22 July 2009

"full Republican talking point mode"



Then, in full Republican talking point mode, Brooks tells us:

"The House [health care] bill adds $239 billion to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would pummel small businesses with an 8 percent payroll penalty. It would jack America’s top tax rate above those in Italy and France. Top earners in New York and California would be giving more than 55 percent of earnings to one government entity or another."

D. Brooks is about as pretty an example of inexplicable (not to say, ‘groundless’ or ‘unwarrantable’) celebrity as exists in the world. At some point in the past he or his parents presumably knew somebody who . . . knew somebody who . . . somebody.

But that was and this is now. D. Brooks is an established cultural monument. An excellent arrangement for the little laddie himself! He will never have to think again, he can tommyfriedmanate for the rest of his earthly days, letting other less celebrated persons get their views into the New York Times indirectly. (The theoretical economic side of Th. Friedman and D. Brooks is mildly interesting: is one to presume, on the basis of ‘rationality’ imputed to their employing corporation, that the latter well knows what Tweedledumb and Tweedledee are up to, that the NYTC consciously prefers to rent out NYTC opinion space in this roundabout way? I have no idea, though I can get as far as seeing why it would be irrational and counterproductive to describe this type of ideoproduct very frankly.)

However the problems of secret-sector business corporations with tasteless cultural monuments scattered all over the lawn are not ours or even Dr. Baker’s. Our problem is what to make of the material that little Tommy and little Davey ventriloquize for our reading pleasure. I’d suggest as a general rule that we make nothing of it all, ignore it completely except when we are quite sure where ‘their’ latest piffle is really coming from. Tommy quite often gives the name of his Edgar Bergen du jour away, but little Davey scarcely ever.

Yesterday’s piece will do as an example: it seems improbable that D. Brooks just ate lunch with N. Macchiavelli. Though it is easy enough to guess that he was hiring out his blankness to an agent of the Concord Coalition or the Peterson Pontificate, why bother guessing? One can get that product straight from the horses’ anatomy, after all.

Dr. Baker guesses himself -- "full Republican talking point mode" -- but that is so vague as to be useless. Unfortunately it is not so vague as to be incapable of distracting attention from the fact that little Davey is widely despised by militant extremist Republicans. [1]

Hence it is not surprising to find a commenter chez Baker commenting "What I find interesting is that the only two people I have seen referencing the $239 billion CBO score were Brooks and McConnell, both of whom used it to demagogue. Otherwise there seems to not be a peep...." -- that is to say, D. Brooks cannot have been simply rehashing an RNC agitprop handout.

Dreadful though this señorito is, as far as I have seen, it never sinks quite that low. [2] (Perhaps it was Neocomrade Senator A. M. McConnell in person that D. Brooks had lunch with?)

Happy days.


___
[1] http://tinyurl.com/n8xmzz will do.

In fact, Neocomrade Dr. R. Limbaugh himself barked ’n’ bellowed somethin’ similar against Master David yesterday, but it appears that one must be a card-carryin’ and dues-payin’ wingnut to search the Rushian website. ("Forget it!," says I.)

The nature of tommyfriedmanation and daveybrooksifying is such as to make it highly likely that pretty well everybody with fixed views of any sort will be irritated by these neobrats, and probably sooner rather than later. (The economic basis of the whole bratty shtyk really could do with some elucidation: will not most consumers remember one Tweedledumb op-ed that they considered idiotic or perverse more vividly than a hundred that they did not particularly mind? I.e., can Tommy and Davey really be worth what they cost? )


[2] Balance and fairness demand that this point be made more strongly. Much of the time, D. Brooks positively goes out of its way not to sound like a Party apologist. The mechanism seems to have been imprinted at a tender age with the quaint notion that the dignity of the ever-august New York Times Company would be impaired by absolutely unmistakable factionalism. This, too, appears from yesterday’s nitwit scribble: little Davey does not cheerlead for the collective and official GOP, it cheerleads for "Blue Dog Democrats[, t]hese brave moderates."

The Party of Wisdom and Virtue™ as such may be the only patron that one will never find the D. Brooks mechanism shillin’ for, just as one would be flabbergasted by a NYTC unsigned editorial so indiscreet as to allude to what "We Democrats" think or wish for.

19 July 2009

America faces a BigManageable Challenge! Why not try Ownership?"



A pretty compendium of wrongthink as practiced in beautiful downtown Hooverville, USA!

The neocomrade, whom I take (a bit doubtfully) for a dupe of the militant extremist Republicans rather than a co-conspirator and dupemonger, gets right to work: "America does not face a health care crisis. America faces" ... well, since D. Murdock (no relation to His Pressbaronial Lordship) is language-challenged, let's pass over what he says for the moment and say what he means: our holy Homeland™ faces "an insurance distribution bottleneck."

I.e., the very first thing aspirin’ wingnutettes and wingnuts [1] ought to do about ‘Obamacare’ is never to admit that it has anythin’ whatever to do with medicine. Medicine is a business--well, it’s sort of like a proper Hoovervillainous business, at any rate--in which one can get one's hands dirty. (Why, rumor has it one's hands can even get bloody in the practice of "health care" [2]--though let's not exaggerate,or believe every wild tale we hear, please, ....)

Keepin’ their own paws unsullied by "health care reform" is, I believe, a point of perfect unanimity amongst Hoovervillains and AEIdeologues and Catoholics and Heritagitarians et hoc genus omne. Beyond that, however, the tank thinkin’ neogentry start squabblin’. Neocomrade D. Murdock is a very moderate sort of militant extremist, for he is willin’ to admit that a ‘crisis’ of some sort does exist, and that somethin’ or another may need to be ‘reformed.’ True-blue High and Drys take the late Mr. John Arthur Roebuck’s attitude:

Such a race of people as we stand, so superior to all the world! The old Anglo-Saxon race, the best breed in the whole world! I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last! I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there has been anything like it?" [3]

If charity be mistaken in Neocomrade D. Murdock's case, if this specimen should be a duper and not just a dupe, it is at least a very low-rankin’ one. Look at how it talks: what I have neutrally [4] and descriptively relabeled "an insurance distribution bottleneck" is for it "a manageable challenge." Though obviously it won’t be D. Murdock personally who does the challenge managin’, yet that is the way even a junior Hoovervillain spontaneously thinks. It is the specifically Hoovervillainous way of thinkin’, the point at which that brain disease differs most from the other brain diseases endemic at Wingnut City. I betcha the specimen adores Neocomrade Governor M. Romney, though perhaps with the medical history of Massachusetts swept under the rug whenever visitors come callin’.

Now up to a point this is commendable, and not merely by contrast with the Roebuckian bozos. America’s Otherparty would be a completely unworkable racket if the rank-and-file base ’n’ vile did not at all respect and admire Big Management from afar. It is not just a sentimental loyalty to its Party but adherence to Party substance that the specimen exhibits. If the Big Managers radically cannot meet challenges, what is one to conclude except that the Party of Grant (&c.) had better go extinct as quickly as possible? Or, to present the same basic point in a back-handed way that will appeal to the Wingnut City groundlin’s as well: isn't it painfully obvious that Mr. Obama "has never met a payroll"? The way in which that antique Big Management Party bromide has zoomed back into popularity over the last six months strikes me as an excellent indicator of The Way We Live Now.

Neocomrade D. Murdock does not know much about insurance administration, plainly, but that is not, I think, the real subject-matter of this factious piece. Projecting the above remarks a bit farther, I should say that the specimen is chiefly remindin’ its neocomrades and its ideobuddies and their marks and dupes that they, and they alone, are the Party of Big Management. Which is to say, the only quarter from which salvation and ‘reform’ can seriously be expected durin’ this or any other ‘crisis’. On that basis one can see why a D. Murdock should prefer that some ‘crisis’ actually exist: out on Planet Pope, where whatever IS, is RIGHT already, there is of course no scope for Big Management to do its salvific thing.

There is nothing here to appeal much to political adults materially, yet adherents to America’s party ought to be able to appreciate the formal merits of a D. Murdock. Anybody who can swallow the militant extremist tripe and baloney without gaggin’ in the first place ought to find Neocomrade D. Murdock extremely edifyin’. Read my way, the specimen gives a really spiffy exposition of why Republicans should want to be Republicans. All their agitproppers are forever encouragin’ both GOP geniuses and Party base ’n’ vile to wallow in self-appreciation. Unlike 99.44% of ’em, though, Neocomrade D. Murdock gives one a clue what it is, exactly, that these comedians are self-appreciatin’ so relentlessly. Namely, Big Management.

As to the actual practice of big-managin’ health insurance, naturally Neocomrade D. Murdock, himself a specialist in the Agitprop Arm, is a little weak and hazy. Either he is genuinely hazy and weak, or else he is pretendin’ to be so for agitprop purposes. I do not quite know how to take a specimen that thinks it can get a vast number of uninsured persons out of ‘crisis’ mode and into ‘reform’ simply by pointin’ out their eligibility for Medicare / Medicaid. As if it would not cost really competent Big Managers a penny more to cover fourteen million (14,000,000) additional warm bodies!

"If you believe that, sir, you would believe anything!" [5]

Happy days.

_____
[1] "To what do such exotic critters aspire?" You may well ask, Mr. Bones!

’Tis not a hard question, though this is not the proper forum to justify the correct answer at any length: the Party of Grant and Hoover and Goldwater and Atwater (&c. &c.) is always on the look-out for JayCee fodder, minor-league neo-Babbits. And what the latter are on the look-out for is two-fold: (A) eventually to win big at the Casino of Human Events themselves personally, and meanwhile they aspire to (B) respectability, which is not one one-hundredth as self-gratifyin’ as the long-term lottery win, but does have the advantage of bein’ attainable for sure. More or less.

As regards the subject at hand, it goes without sayin’ that respectable folks have white collars and clean hands. Everybody knows that! Or used to before wombschoolin’ and FoxNews came in.


[2] Only another euphemism or apotropaïc formula is "health care."

The serious student will haved notice how nicely such verbal upholstery frees the customer from worry about not just icky bl**d, but about d**th and a’ that.

However "health care" is thoroughly bipartisan verbal bologna in the holy Homeland™. Ideally Rio Limbaugh would have a perfect monopoly on never misusin’ the word ‘existential’ otherwise than in conjunction with the Tel Avîv régime. But in the real world, pretty well all holy-Homelanders™ empathise with the Peter De Vries character who was resolved "To live forever or die in the attempt." When ninety-nine percent of decent political grown-ups would never dream of not saying "health care reform," it would be ridiculous to tell a Neocomrade D. Murdock that he ought not to..


[3] http://tinyurl.com/nsm8sc


[4] Without twistification of the neocomradely scribble in its own terms, that is. There can be no question of neutrality about what D. Murdock and his ideobuddies are substantially up to at the moment.


[5] In terms of the Big Management Party’s general campaign of obstruction, as opposed to purely theoretical study of the Mind of Murdock, those cost-free fourteen million eligibles are less important than "as many as 10 million uninsured [who] may be illegal immigrants." The neocomrade sails by all that pullulatin’ mass of crimmigrants and criminaliens with no more remark than that.

White-collared and clean-pawed respectability of the D. Murdock brand could scarcely do anythin’ else. Yet of course if the wingnutettes and wingnuts are SERIOUS about stoppin’ Obamacare dead in its tracks . . . .

The politics of neoreaction are not without contradictions. Allow me to list three:

(1) Reflect how the Wall Street Jingo element of the Big Party is at once the subfaction of militant extremists that has most to gain by derailin’ health insurance reform and the subfaction least interested in xenophobia and a’ that.

(2) Reflect how outrageous it would seem to a Big Party and AEIdeology booster like Neocomrade D. Murdock to be asked whether the general track record of the vigilante cowpokers under George XLIII (and the Crawford Crash™ in particular) do not raise a few questions about the all-wunnerfulness of Big Management.

(3) Reflect how the dupes and marks would be well advised never to get old and sick so as to be compelled to find out exactly what their ‘ownership’ amounts to in the matter of "individually owned and controlled health insurance plans."

On (3): a harsh critic might accuse D. Murdock not simply of playin’ cutsey word games but of playin’ obsolete cutesy word games. Temporarily obsolete, if not permanently. I suspect the holy-Homelanders™ will take some years to become really vulnerable to the "Ownership Society" scam once again. No doubt we'll get there eventually, but it will take a while.

Meanwhile, Neocomrade D. Murdock is enough to give the word ‘overzealous’ a bad name, with his nifty scheme of persuadin’ the customer base that verbiage on paper rather than (say) automobiles and houses has become the very model of an Ownable Thing nowadays. The advantages to the Jingo subfaction of the Party of Grant (&c.) in a sucessful marketin’ of that product would be immense, but unfortunately one must multiply the scrumptious payoff by the very low probability of its occurrence.

My general impression of a wet-behind-the-ears Party cub is strengthened accordin’ly. This neocomrade cannot, hopefully, be a fully credentialed exponent of Big Management as officially expounded to Harvard Victory School M.B.A. candidates. On the other hand, who can forget that Master Dubya of the Serene House of Kennebunkport-Crawford actually possessed the appropriate HVS scrap of verbiage-filled paper? Since the former Allston (MA) Academy of Barbers and Chirurgeons did not go out of business from indelible shame before 20 January 2009, I daresay they'll be findin’ Neocomrade D. Murdock no threat to their self-esteemin’ at all.

But Father Zeus knows best.

14 July 2009

‘biting and vitriolic’



One would not make personal appearance remarks to Quasimodo, after all, Mr. Bones!

Remarks to militant GOP extremists about Governess S. Heath-Paling of Alaska fall in the same category. So let's leave the Wonder of Wasilla™ alone, shall we? Obviously that is what Neocomrade Dr. R. Radosh is hopin’ to get everybody to do.

Ordinarily a decent political grown-up might feel countermotivated by suggestions from far out in the fever swamps, but I, at any rate, can make an exception when invited to bash Miss Piggy Noonan of the Wall Street Jingo [1]. Neocomradess M. E. Noonan is especially fun to bash because thirty-odd years ago she was politically indistinguishable from myself, a "Reagan Democrat." And now she is politically hard to distinguish from Neocomrade Dr. R. Radosh, both of them bein’ ‘conservative’ ‘intellectuals’ and, more specifically, belated adherents to the Hate-’68 Movement™. [2] "There but for Father Zeus . . . !"

Apostasy pays! It pays very well indeed if you are Miss Piggy, but Neocomrade Dr. R. Radosh has not done so very badly. Though far from as well as Miss Piggy has done, for you won’t soon find M. E. Noonan reduced to addressin’ pajamatarian audiences!

R. Radosh, bein’ so reduced -- or rather, never havin’ been promoted any higher, his carefully turned coat notwithstandin’ -- appears to have decided that if he is in for a penny, he is in for a pound. He dumps on his Big Management Party neocomradess almost as if he were a pajam [3] himself:

Peggy Noonan’s recent biting and vitriolic editorial attack on Palin [lies that] Palin has never learned how other people see things; she was out of her depth in a shallow pool, she 'didn’t read anything,' she could see no truth in anything others had to say. Moreover, she pretended to be working-class when in fact she earned a salary on the high end of American wage-earners; she was clearly middle-class in upbringing; she graduated from a good college, etc. (...) Palin [was] a creature of the Republican elite, from party operatives to journalists like Bill Kristol who championed her. [She] can and will never learn anything, who will be able to name the president of Pakistan but who will never 'know how to think about Pakistan.' She is a gift to both the mainstream media and the Democrats, who will keep her popular in order to knock her down and assure a left-liberal future. So ... we as a nation need a serious and responsible Republican party, not a frivolous one whose appeal is based on the kind of resentment Palin followers respond to.


(( I have tried to sift out the radoshchina that is not about M. E. Noonan so much as about America’s Otherparty generally. ))

The honourable and gallant renegade’s Miss Piggy problem is clearly much like my own: all three of us are insufferable elitists who not only "know how to think about Pakistan" ourselves, but are appalled at the idea of handing the conduct of our Uncle Sam’s foreign and aggression policy over to somebody who does not. Hence it is no surprise that R. Radosh can not bring himself to say anything positively encouragin’ about the Governess. Miss Piggy, it seems, is not mistaken about Neocomradess S. H.-P., she is only speakin’ out of turn: Si tacuisses, O Porcula, Republicana mansisses! Though of course the publicist’s standin’ as a Jingo-level Republican is simply not assailable. Piggy would have to wander off a lot farther in the same direction before she is in the slightest danger if gettin’ herself excommunicated from the First Church of Rio Limbaugh the way Neocomrade General C. L. Powell recently was. [4]

The bulk of the R. Radosh scribble strikes me as an attempt to teach the pajams (and, in principle, teach M. E. Noonan as well) by example: let them be silent about Mizz Sarah and moan and whimper instead against "both the mainstream media and the Democrats, who will keep [S. H.-P.] popular in order to knock her down and assure a left-liberal future." That is the sort of advice, I fear, that begs to be labeled ‘tactical’ in the sense of ‘insincere’. Neocomrade Dr. R. Radosh only too plainly hopes that if silence can once be procured, why, the Wonder of Wasilla™ will just fade away. Naturally the governess-crazed pajams are not broadcastin’ on that wavelength at all. Hence R. R. must warn his culturally inferior neocomrades that they will be playin’ into the hands of the enemy if they do not shut up.

Whether that is of any value as practical advice, who knows? But meanwhile, one could scarcely hope for a better example of the de haut en bas Elitismus perpetually operative inside the Party of Grant and Hoover. Even Miss Piggy’s own Heath-Paling scribble was only an (almost) equally good example of "Be humble and quiet, O ye dhimmís, and acknowledge yourselves to be small!" [5]

On a different front, a suggester might suggest to Neocomrade Dr. R. Radosh that he himself may be injurin’ the Party of Big Management in a fashion parallel to his account of Miss Piggy’s potential damage: if the enemy pays too much attention to this sort of thing, they (we) will be reminded of certain facts about how the militant extremist racket works that can be used against it. Especially the great gulf fixed between the economic OnePercenters proper-- the Owners of America along with their agitprop artists like M. E. Noonan and R. Radosh, along with their organized packs of AEIdeologues and Heritagitarians and Catoholics and WSJingos (&c. &c.)--and the obscure mass of dhimmís and pajams and Heath-Paling groupies down below the waterline. Between dupers and dupes, roughly speaking. [6]

To be sure, the Radoshchian harm would be done indirectly, unlike the Piggish. M. E. Noonan imagines that most Homelanders™ will see lots and lots of Heath-Palin’ites exuberatin’ on the tube and find the spectacle on balance unedifying. Not even MurdochNews has access to the inner conclaves of the Big Management Party at which decisions about how the indispensable dupin’ is to be accomplished are discussed and resolved. (The rest of the Monster Media would be glad to broadcast such material if they could get it, but they can’t. Though not infallible, the secret-or-private sector can be pretty good at maintain’ its secrecy.)

Yet hostile publicists do not need to catch the OnePercenters in flagrante, actually admittin’ in so many words that there is Klassenkrieg right here in the Heimatland Gottes and that they are doin’ their damndest to win it. There is fourteen decades’ circumstantial evidence to that effect readily available, after all. [7] The risk Neocomrade Dr. R. Radosh incurs is rather that of bringin’ to enemy attention the most likely fracture points in the anatomy of the elephant.

I incline to guess it is the neocomrade renegade’s optimism that accounts for this inadvertance. One can see him worryin’ with Miss Piggy about how swing voters may react to further doses of Governess S. Heath-Paling. If one choose to be optimistic for the good guys, though, the question is rather whether we cannot take away from the militant extremists even what they still possessed in November 2008. [8]

Happy days.


___
[1] Loyal Goldwater-Atwaterites may prefer to accept the Radoshchian alternative and bash their Vice President instead. "Maybe some other time," say I.


[2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neokonservatismus


[3] proletarian : ‘prole’ :: pajamatarian : ‘____’ (Stress on the ultima, please!)


[4] The student of neocomradology should mark that excommunication is not now what it is rumored to have been once. As long as he sticks to Jingoland and the country-club circuit, Neocomrade C. L. Powell can go on forever as if nothin’ much had happened. Fortunately for himself, the neocomrade general prefers that turf to (say) Port St. Lucie FL.


[5] IX:29: Hattae yu‘Tú l-jizyata ‘an yad.in wa-hum Sághirún.


[6] The rough part of this draft that seems not to merit a lot of polishing time is that to speak of ‘dupers’ suggests that upmarket and anti-governess Republican Party extremists are conscious and deliberate liars or cynics. That is absurd: they are simply not smart enough, with the exception of Neocomrade Viceroy R. B. Cheney and possibly a handful of others. It is just coincidence (sort of) that what Noonans and Radoshes (and you and me) say meshes so well with what benefits them/us.

That "sort of" is very tricky to elucidate. I pass it over especially because if it were carefully elucidated, the piece would eo ipso place itself outside the realm of practical holy-Homelandic™ politics. But let there be no mistake! Nothing above should be taken as questioning the subjective sincerity of any Big Party neocomrades, whether OnePercenters or agitproppers or mere rank-and-file base-and-vile. Father Zeus forbid that any serious analyst should do that!


[7] The Big Party of Grant (and Hoover and Goldwater and Atwater) is best dated from 4 March 1869, the first inauguration of Ulysses XVIII. Before that, palæocomrades of America’s Otherparty called themselves Federalists or Whigs, or else they were preoccupied with the Evil Slavocrats in a manner irrelevant to present-day concerns.

There is nevertheless a clear thread of illiberalism and antidemocracy runnin’ straight through from their General A. Hamilton to their General C. L. Powell, and especially that constant quest to make sure that respectable dollars get to vote and not trailer-trash organisms alone. Still, there is no practical point in dredging anything up from very far in the past with a crew still spellbound by Their Ford’s admonition that history is bunk, which they have lately reworded a little to "That was THEN; this is NOW!"

But Father Zeus knows best about wingnutettes and wingnuts!


[8] Ev. sec. Luc. IV:25: Qui enim habet, dabitur illi; et qui non habet, etiam quod habet auferetur ab illo.

(( Excursus. Behind the Radoshchian panglossism may lurk the specter of Neocomrade Magister S. Rasmussen’s neomethods of public opinion pollin’, which have pscientifically established beyond the faintest doubt that in November 2012 not more than 2,309,168.41 Homelanders™ at most would vote to re-elect Barák Husáyn XLIV, and probably far fewer.

(( For reasons I cannot guess, none of the neocomrades have yet distinctly noticed that this means that America’s party will nominate somebody else instead. But who shall it be?

(( "President Lieberman?" "President Zell?" Boggles the mind at these prospects at least as much as at "Presidentess Heath-Paling." A furore guinnuttorum, libera nos, Domine! ))


02 July 2009

"... hold our elected officials to minimum standards ..."


Q. "If we’re not going to hold our elected officials to minimum standards of tolerance and respect for differing religions, races, and ethnic backgrounds, why should we expect the rest of us to behave any better?"

A. Wombschoolin’ has much to answer for! Please add "inability to ask a straight question" as Item 318(b), everybody.

Meanwhile, what is the brat after, exactly? Does it really not want to be good and wash behind its ears personally unless or until Senators and Representatives are compelled to do so also? I find it inconsistent with the theocratic pretensions of this brand of brattiness to hang one’s ethical hat on Prince Cæsar and the Second Estate like that. Does the "Moran, R." specimen propose to plead to its Judge in horâ novissimâ "How could You seriously expect me to be a good boy, Sir, in a Lake Woebegone full of Franken voters and now represented by the Chief Clown in person?"

I'm willing to believe a lot of negative poop about the WNU, Wombschool Normal University, folks, but there are limits, and it strikes me as probably well out of bounds that the sweet puppies they keep crankin’ out nowadays were formally taught anythin’ so antitraditional as that. I betcha Moran, R., was at least exposed to the notion that it would be saved (or perhaps not?) imitatione Christi and sanctorum meritis with Mr. Franken not enterin’ into the matter at all. Not enterin’ in even virtually or figuratively or allegorice, except insofar as the new junior Senator from Minnesota can be classified with several trillion other persons and things under the rubric "all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil." [1]

The "Moran, R." specimen may or may not have allowed itself to be deceived, that is no business of mine. [2] If its fellow pajamatarians wish to make it their business, ditto. [2] So let us turn from gossip about individual wombscholars to a critique of neoteric wombschoolin’ as such.

I guess the racket must have commenced out of a sincere wish to protect little kiddies and sweet puppies from (more or less) the WFD Complex, world and flesh and devil. Of course there must have been some antecedent Niederdümmung before such a parochial and provincial project could get off the runway: a close reader of the Old Euro books most pertinent can only conclude that the WNU scheme is so impossible as to border on bein’ demented. The soundbite borrowed from the misbelievers of Canterbury makes the point nicely: why, the WHOLE WORLD is number one on the enemies list! The idea that kiddies and puppies are to be sheltered from that is plumb dotty.

In addition to being dotty, the idea is (on Old Euro presuppositions) actually harmful to the kiddies and maybe to puppies also: Beati estis cum maledixerint vobis et persecuti vos fuerint et dixerint omne malum adversum vos mentientes propter Me. [3] Thus Wombschool Normal University is--by its own alleged lights, not yours or mine--actually deprivin’ its customers’ children of an opportunity to gain merit. Tusk, tusk! [4]

___

On the other side of the Great Wall of Jefferson, the implications of "Moran, R." for statism as opposed to religionism are naturally of more interest to an outsider to First Estatism like the present keyboard. Bein’ a pajamatarian, the specimen may be safely assumed to be illiberal and antidemocratic. As well it might be! For la démocratie en Amérique has obviously let it down seriously. Under the current Homelandic™ system, that odious mob régime that has obtained since (say) 4 March 1829, the only place where citizens can do anything much to "hold our elected officials to minimum standards of tolerance and respect" is the polling place. Minnesota has just flunked the Moranic litmus test, obviously. [5]

And poor Moran, R., cannot do anythin’ about it worth mentionin’!

Were it not for a few minor disagreements about Eastern Mediterranean Monotheism, the poor lad would be happier in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where, needless to say, disrespectful clowns like Mr. Franken could never get on the ballot.

That raises a point remotely, but I think distinctly, connected with the Moranic wombscholarship. The evil Qommies have an enforcement mechanism, one that is actually written into their Constitution in a thoroughly Madisonian fashion. Desiring to "hold our elected officials to minimum standards," they made specific institutional arrangements to accomplish it. But Moran, R., is a sweet puppy and a kiddie konservative and an alumnus of WNU: it craves somethin’ not very unlike the Persian version, but it wills its First Estater end without willin’ any means thereunto. Hence it winds up just lyin’ in its Pajamastání kennel and whimperin’ because the America of 1430/2009/5769 happens not to be a place where Al Franken is unelectable.

Now one does not have to be a dupe of America’s Otherparty to find "Senator Franken" a slightly disagreeable expression. The present keyboard thinks about Homelandic™ politics in the venerable tradition of Cook County and Tammany Hall and therefore finds it troubling whenever some Mr. Franken or Neocomrade R. W. Reagan cashes in an extraneous type of celebrity for exalted public office. They should both, of course, have begun as wardheelers and then progressed through the standard cursus honorum -- (say) state rep, state senator, Fedguv Rep, Fedguv Senator, governor, POTUS -- instead of cutting themselves in way up towards the head of the queue.

However, all illiberalism and antidemocracy once excluded, one can scarcely whine about such human events à la R. Moran. The only absolutely indispensable requirement (beyond what is in Mr. Madison’s document and its equivalents in inferior jurisdictions) is that the Frankens and the Reagans should somehow hornswoggle the electorate into electing them. Which they did.

Fiat electio, ruat cœlum! The great thing is to know and accept *in advance* what one will probably have to put up with. [6]

Happy days.

___
[1] The verbal formula comes from the Anglican heretics, admittedly, but I trust it remains still a reasonably current scrap of Old Euro culture here in our holy Homeland™. "World, flesh and Devil" is the sort of thing that Sen. Franken might make a tasteless joke about, don’t you know?


[2] Tu quis es qui iudices alienum servum? Suo [D]omino stat aut cadit! [Ep. ad Rom., XIV:4]


[3] Ev. sec. Matt. V:11. Observe how beautifully the quotation fits Senator Woebegone, at least if one diagnose him as mentiens. I should not do that myself, but wingnutettes and wingnuts are bound to.


[4] Pater, dimitte illis! Non enim sciunt quid faciunt [Ev. Luc. XXIII:34]


[5] Actually, at Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh that point is not obvious at all. They all think their Neocomrade N. Coleman got more votes.

Still, from a pajamatarian viewpoint it presumably does not make much difference whether Minnesota be 50.0001% Moranically incorrect, or only 49.9999%. At issue is not how public officers are to be designated, but who or what gets to set le ton publique. If the Naked Public Square (Pat. Pend.) is ever to be tarted up to suit Moranical and pajamatarian tastes, a great deal more than a bare majority of local support for the redecoration effort will be required. Unfortunately (?) current demographic tends are such as to make it unlikely that anythin’ of the sort will happen. The holy Homeland™ is pretty obviously moving away from rather than towards the sort of Beulah Land that the late Neocomrade Rev. R. J. Neuhaus was always pinin’ for. (But Father Zeus knows best about professional First Estaters!)


[6] Everybody is stuck willy-nilly with the "Life is unfair!" problem. However, when one is the fruit of a wombschool, there is the aggravation that Life is forever surprisin’ly unfair.

De sanctâ simplicitate, libera nos, Domine!

01 July 2009

Harry and Louise Meet Pinocchio


Neocomradess Sh. Dalmia, a minor-league Hoovervillain employed at Forbes magazine, has deftly summed up the case for the salus quo as follows:

Lie One: No one will be compelled to buy coverage.
Lie Two: No new taxes on employer benefits.
Lie Three: Government can control rising health care costs better than the private sector.
Lie Four: A public plan won't be a Trojan horse for a single-payer monopoly.
Lie Five: Patients don't have to fear rationing.

That reiterated Hell word is the wingnutette’s own of course, Dr. Bones. Would I stick it in? After all, you and I have long since agreed that we will not call convenient political error and self-servicin’ of the Dalmian sort without irrefutable evidence. So it follows at once that ideospecimens like Sh. Dalmia are not lyin’ when they merrily announce that their own President is a liar. Regardless of what President Summers and Mr. Obama may be up to, Neocomradess Sh. Dalmia cannot be lyin’ when she believes every word she emits with 100.0% subjective sincerity. [1]

Three points of the Neocomradess Prosecutor’s five-point perjury indictment are patently about matters of contingent future fact: #1, #2, and #4.

Point #5 is as well, I think, for it seems unlikely that Sh. Dalmia wants any of her marks and dupes to worry about whether to worry about rationin’ right this instant. Consideration of anecdotes about the salus quo wherein (say) dreadfully ill persons do not get the best treatment known to doctorkind and croak or languish in agony because somebody somehow fails to come up with (say) $145,409.13 would not be useful from the Forbesio-Dalmian viewpoint.

Now if you or I were conductin’ the Hoovervillainous case, Dr. Bones, we would be just plain fibbing when we insinuate that President Summers and Mr. Obama are going to introduce the ‘rationing’ of medical care to the holy Homeland™. We would know the better but say the worse, which is almost the dictionary definition of ‘lying’.

A devout neocomradess like Sh. Dalmia cannot look at her own agitprop activies with so very unenchanted an eye as that, however. Presumably the fact that Lord Mammon has no central bureau of operations is more than enough to persuade his slaves that the word ‘rationing’ is utterly inapplicable to the salus quo. Mlle. de la Main Invisible, peut-elle s’engager dans le rationnement? Quelle idée! "If you desperately needed the expensive procedure yesterday and didn't get it, you were not rationed out of it, Ms. Cadaver, you were only . . . ."

I fear I cannot finish that sentence with any confidence, Dr. Bones. It's plain that Hooverville and Rio Limbaugh and all of Wingnut City would rather be waterboarded to a man than admit that when the Blessèd Market declines to grant somethin’ it makes the least bit of sense to talk about rationin’. But how they describe the denial themselves is not clear at all, beyond the obvious "But after all, if you could not pay for it, Ms. Cadaver! I mean, what on earth did you expect?"

Perhaps it does not matter how the neocomradely community would describe medical rationing when their system does it, because, if they have any brains at all, they will try to make sure that anecdotes of that sort simply do not come up for discussion at all. And what is true for a Harry & Louise national coffeklatsch in particular is true broadly and generally: the slaves of Lord Mammon are doin’ the best for their Master when they avoid any suggestion that He even has a system. Wingnutettes and wingnuts who prate blithely about Capitalism are decidedly the weaker siblin’s of the Big Management Party and the AEIdeology. They can do Kiddie Konservatism no good by borrowin’ language from their own worst enemies. I suppose it must be a consequence of wombschoolin’ and Niederdümmung that one hears so many of them makin’ this fool mistake of late. The stronger siblin’s of Big Party and AEIdeology stick with the traditional approach: Lord Mammon's Way is not any kind of ‘system’, ‘capitalist’ or otherwise, it is only ... well ... you know ... it is simply The Way the World Works, it is normalcy or business-as-usual. Maybe on rare occasions, especially at banquets of the Chamber of Commerce after the catechumens have been dismissed and the hatches securely battened, it can be hypostasised a little and adored as "Free Enterprise," but that wordin’ is already gettin’ into the danger zone, no matter how dearly junior sweet puppies of Endarkenment love that four-letter ‘F’ word.

I think there can be no doubt at all, Dr. Bones, that the neocomrades of militant extremism would be well advised to try to make their favorite hired Hand inaudible as well as Invisible. Perhaps more so now than ever, for here in the immediate wake of the Crawford Crash it is not in the neocomradely interest to admit the existence of a ‘system’ that went wrong but might perhaps be regulated to keep it on the rails in future. Much better for them if as many Homelanders™ as possible can be persuaded to file the recent and continuing troubles under "Shit happens." [2]

(( My own account of Ms. Cadaver and the $145,409.13 (from a Hoovervillainous perspective) is that the poor woman was merely misexercising her unalienable right to win the lottery. It would not, after all, be a lottery if all the tickets were winnin’ tickets! But there is little point in troubling Neocomradess Sh. Dalmia of Forbes with what Mr. McCloskey would say in defense of wingnutism, had he the honour to be a wingnut. Sh. Dalmia works for the AEI/GOP Agitprop Arm, and, although the lottery theory of Kiddie Konservatism may be an admirable guide to action, it is not a thing that can be frankly discussed in public where actual and potential marks and dupes can overhear and be scared off. ’Nuff said! ))

That analysis leaves

Lie Three: GOVERNMENT CAN CONTROL RISING HEALTH CARE COSTS BETTER THAN THE PRIVATE SECTOR.

as the only pseudomendacity that is not located in the future contingent. It could be, the neocomradess might mean "President Summers and Mr. Obama will not in fact be able to reduce risin’ health care costs any better than Mlle. de la Main Invisible is on course to reduce them already." She could mean that, but the chances that she really does are very slight. It seems plain that what we have here is only a variant of the kiddies’ golden oldie "I’m from the government and I’m here to help you." Ha ha.

Let us examine the neosophistry that Sh. Dalmia fortifies her Lie IV with:

Ignoring the reality that Medicare--the government-funded program for the elderly--has put the country on the path to fiscal ruin, Obama wants to model a government insurance plan--the so-called "public option"--after Medicare in order to control the country's rising health care costs. Why? Because, he repeatedly claims, Medicare has far lower administrative costs and overhead than private plans--to wit, 3% for Medicare compared to 10% to 20% for private plans. Hence, he says, subjecting private plans to competition against an entity delivering such superior efficiency will release health care dollars for universal coverage.

But lower administrative costs do not necessarily mean greater efficiency. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office analysis last year chastised Medicare's lax attitude on this front. "The traditional fee-for-service Medicare program does relatively little to manage benefits, which tends to reduce its administrative costs but may raise its overall spending relative to a more tightly managed approach," it noted on page 93. In short, extending the Medicare model will further ruin--not improve--even the functioning aspects of private plans.


That is technical enough to be mildly interesting. Unfortunately for the konservative kiddies and for their Lord Mammon, though, it does not take proper account of the militant extremist constituency as a whole. The plain implication of the CBO oracle, should you choose to accept it, is that bureaucrats don't waste money, doctors (&c.) waste money. If that revelation scores five points against conjectural Obamacare, it scores fifty against the really existin’ salus quo.

A little more obscure, but equally important, is that the neocomradess has dodged the chief point about ‘efficiency’ raised by President Summers and Mr. Obama, which had to do with the overhead of insurance corporations rather than of Dr. Welby and Nurse Nightin’gale. I guess this is what one ought to have expected of the Forbesio-Dalmian mindset: it makes far more sense for a cultivated despiser to abuse "Big Insurance" than it would to pick on "Big Medicine." The interests that Neocomradess Sh. Dalmia is especially concerned to defend are sufficient concentrated for her own corporation to be able to offer investment advice about them, whereas doctors and nurses and paramedicals are scattered piecemeal all over the landscape at random. The AMA is all very well in its way, but nevertheless, one cannot make a killin’ in it on Wall Street.

Accordin’ly, this neocomradess may be a godsend for Aetna and Blue Shield, but quacks actually in practice had better watch her closely. They should notice how she aligns herself with the CBO in favor of doin’ "relatively [a lot more] to manage benefits." Naturally if such language had come from the Administration, Sh. Dalmia would instantly have turned it into a nightmarish soundin’ proposal for the bureaucratic micromanagement of medical practice. As her agitprop stands, it must mean we are to have future micromanagement of hospitals and clinics by insurance corporations -- if it means anythin’ much at all.

After a noticer notices that point, he is likely enough to move on to wonder why on Gore’s green earth Big Insurance has not been doin’ exactly that for the last fifty or sixty years. (Perhaps there are laws against it? Seems unlikely!) I daresay the quacks will not be interfered with too much, should the holy Homeland™ be preserved from the immediate menace of Psocialised Medicine: it is much easier for the paper-pushers to take the providers’ word for what provision costs, after all, than to look into it deeply themselves. Up to the point where nearly everybody falls in the same low class as the late Ms. Cadaver, insurers can always just pass the (possibly overpriced) costs along to the ‘consumer’, with the added bennie, peculiar to their own branch of industry, that not one consumer in a hundred thousand will connect his own monthly premiums with how much Dr. Greedy billed for the treatment of Mr. Lucky -- a bill ScroogeCare paid without battin' an eye or askin’ a question, though possibly with a moment of actuarial reflection about next year's efficiency-won rate reductions.

Happy days.

___
[1] And the most important moral of that is that subjective sincerity counts for nothing or little in politics. But the present scribble will confine itself to secondary morals.


[2] The absolutely ideal rubric would be Palæocomrade A. Pope’s "Whatever is, is right." However in these Latter Days of the Law, one can scarcely expect the late Ms. Cadaver to take so heroic a view as that of her own demise. As everybody knows, even the Friends of Eddie Burke have to water down their guru’s firewater quite a bit to arrive at a product marketable here in the holy Homeland™ of 2009, where, due to an unfortunate mistake in the 1820’s or thereabouts, the lower orders are permitted to exist politically.

Plus naturally there is the trivial obstacle that very few lemmin’s in the ranks of militant extremism are prepared to grant that President Summers and Mr. Obama must somehow be right just because they ARE.