mistake. For that matter, somebody is makin’ a different grave mistake if what I have called the good field marshal's "subordinate officers" are not, in fact, subordinate: all chiefs and no enlisted savages might make for a nine days' wonder, but come Day Ten, there won't be any ‘there’ there. This mistake is less likely than not savin’ the TV appearances, I suppose, in light of the obvious connections between the good field marshal and his officers and his officerettes and his trooperesses and his troops on the one hand, and the Party of Big Management on the other. [1]

What's that you say, Mr. Bones? "Am I deliberately trying to make the good field marshal's Party-and-Ideology groupies sound like the Kook Klux Klan?" Not at all, sir, not at all! I am aiming rather at a sort of Enron Corporation or Madoff Fund model of these new sweet puppies of the Right. You are not to make fun of me, sir, merely because I point up that a great many holy Homelanders™, a few of them not wingnuts or wingnutettes even at all, have a distinct tendence to go overboard in the organization-chart direction.

"Didn't I read the G. H. Reynolds article?" Oh, I see -- you must mean the agitprop neocomrade’s elegant smoke and mirrors to the effect that the Teapartisans are to get along without any organization charts at all,

"[M]odern communications and social-networking technologies allow quick coordination among large numbers of people who don't know each other,"

and so on and so forth. Come along, Mr. Bones, do I have to remind you that we heard the same sort of drool from much the same class of droolers twenty years ago, without anything much comin’ of it? Master Dilbert sincerely believed that high-tech whizbangs had overthrown the Soviet Union and refuted St. George of Orwell and "changed the world for ever" -- meanin’ chiefly, as I reconstruct, that the laddie himself then expected his holy Homeland™ swiftly to become the paradise envisioned by the dupes and marks of Miss Rand of Petersburg and Mr. Nozick of Harvard. ("Ah, ‘What went wrong? ’ " ! "Well may you ask, Neorabbi Bernie! [2])

Dilbert thinks so still, it appears. Well, OK, he is not the sort of spineless wimp who gives into mere reality. Like Neocomrade Lord Rove, Master Dilbert believes in "WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality!" and all the rest of the neocatechism that baloney comes from.

The rest of us, however, would do better to come quiet, when reality arrests us. Especially now that the Crawford Crash has removed us several thousand additional light-years from the Beulah Land of dilbertarian bliss.

"Do the Teapers fancy themselves Rovean Empire-founders, then?" ’Tis an interesting question, Mr. Bones, though of course nobody off the reservation can ever know for sure what the Party-and-Ideology base-and-vile are thinkin’. Still, it strikes me as very unlikely that they are imperialists of anythin’ like Neocomrade Lord Rove’s sort. It goes without sayin’ that this present frabjous day would not be happenin’ at all, had the Fabulous Flyboy from AZ not been shot down on his White House sortie. "If Samuel Adams had had Lord North's job . . ." -- would be the properly ludicrous parallel in Century XII/XVIII for that counterfactual.

Less improbably, le teaperisme en Amérique may be a consequence of, or a collateral damage from, the Crawfordite Griff nach der Heimatlandmacht. If one prescinds from unreality-basin’ of the sort His Excellency formerly condescended to Mr. Suskind with, it looks as if there is not goin’ta be any Rovean Empire. All those power options that Neocomrade R. B. Cheney and Neocomrade Gen. A. Gonzales and Neocomrade J. Yoo, Esq., and all the militant extremist merry men so laboriously heaped up in the White House coal cellar are still there, but since the Roves and the Cheneys and the Boy and the Boy’s Dynasty are *not* still there, what good do these things avail the neocomrades? Quid enim prodest homini si mundum universum lucretur, animae vero suae detrimentum patiatur? [2]

You might try, Mr. Bones, to think of the 2009 Teapers after the model of Generalissimo Chiang in 1949: they used, just the other day, to be in control of all the levers of State power, but their attempt to perpetuate that arrangement in saecula saeculorum amen sadly miscarried. A small island far off to the starboard edge of the political world is all that remains in militant extremist GOP hands securely at the moment, though that misfortune does not mean that they have lowered their pretensions to be the alone echte und legitime Heiligheimatländer one whit.

Reconquest of the mainland is not goin’ta be easy no matter how the neocomradely remnant go about it. Of a reconquest accordin’ to the top-down models proposed by Neocomrade K. Freiherr von Rove back before the Republican Party's Nakba Day , there can be no question at all.

Teaperism, at least, is not obviously hopeless!

But God knows best.


Happy days.





___
[1] A rather less juvenile version of this same scribble appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Jingo , than which nothin’ on Gore’s green earth could be more bigmanagerial! One learns that

When Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele asked to speak at the Chicago tea party, his request was politely refused by the organizers: 'With regards to stage time, we respectfully must inform Chairman Steele that RNC officials are welcome to participate in the rally itself, but we prefer to limit stage time to those who are not elected officials, both in Government (sic!) as well as political parties. This is an opportunity for Americans to speak, and elected officials to listen, not the other way around.' "

To be sure, the ever-august Chair of Steele™ is not the very toniest and farthest upmarket sort of executive-suite furniture available. How could it be, in a Big Party for which it has always been axiomatic that all first-raters will be found enrichin’ themselves with their bigmanagerial skills, not throwin’ these pearls before the swinish multitude?


[3] Ev. Matt. XVI:26.


11 April 2009

Music Once Was Musical [0]



Which way is the data flow here?

One would expect Neocomrade Professor Doctor Th. Sowell to set forth authoritative talkin’ points for the guidance of his weaker siblin’s in the Party of Big Management, but this performance looks more like His Excellency rummagin’ through Neocomrade Dr. Limbaugh’s ever-immortal Stack of Stuff: de bas en haut, don't you know?

H. E. does have one firm word of instruction for the GOP base and vile: they are advised to agitate and propagandise against their Fedguv and their President as ‘fascist’ rather than as ‘socialist’. His Excellency bein’ a professional Chicagónomist rather than any sort of historian, one has to wonder what that ploy is all about. The practical state of the wombscholars and downdumbees is such as to make it very doubtful that they understand more than "somethin’ very bad" by either epithet. And from outside the zoölogical gardens, it matters not at all which epithet they hurl: "Sticks and stones may break my bones / But slurs can never hurt me."

One can learn little about Comrade POTUS from how the exalted Hoovervillain prefers to insult him, but there may be some instruction about Hoovervillainy. Hard to miss that H. E. recommends the name of the Old Euro bad guys whose badness was less specifically economic. That may seem a misstep, insofar as one might present the facts under the proposed talkin’ point this way: "Dr. Goebbels and Signor Mussolini were soft on capitalism."

H.E. inculcates that his F-word monsters "believed in government control of privately owned businesses, which is much more the style of [our own] government. That way, politicians can intervene whenever they feel like it . . . ." His S-word fiends, on the other hand, "believe in government ownership of the means of production" -- which sounds like it was quoted from some other sect’s catechism because that is in fact exactly where it comes from. H. E. (who was havin’ a bad day, it looks like, inspirationwise) does not actually make the point that he seems to have intended, and so one can count on the weaker sistern to miss it. Allow me: she who owns must also administer, whereas the firm of Goebbels & Mussolini could leave administration to their tame Heroes of the Market and only rarely intervene to veto this or that, and even more rarely to insist on positive action uncongenial to their kept marketeers and to everybody’s old friend Mlle. du Main Invisible. The mystic princess was out of work altogether under Comrade Lenin and Marshal Stalin; in Italy and Germany, she was alive and well, though not invariably in command the way she was before the recent Crawford Crash in the holy Homeland™.

Nevertheless, I conjecture that Neocomrade Prof. Sowell cares very little about the economics of lower-case-'F' fascism and recommends it to his Party inferiors mostly because the primary associations of the word, especially though not exclusively amongst Big Management Party wombscholars and downdumbees, is not economic at all. Nobody thinks of Hjalmar Schacht; everybody thinks of Heinrich Himmler. (Loosely speaking.)

Genocide and holiness and militarism and Homelands and limpieza de sangre, that's the ‘fascist’ ticket! Of course there had to be some sort of fascist economy, even as there had to be some sort of fascist State, nobody can make his way in the modern world without these miserable crutches, but to judge the firm of Goebbels & Mussolini by its necessary crutches rather than by its lofty (in)humanistic idealisms and its national-family values would be to miss almost the whole point. Only at the margin of ‘fascism’, in the realm of M. le Maréchal Pétain, do we find much trace of Lord Mammon. Even at that, the first word of Travail, Famille, Patrie! will scarcely have meant anything that Chicagonomics would be very interested in, or would much approve of if it did take an interest.

With fascism represented more fully and accurately like that, Neocomrade Prof. Th. Sowell's suggested talkin’ point may or may not seem fantastic even at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh. Not even Barák Husáyn Obáma can be bad and wrong in every way at once, and to make him out bad and wrong after the centrally characteristic fashion of Goebbels and Mussolini and Generalissimo Franco and "Nous, Philippe Pétain" is absurd anywhere outside the factional monkey house. I assume His Excellency is either professionally blinkered and takes no interest in ‘fascism’ or in anythin’ else except insofar as there exists some Chicagonomic angle to it. Or, rather more likely in my judgment, H. E. is playin’ defense here, and would rather have the current controversies between America's party and the militant extremist GOP framed with as little mention of economics as possible.

Call Comrade POTUS a socialist, and the mind may wander to how brilliantly the antisocialists have just managed to wreck "their own" financial system. Call BHO a fascist, and maybe a few instructed persons will laugh out loud at the neocomradely ignorance, but such laughter will not do economic OnePercenterdom any actual harm. Better talk distractive nonsense, in short, than talk sense that might prejudice the interests of Party and Ideology.

His Excellency of Hooverville is endeavorin’ to exalt the horn of the Republican Party and of the AEIdeology, that is to say, the horn of Big Management™ all across the board. From that standpoint, what could be better than to tar opponents, if possible, with the sort of bigmanagement that once ran Dachau and Operation Barbarossa?

The socialist Muscovites at least managed to be on the victorious side in 1945, so of course it would not do at all if Comrade POTUS were to emulate them on that front. One connotation of the word ‘fascists’ that the wombscholars at Rio Limbaugh may actually be able to take in is ‘losers’.

So Neocomrade Th. Sowell's is a plan that the Joseph Goebbels School of Counterterrorism and Public Diplomacy can approve of in principle.

In practice, though, I betcha it doesn't work. The neocomrades may get their paws back on the Executive Branch levers of power sooner rather than later, but if they do, it will not be thanks to the Sowellian antifascism product, nifty though one can write it up. (Or to Señorito J. Goldberg's ditto.)

Happy days.


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[0] Thee tell me, Mr. Bones, why the ChristoKorean editors of America's Moonpaper wanted to call it that, when Neocomrade Dr. Th. Sowell could be totally tonedeaf for all that this scribble indicates.


10 April 2009

Virtually Pathological?




As much as anything else, what fueled the extreme hostility towards the Bush/Cheney administration were their imperious and radical efforts to place themselves behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and above and beyond the rule of law. It would require a virtually pathological level of tribal loyalty and monumental intellectual dishonesty not to object just as vehemently as we watch the Obama DOJ repeatedly invoke these very same theories and, in this instance, actually invent a new one that not even the Bush administration espoused.

Erst kommt die Eloquenz, Mr. Bones, dann kommt das Fressen!

"Virtually pathological" is not a tool that clean-limbed liberals and democrats and disciples of M. Pascal need to think with. One does not, sarcasm apart, proclaim wingnuts and wingnutettes and Weekly Standardisers and Hoovervillains to be ‘sick’. This by-law is not imposed for the sake of the bozos and the sweet puppies, naturally, but for the sake of decent political grown-ups. We make life far too easy for ourselves by allowing (pseudo)diagnosis to pass for argument.

The derogatory prefix placed in parenthesis is optional: the diagnosis ploy would be improper even on the supposition of genuine clinical pathology. She who lives by a medical analogy ought to be prepared to die by it, and die by it she must, for even if a diagnosis is entirely accurate, it still fails to be any sort of argument at all. Let Dr. Schweitzer, ably assisted by Mother Teresa, examine some miserable victim like General Lord George Will and (quite correctly, me judice) decide that what the patient has fallen prey to is syneidetoma mutilans, a malignant tumour of the conscience, that remains only a description of His Lordship’s moral and mental disability. If the bad news were brough directly to His Lordship's attention, he would reject it as hostile defamation in two seconds, never dreamin’ for a nanosecond that he might ask some neocomradely quack at Wingnut City for a second opinion. Sick or whole, the prize jerk over at the The Washin’ton Neo would manage to see that it is not that sort of opinion, not, indeed, the sort of opinion it pretends to be. That discrepancy is why it was so extremely counterfactual of me to imagine St. Albert of the Historical Jesus playing the sort of game that Mr. Glenn Greenwald wants to play. [1]

So much for ‘diagnosis’. Mr. Greenwald's innovation is more with ‘virtual’. Exactly what value is added, or intended to be added, by that term is a slightly tricky question nowadays, when one’s immediate response to it is to think of some connection with WWWonderland rather than of the virtus Catonis Iunioris or il virtù del Signiore Macchiavelli. There is also the possibility that it is sheer tautology, a noise with no meaning of its own: ‘pathology’ being a figure of rhetoric to begin with, if "virtual pathology" means no more in context than "General Holder is not really sick but he might as well be," it looks to me as if Greenwaldian VP comes to little more than "an avowedly rhetorical figure of rhetoric. " Celà ne vaut pas le voyage, don’t thee know, Mr. Bones?

___
Descending from Form to matter (or call it Fressen), thee will notice, sir, that G. Greenwald, Virtualis Medicinæ Doctor, does go on provide a little more information about the virtual patient’s virtual infirmity. General Holder and those who applaud him suffer from "tribal loyalty" and "monumental intellectual dishonesty." It is especially alarming to Dr. Greenwald that these same virtual symptoms were characteristic of the militant extremist Republicans back before they were so happily deprived of the Executive Branch just the other day.

Now here again we must distinguish, Mr. Bones. It would be thoroughly Pascalian and therefore edifying to warn us good guys, in a general way, always to endeavor to think better than lowly denizens of Hooverville and Rio Limbaugh and Wingnut City manage to think. So far, so good, but when Dr. Greenwald starts specifying particular defects in the (pseudo)intellectation of Bozodom rather than allowing each individual good guy to play diagnostician for herself, I begin to reluct a little. Being countersuggestible, not to mention a Tammany Hall or Cook County Democrat, I find myself wishing to say something nice about "tribal loyalty."

"Monumental intellectual dishonesty," taken at face value, is far outside the Pascalian pale, indefensible altogether. Yet thee and I, Mr. Bones, have long pondered the mysteries of precisely when it is appropriate to accuse the typical Homelandic pol of lying (or of ‘cynicism’), and Dr. Greenwald runs afoul of us a little in that quarter also, I think. In short, I incline to accept our virtual quack's virtual diagnosis of "tribal loyalty," but to deny that the condition is ‘pathological,’ whereas with "monumental intellectual dishonesty," I allow that the condition would be virtually pathological if actually present in the patient, but incline to suspect Greenwald, V. M. D., of a virtual misdiagnosis.

At the same time, he does seem to have a pretty good feel for what is problematical about General Holder and his groupies. To phrase the crucial point entirely independently of questionable Greenwaldisms, the Attorney General of the United States of America evidently thinks that Cheyneyoid Unitary Executivitarianism™--"efforts to place themselves behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and above and beyond the rule of law"--is OK when we donkeys do it, but was not OK back when the militant extremist GOP used to do it. Unremarkably, it is not difficult to unearth wingnuts and wingnutettes who double-standardise in the diametrically opposite direction, makin’ that Big Party pond scum of theirs, Neocomrade Gen. A. Gonzales, Esq., out a noble goose, with Mr. Holder the silly goose who presumes to wield high prerogatives obviously reserved to her prescriptive natural betters.

These virtual symptoms, I take it, are what get virtually diagnosed as "monumental intellectual dishonesty." But this V. D. is entirely wrong at least insofar as Hooverville and Wingnut City and the militant extremist Republican Party are concerned: they sincerely believe that their own OnePercenterdom, as represented through America's Otherparty, is better than the rest of us. They thought so when they were Federalists with Gen. Hamilton, Esq.; they thought so when they were Whigs with Generals B. Harrison and Z. Taylor; and they have though so as the Party of Grant or Grand Old Party ever since 1869, every day in every way right down to when they became, temporarily, the Party of 1LT Bush of the TX Air National Guard.

There has, perhaps, been a slight modification of why our Homelandic ganders suppose themselves far better than the average goose, but never any waverin’ for even an instant in the fact of their self-preferrin’. Under these circumstances, the question of "monumental intellectual dishonesty" has arisen only when general electoral necessity or an ill-judged ‘idealism’ on the part of individual ganders has led them to conceal or even deny their obvious betterness. These aberrant episodes have happened frequently enough, because in order to function as a North American political party rather than a Venetian conspiracy of oligarchs the militant extremists of the Otherparty can rarely [2] be quite frank about their own Coriolanian betterness in public places where the beastly mob of cobblers and donkeys might overhear them. They mastered the requisite ‘populist’ humbug by 1840 at the latest, and have been keepin’ it up admirably ever since.

Hence Dr. Greenwald is mistaken to virtually diagnose "monumental intellectual dishonesty." The ganders honestly believe that noble ganders are better than silly geese and therefore obviously ought to have more power. When they pretend otherwise to Televisionland and the electorate, their pretence is so old and so ill-camouflaged that nobody who cares enough to stay awake and pay a little attention can be deceived by it. Thee and I, Mr. Bones, have long agreed that the Ganders Only Party are not to be called ‘liars’ when they emit noises like that in judicious (?) defiance of their subjectively sincere self-esteemin’. Dr. Greenwald virtually diagnoses "intellectual dishonesty" which is not verbally the same as ‘lying’. I am not entirely certain whether or not there is any material difference. Can the militant extremist ganders be acquitted on the grounds that certainly do not deceive themselves in foro interiori about their own natural and prescriptive superiority? I should say Yes, but perhaps Dr. Greenwald or some other cultivated despiser of Hooverville and Wingnut City could make a respectable case to the contrary. God knows best.

The central question is not about America's Otherparty, but about whether General Holder, presumably himself a silly goose and a loyal donkey, must be found guilty of "monumental intellectual dishonesty." I suppose it is just possible that the presumption is wrong, that our Attorney General is, in his heart, no liberal and democrat and Democrat, but something else altogether, possibly an illiberal antidemocratic Socialist or Technocrat. (Or why not an antidemocratic and illiberal Reformed Zoroastrian?) If so, he would be off the Greenwaldian virtual hook exactly the same way in which the militant extremist GOP are off the virtual hook: General Holder would "know in his heart," à la B. Goldwater, that he is better than we are and must therefore have powers that it would be madness to entrust to us silly geese. But if there is any positive evidence to that effect, I have not heard of it.

One easy guess is that the good General supposes himself to possess, not an across-the-board prescriptive betterness like that of the wingnuts and wingnutettes, but only an ex officio betterness. Any goose or donkey could in principle be Attorney General, but the one that actually is so must eo ipso possess extraordinary powers, perhaps even to the point at which Dr. Greenwald can be relied upon to virtually diagnose "an impenetrable wall of secrecy ... above and beyond the rule of law." Something along those lines must be conceded by America’s party, assuming we do not wish to repudiate our descent from general Jackson. (There were some distinct Rulalaw questions about our foundational hero, were there not, O Democrats? Though despair not! many of them were about other countries’ Rulalaw, which is rather a different subject than the one Dr. Greenwald has raised.) But how much concession shall there be, and what shall it consist in, exactly?

Dr. Greenwald is broad-minded enough to refer to a very hostile second virtual opinion which goes like this:

But where — as here — Obama embraces the very same extremist secrecy and immunity powers which provoked such intense criticism when Bush claimed those powers, any minimally honest person will react how Booman did. It is simply impossible for X to have been a hallmark of lawless tyranny when Bush did it but an understandable or tolerable action (or, worse, a routine fulfillment of one’s duties) when Obama does it. It is simply impossible for X to have been a hallmark of lawless tyranny when Bush did it but an understandable or tolerable action (or, worse, a routine fulfillment of one’s duties) when Obama does it.

That really will not do, but unfortunately Dr. Leon H. Wolf cannot virtually diagnose the Greenwaldian pathology correctly. What is really wrong with that quotation is merely that Dr. Greenwald lays down his Rulalaw simpliciter rather than secundum quid: lots of "minimally honest people" can assent to those abominations, a difficulty arises only if they also profess to be liberals and democrats and Democrats. ’Tis a happy thought that everybody ‘honest’ must reject the goose-and-gander shtyk and be a sound Kantian! Yet a happy thought is all it is: the empirical woods are full of categorical imperative rejectionists; to accept advice to ignore them as dishonest would only needlessly unfit one for coping with the real world.

The Wolfian virtual diagnosis is rather legal than medical:

In light of the indisputable (by everyone other than Olbermann and other leftists who are clueless about the law, some crackpot law professor from GWU and Greenwalds) presumption that the Government is immune from suit in the absence of a clear and express waiver, the DoJ really had no choice at all but to raise this defense. Anyone who says otherwise simply does not understand how lawyers are supposed to do their jobs.

Wolf, Esq., looks to be in fact what I just fantasized that Gen. Holder might be, an illiberal antidemocratic Technocrat whose special technê is jurisprudence. Since Rulalaw can mean pretty well anything and its opposite, as thee and I noted in conjunction with the late Neocomrade Representative H. Hyde's ever-immortal bloviation during Impeachmentgate, sir, few things are less surprising that Wolfian Rulalaw and Greenwaldian Rulalaw should have little in common but the label. ’Tis rather like hot-and-sour soup, don't thee know, Mr. Bones? No way of guessing what ingredients will go into either product at the next restaurant one visits for the first time!

Happy days.

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[1] At the exalted, but specialised, level of St. Albert and Mother Teresa, the best thing to do with a General Lord George Will, or a Neocomrade Vice-President R. B. Cheney,or, in the case at hand, with General Eric Holder, is, as I conjecture, to mutter in a devout whisper, but one loud enough to be easily overheard, "There, but for Father Zeus, go you and I!"

That ejaculation is not, I think, at bottom significantly different from this humble keyboard's own "prize jerk" above, but thee must admit, Mr. Bones, that the ecclesiastical path is a good deal tonier. Either way, the actual information content is merely that His NeoPostal Lordship is ethical and intellectual pitch, a substance not be touched by anybody who would mind being defiled.


[2] Naturally it is always a pleasure when complete frankness does break out in the Otherparty, as for instance when Buckley Minor went about hawkin’ his favourite political proverb, Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi. Still, it cannot be an acident that he did so in the decent obscurity of an extinct tongue.