26 July 2010

Only TWO right wings, milord?


. . . Social conservatives and libertarians, the two wings of the American right . . . .

Presumably this Party-and-Ideology señorito does not want anybody else to count beyond two, though it is very difficult to believe that he does not know better than that himself.

Maybe he regards the rest of the Party of Big Management and the Kiddie Selfservative Movement as nonwinglike in nature? That would make more sense: the "malefactors of great wealth" in particular, Don Rossito’s Daddy Warbucks, and his Uncle Scrooge, and his Uncle Rupert (&c. &c.) are not mere pinions, they are the heart and soul and brain (?) of Yank reaction. And, apart from a few short and unimpressive intervals, they have always been firmly in charge of the Party of Grant and Hoover.

The idea that their traditional Ascendancy is threatened at present by an uppity crew of AstroTurf™ amateurs is very exaggerated, the sort of thing that journalism school alumnuses are predestined suckers for. [1]

Happy days.

___
[1] Don Rossito lives far enough above the fray, evidently, not to be aware that ‘libertarian’ is a trademark of Planet Dilbert, not properly to be used to refer to run-of-the-mill victins or patients of AstroTurf™ Therapy. These latter are good folks, perhaps, but singularly lackin’ in that steel-claptrapmindedness that marks off true Rand-Nozick groupies from more normal people.

Perhaps the culture-bound señorito considers that all those publicists at Wingnut City tanks of thought who preach Finanzkapitalismus as a revealed religion are ‘libertarians’ as well. That neocrew he cannot fail to have actually run into personally, however, which makes it likely that he is hushing up who and what his ideobuddies are rather than in ignorance of it, as he may well be with Dilbertarians proper. Can Don Rossito de Daúthat really not have noticed that what his factional daddies and uncles and cousins and brothers-in-law actually do in the path of Big Management often bears very little resemblace to the dogmas of the AEIdeology?

Were he a little better informed, or a little less given to secret-sector secrecies, he might have sided with the Family against mere hired-hands: I believe freelords Murdoch and Scrooge and Warbucks never had a good word to say about "cap and trade," whereas it is well known that many of their lackies and runnin’ dogs "were for it before they were against it."

But Mammon knows best.

20 July 2010

" ...future historians will inevitably...."



Dear Dr. Bones,

... future historians will inevitably wonder ... Will future historians NOT wonder how a democratic state--any democratic state--should presume to [whatever]? ... future historians will have better things to do than wonder about the narcissism of people ....

Speaking of ‘narcissism,’ here's a rather extreme example of the way publicists and tertiary-educationalisers take for granted that the court annalists to Princess Posterity will not -- ¡can not possibly! -- disagree significantly with themselves. What could be more patently silly and selfocentric than to be cocksure like this about any ‘future’ more than (say) fifteen minutes off? [1]

I guess it is a sort of virtual power grab: Rear-Colonel Armchair over at the Commissariat for the New American Innovation invokes a vast host of little imaginary friends from A. R. 1946/2510/6270 to redress all perceived fairness-and-balance problems of 1431/2010/5770.

Oh, well, Qui pauca considerat, facile pronunciat.! Life is far too short to waste any moments noticing that one would have to ransack the year 0916/1510/5270 to find much trace of proleptic agreement with Newhousism and Avishaianity.[2]

Happy days.


___
[1] Let the Rev. Sidney Smith say it: "4th--short views of human life--not further than dinner or tea.


[2] I betcha zealot Avishaians and pious Newhousites have no use at all for the one literary genre where the notion that die Zukunft might actually turn out to be ganz anders is frequently recurred to: science fiction, so-called, even though Nat. Sci. proper has usually very little to do with the product.

(( Less unseriously, one might name this trendy brain disease in honor of the late Carl Becker, who unearthed and emphasized M. Diderot’s little zinger, La postérité pour le philosophe, c'est l'autre monde de l'homme religieux.

(( But Condorcet knows best. ))

16 July 2010

Crater the Less



Dear Dr. Bones,

Wouldn’t it be fun if Neocomrade J. X. Crater here happened to be President Jimmy's idiot neonephew?

Nepotism is probably lacking, but neoïdiocy abounds. Today’s little neoladdie seems genuinely to expect that if somebody will only repeat the Executive Summary of Chicagonomics for Dhimmies to us economic heathens slowly and emphatically enough, why, naturally we must see The Neolight at once.

One must lead a very sheltered life to believe that sort of baloney, a well-wombschooled life, a life full of "cognitive hiatus" every way one looks. The kiddies can have their Neocomrade Rear-Colonel V. D. H. Blimp explain to them why Crater Minor lives the life of an "idiot" in Greek -- not gettin’ out of Foxcuckooland half enough is the crux of it.

This is the sort of blinkered factious scribble that leads many to wonder whether mammonology can be a science at all: will not Crater Minor keep on floggin’ the same ol’ cocktail-napkin neowares regardless of market response?

But not so quick. Perhaps the señorito is a devotee of Neocomrade Karl, Freelord Rove? Perhaps it supposes the former so-called "real world" to have been abolished [1]. in that case, I guess we must say we have to do with a fancy neoïdeologue rather than a plain vanilla neoïdiot. In that event, from the patient's or victim’s perspective there would be no ‘blinkers’ -- what a Crater Minor declines to acknowledge as real eo ipso ain’t real.

Dr. Krugman suffers from a mild case of the Craterian brain disease, but "with colours reversed" as the chess groupies say. This morning he solemnly and emphatically repeats from the Catechism of us lieberal fiends and demonocrats passages including this one,

Ronald Reagan said that his tax cuts would reduce deficits, then presided over a near-tripling of federal debt. When Bill Clinton raised taxes on top incomes, conservatives predicted economic disaster; what actually followed was an economic boom and a remarkable swing from budget deficit to surplus. Then the Bush tax cuts came along, helping turn that surplus into a persistent deficit, even before the crash. But we’re talking about voodoo economics here . . . .


Bein’ naturally [2] less IQ-challenged than a kiddie selfservative, Krugman detects the fragrance of voodoo in the air, but he does not in fact take the whiff very seriously. He scribbles as if he expected that little history lesson more or less settles the greedies’ neohash once and for all. Fat chance of that!


***

Perhaps the neospecimen at hand is a crank as well as a sorcerer? It fantasizes (right above its bottom line) that "Using dynamic economic analysis would prove the critics wrong."

Would you happen to know, sir, whether there is a brand-name ideoproduct available in the bazaars of Rio Limbaugh and Hooverville that is labeled "Dynamic Economic Analysis"? It might be fun to pick up a jug or two, even if it proves no better than that Bolshevik snake oil about how formal logic sadly neglects Dialectic™ and thus arrives at all sorts of uncongenial results that are just dumb mistakes, really.

If Crater Minor is playin’ that sort of neogame, I suppose it falls about halfway between Wally Wombschool and Cindy from Wasilla on the naïve end and Kiddiemaster Rove on the slick end of the Great Scale of Wingnuts. The señorito would not simply fail to see certain uncongenialities because it lives in a womb with its Uncle Rupert and wears blinkers, but neither would it possess his freelordship's sublime self-neocomfidence about damnin’ other people's torpedoes. Presented with detestable whinings like Krugman's, it would neither simply fail to hear the objections with Master Wally and Mizz Cindy, nor dismiss them out of hand as incapable of threatenin’ so august a neoracket as the Rovan Empire. It would have to muster up its DEA neoärtillery and actually do some semiserious shootin’ at poor Rear-Col. Krugman’s retrograde static views.

I doubt anybody would actually learn much from watching such a show, but it might do for a Silly Season entertainment.

And I wish you, sir, as ever,
Happy days through affordable healthcare.



___
[1] ''That is not the way the world really works anymore. WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- WE will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. WE are history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what WE do.''


[2] I have a proof that narcissism and selfocentricity are at bottom strictly intellectual failures, but unfortunately the e-margin is too narrow to contain it.


Dr. Krugman Visits the Dumbdumbs


[F]lirting with crisis is arguably part of the [militant extremist G.O.P.] plan. There has always been a sense in which voodoo economics was a cover story for the real doctrine, which was “starve the beast”: slash revenue with tax cuts, then demand spending cuts to close the resulting budget gap. The point is that starve the beast basically amounts to deliberately creating a fiscal crisis, in the belief that the crisis can be used to push through unpopular policies, like dismantling Social Security.


Dear Dr. Bones,

Has your colleague Krugman ever met a real, live Republicaniac? Or even read their Party-an’-Ideology agitprop with the same level of attention he would grant some technical paper on a fine point of academic mammonology?

I cannot tell from that paragraraph, or from the whole scribble, whether P.K. supposes that there ever existed a Plan VooDoo, let alone whether he supposes the VooDoo Plansters are carryin’ on with their VD even as we speak.

Obviously (to normal persons, but not to Krugman) if VD was a "cover story," than the genuine Grand Old Plan must have been something else, something daylight-shy that one would have to rip the VD camouflage off in order to detect and deplore. He does think the G.O.P. geniuses are still hidin’ their ¡Smash Social Security! [1] attitudes, which is inaccurate only insofar as there has long ceased to be any serious attempt at concealment.







_____
[1] Like PK, I single out State pensions as especially obnoxious to the slashin’ and smashin’ gentry. Presumably he, like me, understands that what lurks under the Party-an’-Ideology cover story is far broader than that, that the militant extremists really mean somethin’ more like ¡Abajo los entitulamentos! ¡Que comen el pastel!

(( Not altogether relevant, but definitely of interest is that there seems to be no established term in Undocumentol corresponding to ‘entitlement(s)’. I expected that *entitulomento(s) or something close would be all over the place, but not so. The Portugals do have entitulamientos, but not so many of them that they use the word often.

(( The G@@GLE Gibberish Machine cranks out simply derechos, which obviously will not do at all: Uncle Scrooge and Daddy Warbucks certainly think creditors have a derecho to be repaid, they’d die at the barricades spreadsheet in hand for that proposition. Nevertheless, although one may say idiomatically in Greater Texan "Freelord Shylock is entitled to payment in full as originally covenanted for," should we start calling every secret-sector indebtedness "an entitlement" on the lender's side, what we really mean by the E-word would disappear in a vast cloud of irrelevant chaff. ))




10 July 2010

The Moynihan Neolegacy


Oh dear.

I had thought Dr. Baker and I agree about the ¡Smash Social Security! gentry and neogentry, but that was before I saw

"The article also implies that it WOULD be reasonable to cut Social Security benefits to finance other parts of the government. This WOULD mean describing the payroll tax as a "Social Security" tax even though the money was being used to finance the war in Afghanistan or other expenditures. It is unlikely that this WOULD be a popular position."

Three ‘woulds’ in a row there, you see, and only the last of them warrantable by my prior understanding of the situation. The first two are to be classified firmly under "have already." Guided, I presume, by the late, and fathomlessly cynical, Neocomrade Senator D. P. Moynihan, our Betters have already taken their loot and disbursed it on "other expenditures." Now that pensions cost more yearly than they bring in, naturally the Betters desire to terminate that racket and replace it with a different one. Any arrangement that has the Great and Good financin’ the Bad Poor -- rather than vice-versâ, as decency demands and all history illustrates -- is not merely unreasonable, it is "irrationality on stilts," as Mr. Bentham might say.

Pretendin’ to do something of the Robin Hood sort -- or more exactly, pretendin’ that one will do it thirty years down the pike was delightfully Moynihanesque, but to assume that the Guide of All Possessive Humanity intended the Sherrif of Nottingham and his golf buddies to be out of pocket for even a single day underestimates the neocleverness of guidance seriously. ’Tis a great pity that we can never know exactly how Dan Paddy himself proposed to handle the inevitable peripateia.

The beneficiaries of Guidance are doin’ remarkably well, it seems to me, although of course it is still very early days, smashwise. Just to get those misleading ‘would’s out of a malignant lefty and paupersymp like Dean Baker is a triumph in itself. Moreover, that third ‘would’ is correct enough: hardly anybody on the ‘popular’ team sees through the DPM flimflam yet. Naturally I keep hoping that (1) some effective rabblerouser will point out that ‘our’ old-age money has already been misappropriated, whereupon (2) We, the Rabble of the United States of America, will arise as one man . . . &c. &c. A dream fit for the Silly Season, no doubt.

In previous articles, Dr. Baker has needled the Moynihanophile Classes a little bit about about placin’ their Uncle Sam in a ("merely technical") status of default. This is great fun for everybody educated expensively enough to have learned about their Gen. Hamilton’s rigid notions of the creditor’s obligation. Nowadays, though, most of the Betters get their history from Master Glenn Beck or thereabouts, and it is pointless to pick on Betters for not livin’ up to an antique Federalist rectitude of which they will scarcely even have heard.

In 2010, who can more realistically be taken as the very model of a modern Fiscal Selfservative than Neocomrade P. G. Peterson, Freelord Concord? And it just happens that His Responsibility was quoted in the McClatchy piece, as follows:

This week the International Monetary Fund urged the U.S. to cut future Social Security benefits, among other painful steps that it said were necessary to avoid unsustainable debt and an increased risk of global economic instability. "If we could address Social Security reform," said Peter Peterson, the founder and chairman of a foundation that works for federal debt reduction, "it would provide a much-needed confidence builder with our valued foreign lenders ... so they don't lose faith that we can manage our own fiscal affairs."

I don’t think Dan Paddy would have taken quite that line. His own neotericities in the foreign-policy line tended, as I recall, to insist that it is for the lesser breeds without to win confidence from Wunnerful US, exactly the opposite of his freelordship’s approach.

On the other hand, Mr. Moynihan must approve from the warm downbelow of the Petersonian jive: his freelordship almost says (does he not?) in so many words that a mere verbal promise or outward show of "Social Security reform" will reassure the heathen with too much money on their hands than Sam will default on mere domestic obligations first before expecting them to take any haircuts.[1]

Happy days.


___
[1] It enhances the general moynihanicity of the performance that Freelord Concord is almost certainly worried most about Fedguv obligations to neofolks like himself located much closer to home than Cathay.

Also fun to notice is his freelordship’s solemn insinuation that the Voice of the I.M.F. is the voice of the whole human race, admonishing wayward Sam from the outside. In fact, the Voice comes straight out of pretty much the same pseudo- / para- / quasi-academic Tanks of Thought that Mr. Lightman had recourse to in quest of quotations. Maybe your occasional Gnome of Zürich gets a word in edgewise occasionally, but for practical purposes it is all Yanks all the time at the ‘International’ Monetary Fund. (Is it not?)

In the long run, the Betters at Beijing may not much care for being made to play Charlie McCarthy to his freelordship’s Edgar Bergen like this.

Obviously I am no economist, so let me ask Dr. Baker to assess the possibility that the Chinese might also like the idea of lots of elderly barbarians buying their manufactures with (unreformed) SS checks.

But Ricardo knows best.


04 July 2010

"... a seismic shift in the political preferences of ..."



Dear Dr. Bones,

As you may have heard elsewhere, there is a classy struggle goin’ on about exactly who is to big-manage the Party of Big Management.

The trouble with those elsewhere accounts, I fear, is that few GOP/AEI kiddiemasters or Christokorean guruetttes or Castle Podhóretz neogentry start themselves with an accurate notion of how "their own Party" has traditionally misbehaved itself.

Despite Rupert, Firstlord Murdoch and Kiddiemaster Foxcuckoo in the peerage of Wingnut City, bein’ in person an admirable example of the true principle, his freelordship’s own wage slaves--not even to mention the ultimate patients / victims / ‘customers’ (big-managees) of News Corporation[1] --are unwillin’ to admit that the racket in question is far more about Big Management than about anythin’ else in particular. America’s Otherparty (like the associated AEIdeology), for which they gush forth endless effusions of keystrokes, belongs far more to Freelord Rupert than to the small people, "cloth-coat Republicanians" an’ so on an’ so forth. Honest jackals in attendance on their freelordly betters, as it were.

The jackals are ‘honest’ by my standards, at least, though I recognize that you have always thought I let political troublemakers off the hook about plain lying and fancy ‘cynicism’. Today’s neospecimen does my position no harm. Who can seriously suppose that a Neocomrade (Seventh Class) S. X. Deace is bright enough to rehearse specific lies that it has has not talked its own neoself into at least sorta believin’ first? And the idea that an NC7 SXD mechanism could adhere to American-Otherpartisan or AEIdeological views all across the board entirely because it has decided that such is the best way to butter its own bread? That agreeable fantasy is straight out of Lookin’-Glass Land To suggest such a dotty scenario strikes me as only an especially displeasing way to make fun of intellectual and ethical cripples.[2]

Jackal Deace is far from able-minded. Who but a clown or a cripple would meak out that "civil war" and "a tale of two paradigms" are completely different notions. [3] Still, most of the guruettes and gurus of the Kiddie Selfservative Movement do undoubtedly talk like that of late. As if, that is, becomin’ a wholly-owned subsidiary of the AstroTurf™baggin’ classes would radically change the nature of the Party of Grant and Hoover an’ Goldwater ’n’ Atwater. Also as if such a further self-degradation by Big Party Managers were a highly probable event, like it or not.

It (our figurative jackdaw or jackal) likes ‘seismic’ and ‘lavish’ as well as ‘paradigm’, notice:

... a seismic shift in the political preferences of the Republican base as the GOP has squandered the power voters lavished upon it over the past decade....

The evidence of thesauroma [4] is plain on the rhetorical or agitprop front, unlike the alleged ‘shift’, which I appear to have slept through without noticing.

The self-servicin’ kiddies have, to be sure, shifted a little away from cowerin’ under their potatoe couches in terror for their (?) airliners and skyscrapers, but that cannot be what NC7 SXD means: George XLIII was installed by extraördinary judicial mechanism well before the Big Bang, after all.

Master Jackdaw does seems to wish that the base an’ vile of its Party had remained more vigilant against the Islamophalangitarian Menace (Pat. Pend.) than they actually have. And indeed, if the Granto-Hooverites were ever to decide that aggression and invasionism overseas are henceforth to be their core and pith and crux and gist and general neoëssence, why, that factional self-degradation and act of Destructive Creationism would merit some stronger term than ‘shift’. Students of neocomradology would require somethin’ with a whole lotta syllables, like maybe ‘transmogrification’.

Yet since even the NC7 SXD mechanism does not think it is actually happenin’, I believe I will spare you my fun pscenario of how Kiddie Selfservatism en Amérique might actually go that route someday until it is really called for.

Meanwhile, one might adequately explain this Silly Season scribble by considering what is antecedently likely to eventuate when the eye of the jackdaw is combined with the mind of the cripple. All that gets ‘shifted’ is the neomechanism’s attention. On Monday an’ Wednesday an’ Friday, it is struck by one part of the Anatomy of the Elephant, on Tuesdays and Neosabbaths, by another, an’ on Thursdays and Palæosabbaths, by yet a third. Of course the whole triune beastliness of Party and Ideology is present every day of the week. There is no question of anythin’ actually changin’ here, only of the beastliness in question not bein’ perfectly homogeneous.

If that is not adequate--and I think, now that I have written it down, that perhaps it is not--you may fortify it with the consideration that an other-ranks whiner from the Party Base an’ Vile like Neocomrade S. X. Dease is vaguely pretendin’ to advice its Betters, the big-managerial G.O.P. Geniuses, what to do next. Unfortunately, it has no proper conception of the significance of bein’ a hack pol for America’s Otherparty. Master jackdaw shows no sign of understandin’ that its Daddy Warbucks and its Uncle Scrooge and, literaliter, its Tio Ruperto are the true G.O.P. geniuses, that the likes of Freiherr Johann von Böhner and Freiherr Erik von Kantor and Freelord McConnell (&c. &c.) are comparatively unimportant.

If that crew were REALLY smart cookies and neocookies, naturally they’d be workin’ over at Goldman Sachs or thereabouts; certainly not at Beltway City DC.

I can spin you a pscenario in which the rise of AstroTurf™baggery would be a disaster for the existin’ Party Paymasters, easily enough: imagine that Lord Mammon’s team becomes a wilderness of Messrs. Ross Perot, checkbook-wieldin’ cranks and boobs who have not the slightest notion of TopPercenter solidarity. The Grant-Hoover racket could easily then fall apart pretty much the way the Lenin-Gorbachev racket fell apart.

Easy enough to imagine, that is. Yet one would have to be almost as wet behind the ears, and empty in between them, as Neocomrade S. X. Deace to expect it.

***

The little neoladdie manages to be confusin’ about its own druthers. It says tolerably clearly that it expects its own New Paradigm -- a ’Turf’bagger Ascendancy -- to prevail, though of course not that the fantasy will collapse immediately once it happens. At the same time, it emits nothin’ that has any tendency to make your typical Kiddie Selfservative root for ’Turf’bagger Ascendancy.

The neospecimen does not even seem to want ’Turf’bagger Ascendancy much itself. If we were dealing with an intellectually and ethically competent publicist, this could be explained with reference to its remark about ’turf’baggery bein’ "a force of nature." That is to say, "Who cares whether you like it, little man, when the thing is goin’ta happen anyway?"

Anybody can talk that talk, of course, and it does have a bracing air of steel-claptrap-mindedness about it, does it not? Nostradamus and M. de Lénine know the future before it happens, unlike us humble..

However when all the rest of an agitprop performance is wimpy mush of the lowest grade, there is no warrant to drag in Nostradamus. Inevitability and "force of nature" are themselves just conceptual baubles that happen to have caught the jackdaw eye. And the cripple mind cannot tell the difference between two ‘paradigms’ and two laundry lists.

***

Probably the best thing to do with this baloney, Dr. Bones, would be to file it under Hormone-Basin’. The neocomradlin’ does not care much about the substance of its Brave New Foxcuckooland, but it certainly does seem to consider that the more militant and extreme the Vast Whight-Wing Conspiracy becomess, the better.[5]

And cheer up, sir! There cannot be a large number of loony godzillionaires who will be wantin’ to pay for the type of artificial dirt that Neocomrade S. X. Dease happens to like best. We may run into a great deal too much whight-wingery for our own tatste, but few economic TopPercenters are likely to abandon themselves to it altogether.

(( "[B] iblical worldview," forsooth! ))

Happy days.




___
[1] The really accomplished neocomradologist, or an insolent pretender to erudition, can evidently score a few points by knowing that, like the former "Moral Majority," there is no definite article in "News Corporation," even though the Greater Texan language makes it seem all but unidiomatic to omit a ‘the’ in from of both. And Bentley knows best.


[2] For the very, very few capable of systematic cynicism, I daresay there is a lot to be said for a world in which everybody else piously believes in the oracles of Lord Mammon, but one sees through that shamanism oneself. But come along, Dr. Bones! You might as sensibly accuse a Neocomrade S. X. Deace of havin’ invented the Internet as of entertain’ any such all-but-Moynihanian neocleverness.

I’d be amazed if such a neospecimen ever got as far as worryin’ a little that His Selenic Effulgence , the neospecimen’s concrete paymaster at least as regards this one scribble, has not the happiness to be a subject of the Heimatland Gottes. Not even a semisubject like Firstlord Murdoch is HSE! Not even a native thinker in Greater Texan!! Golly!!!


[3] I betcha our jackal has a jackdaw eye for verbal trash and trumpery like "paradigm." Perhaps it is a product of Wombschool Normal University or St. Dilbert Antistate College that would like to whistle itself up somethin’ a little tonier, backgroundwise?

Big LEW doesn’t know more about this neospecimen than that it "previously did sports talk radio (most recently with sister station KXNO) before taking over the afternoon drive slot in June 2006," which is not much.

KXNO is siblin’ to WHO-AM at Des Moines, a burg that must be located on both side of the Mississippi, if I still have my ‘K’s and ‘X’s right.

Be that as it may, NC7 DXS almost certainly did not pick up its ‘paradigm’ from the lingo of any holy-Homelandic™ kiddie game played by ostensible grown-ups. Possibly futból connoiseurs talk about los paradigmas del juego in Undocumento, but in plain clean-cut an’ redstate-blooded Greater Texan? No weigh.


[4] Malignant swellin’ of Roget’s gland.


[5] "Electing people who don’t share my core convictions is a loser - period."