¿Passive, passive, who’s got my passive?

Dear Dr. Bones,

Friday, Jun 15, 2012 04:17 PM EDT Romney gets DREAMy on immigration | After repeatedly vowing to veto the DREAM Act, the candidate suggests he has no problem with Obama’s new policy By Alex Seitz-Wald Fire up the Etch a Sketch. After spending the entire GOP presidential primary affirming his hard-right immigration policies, Mitt Romney took several steps to the left today while responding to the Obama administration’s new deportation policy.... (( ... ))

Betzee Friday, Jun 15, 2012 08:20 PM EDT "I would like to seek legislation that deals with this issue ..." Hate to tell ya Mitt, but GWB tried and failed. He was a a hellava lot more popular with the base than you will ever be, too. Moreover, use of passive voice speaks volumes about your leadership abilities.

Charity may, in a pinch, suppose that Miss Poster was not talking about "I would like to seek legislation that deals with this issue ..." but about a different oracle, viz. "I think the action that the president took today makes it more difficult to reach that long-term solution because an executive order is, of course, a short-term matter and CAN BE REVERSED by subsequent presidents."

Before picking on the Governor’s alleged "leadership abilities," I’d question a couple of details about His Excellency’s grasp of how the non-secret sector in fact operates:  (1) An executive order is not particularly short-term or long-term or any-other-term, what is special about it is that it is an *internal* directive for the Executive Branch. And of course (2), legislation also CAN BE REVERSED also.

Why, ¡even the Fedguv Constitution itself can be reversed!, an arrangement every boozer ought to celebrate daily as Happy Hour dawns over the yardarm.

Moving on to Leadership, H. E. does rather give the impression that His edicts deserve to be engraved in marble or imperishable brass. Between the H*rv*rd Victory School theory and the practical Baincappin’ experience in H. E.’s background, perhaps it is no wonder that H. E. should take that line. Nevertheless, it is all a bit of a mistake, I fear. Your Baincapper need not worry much about bein’ checked or balanced by anybooby inside her own organization--not unless things are goin’ so badly that the Board of Directors actually wake up an’ madly attempt to do some directin’, an attempt by no means guaranteed to take effect, no matter what the by-laws actually say.

Every Baincapper is a Mussolini in her own secret-sector business corporation, but that by no means guarantees that the next Corporate Titan will not toss all her predecessor’s policies out an’ start mussolinifyin’ in the exact opposite direction.   There is a sort of wild Fairembalance to it: Willard Mitt Romney gets to be the Benito of Baincap an’ hear not a peep against whatever His sagacity may resolve upon only as long as H. E. is actually ensconced in the corner office. The next guy gets the same perks, one of which is that She could, should *Her* sagacity think best, nullify any or all of the formerly unopposable Willardmittian decrees.

And this must necessarily be the case, it seems to me, for, if it were not, poor Ms. Epigone would not in fact have inherited the same job that H.E. used to perform. Worse, Baincap would no longer have a vibrant Benito at the helm to brave the storm, only a Dead Hand of the Past.   Even if the rest of the crew, very improbably, agreed 100% about what WMR would have done, they’d still be only a contemptible committee. Sensible investors will bet on the storm in such circumstances.

None of this has much to do with what they used to teach in high-school Civics, but that is O.K., at least as a speculative proposition. For all I can see to the contrary, anyway, Dead-Hand-of-the-Past Syndrome, so to call it, is quite as dangerous to public policy as to secret-sector Big Management.

On Subscribing to National Review

Dear Dr. Bones,

Even though V. D. Blimp-Hanson is an old pal of ours, Paddy and Eye agree that it would be unseemly for us to offer the following as a maiden comment over to National Review Online, us being both brand-new subscribers and cultivated despisers of the KSM, "Kiddie Selfservative Movement."  So we shall park it here with you.

His neohonourable an' postgallant freelordship has perorated about ‘Austerity’ versus ‘Growth’ as follows:

Finally, there is one more problem with the fake growth/austerity juxtaposition. They are both simply reflections of much deeper ideologies that drive politics. “Growth” is a euphemism for the politics of hiring lots of government workers, preferably unionized, and expanding the number of people dependent on government, who in turn owe politicians their jobs and reciprocate at the polls in expectation of even greater largesse. The costs of expanding the number of government employees and offering them ever higher salaries, benefits, and retirement packages are met not through increasing productivity, but rather by increasing taxes on those who mostly make their livings under very different conditions in the despised private sector. “Growth,” then, is a sort of “gorge the beast” antithesis to the Reaganite “starve the beast” model. Both ideologies seek to avoid insolvency through a game of chicken — of front-loading the cost and hoping the other guy will blink first when it comes to paying for it. But where the Reagan model sought first to cut taxes, so as to cut revenue, so as to force down the size of government and prune federal dependency, the Obama paradigm seeks first to grow government, which increases dependency and therefore requires more taxes — itself a good thing because it means redistributing income from those who have no clue that they have passed the point at which they no longer need to make any more money. If politicians talked not of “growth” versus “austerity” but of “borrowing and spending” versus “fiscal discipline,” then there would be very little public support for their disastrous agendas. Instead, we are supposed to like the nurturers who “grow” and despise the “austere” who hack away. It’s that simple.

"It's that simple" is never a good sign.

Decent political adults are bound to wonder what it is, exactly, that Rear-Colonel Hanson-Blimp would prefer that we not bother our ignorant little heads about. I guess there is no way to know for sure unless his freelordship himself tells us, but one possibility is that “borrow and spend” would not be a bad description of Reagan Régime policy. As opposed to Jimmy Crater's "inflate and spend," that is.

Thirty years on, "borrow and spend" does not look all that wunnerful viewed from the self-whighteous side of the aisle.  It is rather a tricky business, though, to decide whether the G.O.P. Geniuses of the '80's may fairly be blamed for not foreseein' that B&S would probably never live up to its advertisements. They seem to have taken for granted that their own Class must always be poor Sam's chief creditors, an' therefore always in a position to dictate Sam's policy in a pinch, whereas in fact the heathen Chinee (mostly) has somehow crept into that key rôle.

Being foreigners, the ChiComs and so forth are not in a strong position, policydictationwise, but then, not bein' *primary* creditors any longer, neither are domestic Baincappers.

It occurs to me as I scribble that an anticipator might conceivably anticipate a buy-partisan consensus here, as follows no particular group of piper-payers can call the Fedguv tune, so ¿Why should Great Sam not borrow blithely instead of either (A) pullin' a long face an' mumblin' pious viennasausage about Austerity, or (B) just printing funny money?

Naturally there can be no serious question of Wunnerful US ever paying it all back, but that's O.K. too, in the sense that Lefty and I would not be broken-hearted if we eventually have to hold down a few noteholders and give them what you might call a "Romney School of Barber Science" haircut.

The Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom, L.L.C., for their part, have made it crystal-clear that they would not consider it a disaster either moral or fiscal to default on such Treasury obligations as are held by the Ponzi Security Administration. "After the first death, there are no others." That is to say, ¿Why not just lengthen that list of less-repayment-worthy bondholders a little that their freelordships have already started compilin'?

To be sure, it's not quite THAT simple, or at any rate damnwell won't be, should potential lenders work out what we are up to and decline to specuvest further in America.  At the moment, however, that danger is almost as hard to detect as is Mlle de la Main Invisible herself.

Poor Blimp could hardly have picked a worse moment to revile "borrowin' an' spendin'" or boost "fiscal discipline" than this present, when neither homegrown TopPercenters nor Lesser Breeds Without are able to think of anything better to do with their hardly-earned piles than hand them over to Geithner von Hindenburg and Bernanke von Ludendorff for safekeeping.

(( Fairembalance, the Fox Goddess, has asked me to point out that the good Rear-Col. is whight enough when he notices that this unprecedented (¿?) cheapness of money for Uncle Sam does not do a whole lot for ‘Growth’--not unless that G*d word be absurdly redefined.

(( The particular HansonoBlimpian absurdity offered, however, is only one of a number of possibilities. ))

Happy days.
--JHM

"¡Color Us Invisible!" (#96.9 of _The Zombie Watch_, an occasional series)

Dear Dr. Bones,

Your 'conservative' 'intellectual' señoritoes can be more fun than a barrel of Darwin-hatin’ ex-monkeys at times.  For example, when wannabe-subtly flatterin' themselves, plus incidently the other ranks at Fort Rio Limbaugh, with such a delicious chunk of pious viennasausage as

Like the noble gesture on its own terms, philosophy as the love of knowledge is all but invisible to the spirit of mediocrity.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Paddy McTammany is enough of an overpricily educated anhistoric Teutonophile [1] to want to point out pedantically that Philosophy is--and always was, and always is/was intended to be--at least a *little* different from ‘philomathy’:

Q. "¿Who is Sophia? What is She, / That all our señoritoes commend Her?"

A. Well, for sure, boy, She is not plain vanilla ‘knowledge’.

¿Hath not Son of Parmenides--or possibly his well-informed ventriloquist-forger, which will do as well at this distance in time--explained this point in the Seventh Epistle, 344a-d?

’Tis not difficult to see out from under whose overcoat the sillier side of Leostraussianity [2] came , and a very Classy overcoat it was, too.  For its time, that is. [3]

Happy days.
--JHM

 __
[1]

Here's a new tack: instead of whispering about secret cabals, insider code, and conspiracy theories about Straussians, Kenneth McIntyre simply reviews the man's work (by way of a new treatment by Paul Gottfried), and comes away underwhelmed: Strauss was at best a mediocre scholar whose thought expressed a confused bipolarity between a very German and ahistorical Grecophilia on the one hand and a scattered, dogmatic, and unsophisticated apology for an American version of liberal universalism on the other. Amongst prominent European philosophers, Strauss was taken seriously only by Hans-Georg Gadamer, until Gadamer concluded that Strauss was a crank, and by Alexandre Kojève, whose work reads today as if it were a parody of trendy French Marxism. In Britain, neither Strauss nor the Straussians have ever been taken seriously. Gottfried is a real scholar and this book is not, by all accounts, a hatchet job. I might add that it was strange arriving at H*rv*rd to discover that the only non-left-liberals in the faculty were Straussians. ((&c. &c. ))

There's more where that came from. Comrade Sullivan is no better than usual, I fear, and he was never anywhere near good enough for setting up as the little street Arab who detects that Emperor Leo is na..., I beg your pardon, one had meant to say "to detect that His Imperial Majesty is perhaps a little underdressed for the intellectual weather this afternoon."

[2] Paddy has been known to spoof at the silliness a little meself: "Even though I have lost my Leo Strauss Brand® magic decoder ring that came in the Cracker Jack® box . . . .", vide peanut-gallery shell #21. ))

Himself of Athens, however, laid a prophetic (and utterly spoofless) finger on the underlyin’ rub long ago:

Darum nun ist jeder ernste Mann, der kein Mietling der Wissenschaft ist, weit entfernt über ernste, hochwürdige Gegenstände seine Gedanken durch die Schrift zu veröffentlichen und dadurch sie der Schwatzsucht und Herabwürdigung preis zu geben. (344d)

But L. Strauss undeniably *did* scribble down his Highworthy Thoughts, even including the one about how The Philosopher (Pat. Pend.) just ain't supposta do that, so ... obviously ... Q.E.D.

One might almost add "L.O.L."

Of course future Little Friends of Eddie Burke (LLC), plus the epigones of M. de Dizzy-Beaconsfield an’ the groupies to Paul Ryan, Jr., Smirk of Janesville, will always retain the freedumb to discover any gap they like, or think politicaly useful, between what Leo the Neoguru wrote down and what the *authentic* an' unscribbled Highworthy Thoughts of his freelordship really were.

Paddy happens not to care much myself for games like that one, the kind in which every participant can make up the rules ad hoc. But then, being more or less an Aristotelian rather than any sort of Parmenidoid, naturally Paddy wouldn't.

[3] Those of them at Rio Limbaugh will no doubt need to be told that nothing made Leo the Great wrathier quicker than to suggest that he grade on a chronology-based curve. Unless, that is, you just modestly proposed to flunk everybody since about Vitoria and Suárez out of hand.

30,000 Leagues Under Big ‘N’

Dear Dr. Bones, Ordinarily Paddy and Eye stay away from all poptripe, not just the MacL@@han Tuba. Out of sight and earshot, if humanly possible.

But this one, brief, shining neosabbath morning, however, something must be said about turning to this specimen

I Just Heard the N-Word 30,000 Times Posted By Zombie On June 4, 2012 @ 3:20 pm In Music,Sex,Uncategorized | 38 Comments At a recent family reunion I fell ... and within the next 60 seconds “nigger” was repeated at least ten more times, along with a variety of other degrading and offensive terms. (( &c. &c. It drags out its slow length relentlessly, yet bottomlines at last with )) I can only sit here patiently and wait for the taboo-busting thrill of hearing “nigger” and “pussy” in every stanza to eventually wear off, and we can once again enjoy the subtleties of metaphor, pun and double-entendre.

directly from the learnèd and gallant Stephens-Davidowitz of H*rv*rd and, for the moment, of the New York Times Company:

[M]any Americans use Google to find racially charged material. I performed the somewhat unpleasant task of ranking states and media markets in the United States based on the proportion of their Google searches that included the word “nigger(s).” This word was included in roughly the same number of Google searches as terms like “Lakers,” “Daily Show,” “migraine” and “economist.” ((ahem)) A huge proportion of the searches I looked at were for jokes about African-Americans. (I did not include searches that included the word “nigga” because these searches were mostly for rap lyrics.) ... The state with the highest racially charged search rate in the country was ....

After that--thirty seconds after that--one may be excused for thinking dark conspiratorial thoughts when one finds beautiful downtown Pajama Junction NJ festooned with gaudy banners proclaimin’ "I Just Heard the N-word 30,000 Times."

Having worked out that this must be only coincidence, we pondered the grave question: ¿What makes a whightist commentator on "Media, Sex, Unclassified" so interested in dark matters of which her freeladyship cannot properly spell the vocabulary?

We await your thoughts.

Happy days.
--JHM

_De Sedum Allocatione Epistula_

Dear Dr. Bones,

As you see, sir, what we have here is a two-stage drift away from the precious neotopic originally announced by Bob, Cardinal Spencer: [*]


(1) Wally Wombschool would rather talk about "our immigration policy," which is at least marginally relevant, for nobooby can doubt with a straight face that His Eminence is all agog to keep as many of THEM out of the holy Homeland™ as is humanly (or, indeed, præternaturally) possible. Even if H. E. did not actually mention that particular angle in this mornin’s homily.

 (2) Then along comes Cindy from Wasilla and picks up her mate’s ‘airport’ figure, drops everythin’ else, and jets off with it to some holiday destination known only to herself. (I assume that if the fair freedame had a prepared speech on Transport Reform beside her on the potatoe couch, she would have launched whight into it.)

At this point, with poor Cardinal Bob out of sight back around the bend, Paddy and Eye are tempted to see how far we ourselves could turn the dial from Transport Reform in twenty-five words or fewer. "The flowers that bloom in the spring," though a bit overworked, would do nicely, ¿no es verdad?.

 ¡"But that would be [’]rong"!

By way of whighteousness, then, let us take Mizz Cindy’s pretzel and untwist it.  Think, Dr. Bones, of our holy Homeland™ in freeladylike rhetorical terms as an Airship of State

with only limited seating.   Now, ¿Hath the Neotestament not advised us, Ev. Matt. XXII:14, that multi ... sunt vocati pauci vero electi?     It seems to Paddy and Eye that if one turn that into the Yank vernacular as "Many are flown, but few are seated," well, ¡hey presto!, we are pretty well back with His Eminence where we ought to be.

Indeed, there is hardly a note that whightists harp on to which the question "¿But who is to have the seats?" is not preëminently pertinent.

To view the same circus from the whighteous side of the aisle, we fiends of Lieberalism and Demonocracy never tire of proposing "wicked and improper projects" of Seat Redistribution. ’Tis a long, and a very slippery, slope that runs down from being gentlemanly to little old ladies on the MBTA to the unspeakable obhominations of Affirmative Action, but we put it to you, sir, that ’tis all one and the same declivity.

Now over on the far side of Mount Seatshare, where Cardinal Bob prefers to lay down his snowjobs an’ ski, the great thing is, naturally, to make sure that all the vile Muzzies have to stand, even when there is nobody else on board but the flight crew. And not just Muzzies, in all probability, but all Natives of any sorts, everybooby "unsavory and hateful," if Eye may boldly coin a neophrase.

Seats are, or rather, damnwell oughtabe, strictly reserved for Inheritors.   For decent volks, that is, goodvolks who not only look whight primâ facie but are most extremely unlikely, as Social Scientism has profiled time an’ time again, to have an infernal machine concealed somewhere in their nethergarments.

===

Since the Muses and you and Paddy and Eye have already written a good deal about Cardinal Bob, much-esteemed, mnogouvazhàyemniy, Archpontiff of Jehádestán in partibus, though none of it very recently, we will conclude quickly with one brief observation about His Eminence’s here performance considered sub specie agitationis propagandæque.

Paddy and Eye agree that H. E. should have leaned a lot heavier of the Global Tourrorism or Muzzie Menace pedal than H. E. does.  As the archpontifical scribble actually stands, selfservative kiddies are evidently expected to take a disinterested interest in the happiness of Judæostatism, whereas ’tis a feat far beyond their well-wombschooled capacity to assume such an attitude about anythin’ at all.   To get Master Wally an’ Mizz Cindy up off the potatoe couches an’ out in the streets stickin’ pitchforks into Muzzies requires (we think) more than abstract "unsavory and hateful," it requires that the kiddiecons be terrorized about their own personal hides. Or about their 401(k)'s might do.

Cardinal Bob certainly knows how to brandish that shtyk, so it is possible, that for some reason H. E. prefers not to do so in his first encyclical deliverance to Pajama Junction NJ.

Savin’ the best whightstuff for latter, I guess.

Happy days.
--JHM

___
[*] His Eminence bein’ a notable acquisition by the stables of the YaleoDra™a-famed Squire of Simon Pajama, somebooby at PJM is to be congratulated, though Paddy and Eye are not sure who that would be.    In any case, it certainly is not every day that one wakes up to the dulcet barks of a pajamaclad that one has independently heard of.

Taking a Fresh Smirk at Crimmigration

Dear Dr. Bones,

Nobody fairembalanced would expect a "career journalist" to think more than one day ahead at a time, an’, sure ’nough, Bridget, zeroth Freedame of Johnson in the peerage of Foxcuckooland, doesn’t even try.

Imagine, just for fun, though, what might happen if somebooby competent addressed this question on behalf of the Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom LLC. Before we start, notice how it kinda tells you something about the DVSW (LLC), that Americas’s Otherparty shuld possess that great GOP Genius the Smirk of Janesville to handle pocketbook issues, an’ nobooby even a tenth as neoclever workin’ the crimmigration beat. The few Daughters/Sons mentioned here as takin’ any sort of interest in it all have what one might call "suspiciously vowel-terminal surnames."

Now getting down to vicarious smirkthink, the first problem is that even a final fix for the Criminalien Menace leaves their freelordships stuck with all sorts of aliens an’ ex-aliens who are not criminals. And the second problem--which is as far as we need go to match the Smirk with a Thirty Year Plan--is that after the alien an’ alienagenic Bad Poor are disposed of somehow, their freelordships will still be encumbered by scads an’ scads of unalien Bad Poor, persons not obviously deportable to anywhere in particular.

¡Just imagine what the goodvolks at Dublin (or Belfast) would say about Yank-whightist proposals to ship Paddy and Eye ‘back’ to them for storage or other disposal, simply on a Mac-and-O basis!

What the Otherparty requires, it seems to Paddy and Eye, is a product one might call "domestic deportation." [*]   The Bad Poor, that is, must somehow be got out of the holy Homeland™ politically an’ economically, but not geographically an’ physically. We assume that Party Neocomrade Senator B. M. Goldwater’s famous proposal to saw off the Northeast an’ then hope it drifts far away real quick is not feasible. Even if it were, I betcha the Venerable Funders of the Otherparty would want to keep the Homeland™ proper, for it is only us squatters an’ slackers who infest the land that can be readily dispensed with.

There might be frack oil under the surface to make their freelordships freer still, after all, whereas even if Paddy an’ Eye (&c. &c.) were to be rendered into soap or lampshades, the anticipated R.O.I. would probably not be such as to attract the canny specuvestor.

Paddy and Eye nevertheless expect that what might loosely be called an Endlösung will emerge on that wunnerful day--¡the End, whatever it may be like, is one day closer every twenty-four hours--just think of that, sir!--when the gates around all those fabulous "gated communities" finally stop being figures of speech an’ become bricks-an’-mortar. Plus of course barbed wire, an’ mantraps, an’ Rotweilers an’ counterstormtroopers an’ . . . . ¡Not many Bad Poor will be on the whight or in- side of the Gates of Herrnstein-Murray!

Most of the frack oil will be left out in cold with us humble, no doubt, but as long as their freelordships can maintain themselves as a Sole Remainin’ Hyperpower, that is no big obstacle. Any particular deposit of minerals or whatever can be given gated-community status temporarily, an’ then abandoned when the gunk runs out. Their freelordships will not be needin’ all the land all the time, probably not any very large percentage of it at any one time. As long as whatever they need is available whenever they actually require it, the fact that most of the Homeland™ is a kind of forest preserve mixed with Bad Poor reservation should not inconvenience anybody of importance.

Most of us unfit will die off soon enough, if not at once from such Obamacare as can be achieved out in the woods, then by natural attrition.

No doubt you have read a number of Sci-Fi pscenarios along these cheerful lines as well as we have. So let us leave it at that.

Happy days.

_____
[*] Not to be confused with either the internal emigration of certain selected Old Euroes or the self-deportation of Governor Romney. His Excellency , by the way, has been doin’ rather a notable job of internally deportin’ himself from Massachusetts lately.