"performing a valuable public service in calling attention"

Once again, Dr. Bones, I think I shall store my pearls here rather than scatter them abroad. Look what patrons of the TPM Café were spared:

The shorters were actually performing a valuable public service in calling attention to the bad financial state of these companies.

The technical economics of that is over my poor head, yet talk about the nature of The Valuable can perhaps be taken in an inferior, a purely moralistical, kind of way. (Adam Smith of Edinburgh got the whole Ec. 10 racket started in that way, did he not? I mean, by rising above commonplace right-and-wrong into loftier and more distant spheres of neo-speculation . . . .)

At that level, assuming the level exists, to assent to Dr. Baker's proposition would involve believing that it is always better to know any available bad news in full.

To get away from Lord Mammon altogether: it would be better, for this brand of moralist, to be aware that she will be in the cemetary on this day next year rather than scrape through ten of the twelve months thinking her disease to be indigestion rather than cancer.

That sounds edifying, in a rather godawful way. It may well be over one's head as being too stern and Spartan for actually living up to, but there are not, I think, any intellectual difficulties about maintaining that IT IS ALWAYS BETTER TO KNOW FOR SURE. In particular, it is better to know when there is nothing at all that the knowledge can do to ward off some fate at least as bad as death.

Anyway, I find that sort of stance edifying, and assume that one must always pretend to want to know the bad news in full at the earliest possible date, even if one would really much rather play "wink, wink; nod, nod" games. To put oneself in the public position of wishing to be deceived is unworthy of a rational creature. It invites contempt from other rational creatures --does it not? -- to get caught acting "like an ostrich" rather than like Leonidas at Thermopylae. Even knowing that most of the others are privately quite as cowardly as oneself does not take all the sting out of it.

However things look a little different when one turns away from rational creatures in the abstract to, say, militant extremist Republicans. Or even only as far off "the Bernanke, Paulson, Geithner crew." Such gentry cannot think only of themselves the way M. Pascal [1] and you and I can. Our managerial betters are in the position of having to manage the news for their subjects, not just know it and live with it themselves.

Now although I have only a foggy idea what precious truths are inculcated into M.B.A. candidates over at the H*rv*rd Victory School, I feel pretty sure that perpetual full disclosure on the down side is not among them. Our Big Managers may or may not be able to confront fiasco and calamity as individuals with a steeady glance and a stiff upper lip, but when it comes to big-managing bad news for the benefit of their social and economic inferiors, they pretty well never do anything of the sort. The slogan "Boost, don't knock!" may be fifty years or more out of date philologically, but as far as I can see, it still describes how those good folks behave.

If, for example, Big Management is entirely sure that Acme Widget LLC will be gone with the wind six months from now, they will try to keep that information from their own hired hands as long as possible. (This is rather tough on the hired hands, actually. Though perhaps in the present state of the economy they could not find another position no matter how soon they learn that they are going to need one.)

I don't think I am letting technical economics in the back door again by saying this, because what is getting big-managed here is rather employee psychology than anything directly to do with balance sheets. Happy are they who have never had anything to do with employee psychology from the bottom side looking up!

Still, it is quite true that the B. M. gentry would only make their own lives all the more difficult if stockholders and suppliers and customers and so forth -- persons standing in a more strictly economic relationship to Big Management --were to learn about the impending Doom of Acme prematurely. Though I do not much care for our incumbent economic OnePercenters, there is no need to suppose that "Boost, don't knock!" is solely a matter of making life up in the executive penthouse less stressful for them. H*rv*rd Victory School lecturers can appeal to a number of cases in which the weaker side won (literal, military) battles partly because the rank and file had no clue how badly they were outnumbered. Gen. Leonidas was rather an extreme case than the typical case, after all.

On the other hand, circumstances have changed at least a little in the course of two dozen centuries. For a start, Gen. Leonidas did not have to worry about what crazy -- or, worse still, what entirely accurate -- notions about the Persians his troops might be picking up on the Internet. Whereas nowadays any ignoramus who starts by wanting to think that "the Bernanke, Paulson, Geithner crew" are hopelessly out of touch with reality will have no difficulty in gathering lots and lots of ‘evidence’ to that effect out in WWWonderland. Though naturally BP&G loyalists can muster quite as much favorable tripe and baloney. Though nobody is, perhaps, quite as ignorant in 2009 as the traditional "Boost, don't knock" panacea requires, it may be that a universal self-knowledge of things that are not actually so is even worse.

The main point, though, is that the instincts of Big Management have not changed at all in the sixty or seventy years since they shoved the legal owners of our secret-sector business corporations out of their path and began to rule more or less unchecked. [2] Full disclosure pretty well never strikes your HVS MBA as a good idea, and least of all when she would have to disclose negative information. Information that might even be used against her, should it fall into the wrong hands.

Happy days.



___
[1] Travaillons donc à bien penser: Voilà le principe de la morale.


[2] Berle and Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, New York, 1932.

Read what he wrote, and reach your own conclusions

"Read what he wrote, and reach your own conclusions."

That is only too easy to say, Dr. Bones, even when the sayer does not actually live far out in Foxcuckooland. But it can be not easy at all to follow through.

I mean, to read what the G. O. Party neocomrade wrote, -- the conclusions part is no trickier than usual. Indeed, sometimes I get the feeling that my own conclusions about the militant extremist GOP come first, and that I do not go about to examine each new bill of goods from Hooverville and Wingnut City and Rio Limbaigh with Arctic or Martian dispassion.

Nevertheless, it was a whole new experience (for the present keyboard) to be referred to a tendentious URL by a cultivated despiser thereof, and discover that its proprietor/perpetrator has neither left his original-intent contemptibility alone, nor silently and undetectably patched it up, but rather ...

... but ....

Well, there IS a strong temptation to say 'Go look for yourself!' at this juncture. And it would do nobody any harm if she did.

Still, one ought to be able to describe such things, and not be reduced to wordless wonder each time Kennebunkport-Crawford Dynasty gentry, or one of their hired-hand or volunteer dubyapologists, discover a new twist.

So then: Neocomrade M. Ambinder has gone hog-wild with that STRIKEOUT gizmo from HTML in his second paragraph. One might, perhaps, call neo-Ambinderism the ‘journalistic’ equivalent of an octopus retreatin’ behind a cloud of her own ‘ink’.

I'm not even very interested, it turns out, in drawing my own conclusions about this ploy. It is a lot more fun to wonder what impression this specimen can have been hopin’ to cause folks to draw about its off-beat behaviour. There may not even be a definite conclusion yet, I won't know for sure until I work through the stage of patting my political pocket to make sure the wallet is still there. So to speak.

Though the ploy be off-beat, the plight of the ployster is not. Neocomrade M. Ambinder has merely discovered that somethin’ he originally dismissed as rubbish because it was advanced by a sentimentally or ‘ideologically’ displeasin’ source. [1]

This might have happened to anybody. In fact, it does happen to somebody often enough to get included in Prof. Fisher’s Historians’ Fallacies several decades ago. Fisher has, as I recall, a crazed Polish chauvinist caught claiming, out of sheer Bircher-worthy dottiness, that Germany invaded his holy Homeland, 1 September 1939. In spite of which, that DOES happen to be what actually happened.

Or at least there was a firm consensus that that is what had happened back when Dr. Fisher wrote the book. Now that on has encountered the Invisible Empire of Karl Rove -- "'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..." &c. &c. -- one would rather like to ask Dr. Fisher if he has reconsidered the supposed fallacy.

It occurs to me as I scribble that Neocomrade M. Ambinder might conceivably be buildin' deliberately on foundations laid for himself and for the Party of Big Management by Neocomrade Karl, Lord Rove. That is to say, the aspirin’ neoteric leaves a few fragments and ruins of her ‘journalism’ in its bad --its pre-invisible and subimperial-- manner around to set off the main attraction. Like the Kaiserwilhelmkirche in Berlin, don't you know?

I can frame no clear and distinct idea why a neocomrade M. Ambinder would wish to do that, but then, I have never altogether understood about the Kaiserwilhelmkirche either. So that’s all right.

Perhaps Coventry Cathedral would be a better analogue, though, since we get the Revised Standard Version set down right next to the picturesque rubble, as follows:

[Addition. That's a hasty generalization. Many of the loudest voices were reflexively anti-Bush, but I can't accurately describe the motivations of everyone, much less a majority, of those who were skeptical. There were plenty of non-liberals who believed that the terror threats were exaggerated.]

Unless I am mistaken, Dr. Bones, we do not have complete repentance of sin and amendment of neo-life here, because the neocomrade ‘journalist’ still manages to give the impression that he can "accurately describe the motivations" of most folks. It's only maybe thirty-eight per ten thousand cases in which Dr. Ambinder gets his diagnoses wrong.

More importantly, it appears that charter members of the neocomradely community do not look at this matter the way Prof. Krugman and Dr. Fisher and you and I do. For decent political grown-ups, the chief point would be that Germany really did invade Poland. For the like of M. Ambinder, however, it is rather that M. Ambinder still cannot detect the secret- or private-sector motives of the heart with perfect reliability. At least, not when it comes to spottin’ rabid Polak patriotism.

We humble want to hear about ‘facts’ or "objective reality" or the like. Something of that sort, despite all the critical and philosophical problems. Whereas Neocomrade Dr. M. Ambinder much prefers talkin’ about the current state of Neocomrade Dr. M. Ambinder’s diagnostic methodology.

It really does look as if subtle degenerative influences from the Rovan Empire may be at work here, does it not?

Yet perhaps not, after all, for this nifty neoism of Ambinder’s may be at bottom no more than that same old tune that Shakespeare set words to in his day: Richard loves Richard. That is, I am I.

Mais que sçay-je?

Happy days.


______
[1] That's my own cultivated-despiser type formulation, obviously. The exact words that get the Striveover Therapy (Pat. Pend.) treatment were "those folks based on gut hatred for [President Bush]" -- intelligibility requires that the name of George XLIII be crossed out too, but possibly the neocomrade aimed at intensifyin’ his rhetorical shtyk by leavin' the ostensibly corrected sentence ungrammatical?

As I have moaned already, Dr. Bones, it is not given to me to grasp exactly what Neocomrade M. Ambinder is aimin’ at ‘journalistically’ when he behaves like this.

Also sprach 'sbvpav'

Mr. Poster 'sbvpav' illustrates how even good guys listen pretty selectively. His summary of the health care agenda of President Summers and Mr. Obama is half right. Since 'sbvpav' is a good guy, the other half is not wingnuttified into "false witness," it is just plain AWOL, omitted altogether.

Mr. Poster says (P-0) "no one is going to be forced into the public option," which merits being numbered as zero because S&O are not, of course, starry-eyed libertarians out to increase the sphere of everybody's self-freedomisation.

His (P-1) "keeping private insurers honest by providing competition, where there is none now, and over time lowering the over-all cost of insurance for all" is more to the point, unless you think it is two points. Here one can actually find Mr. Obama saying more or less the same thing,

"Point number two, it has to bend the cost curve. What that means is that we've got to create a -- a plan that experts credibly say will reduce health care inflation. Because if all we're doing is adding more people, but we're not controlling costs, that will blow up the deficit over the long term, and it will blow up the burdens on individual families and businesses. We've got to get control of our costs. We spend $6,000 more than any other advanced country per person on health care. That's number two."

Then there is Mr. Poster's (P-2), universality of coverage, "not [to] lose sight of the goal: health insurance for all, a right not a privilege." That paraphrase does not, as it happens, correspond to anything that Mr. Obama said to Neocomrade M. Smerconish on Thursday afternoon, although probably he and President Summers are indeed for universality in principle. (Mr. Obama may have been pandering by his silence to the passionate desire of many at Wingnut City to have uncredentialled wetbacks drop dead in the street rather than crowd the emergency rooms. But God knows best.)

(P-3) is "the ability to purchase affordable health care for yourself and your family even with a pre-existing condition; assurance and the security of knowing when you get ill, your insurance will be there for you and not canceled." This one is soundly based. Mr. O. said

Number three, we've got to have the insurance reforms I talked about for people who already have health insurance, and that means making sure you can get health insurance even if you've got a pre-existing condition, making sure that you're not burdened by lifetime caps, making sure that insurance companies can't drop you just because you get sick or because you're older or because you're not as healthy. So making sure that there are basic insurance protections, that's very important."

Mr. Poster's (P-4), "preventive care such as routine yearly exams and nutritional counseling," was not in Mr. Obama's 20 August bullet points at all. Unlike universality, I don't think that angle was left out merely by accident or as part of a deliberate anti-reactionary strategy of persuasion. Probably Summers and Obama really do take only a contingent interest in medical prevention: if it helps cut costs, fine, include it under that rubric. But prevention may not cut costs, and in any case it is not an end that S&O seek for its own sake.

(Presumably 'sbvpav' does think of prevention as an end in itself. That passage sounds to me as if Dr. Procrustes wants to fit the Administration’s program into a preconceived agenda of his own and finds the job a bit challenging: wrench, twist, fold, staple, mutilate! But God knows best.)

Finally (P-5) is another one that might be numbered zero, "the financial security of Medicare sustainable for all when they reach 65 and the closing of the doughnut hole in prescription drug prices." That is great stuff and I'm all for it, and so is Mr. Obama, almost certainly, and maybe Larry S. is for it as well -- BUT this is "flowers that bloom in the spring" stuff as regards the actual case at hand.

Unless I have misunderstood radically, Medicare and Medicaid, pensioners and poor folks, are simply not what the now fuss is about, though no doubt universality will require that certain persons who are already eligible for these programs get hooked up to them. Plus naturally if closing "doughnut holes" in them saves money that can be spent on the actual objectives, that is OK too. But bucks are fungible: patching holes in the Pentagon budget, or that of the National Endowment for the Arts, would do just as well.

***

I have already cited Mr. Obama's second and third bullet points, (O-2) "bend the cost curve" and (O-3) regulate the secret-sector insurance industry with unrelenting rigor.

As I began by complaining, that leaves half the Administration’s stuff out. The other half went like this, as told by Mr. Obama to Neocomrade M. A. Smerconish and the dittoheads:

(O-1)"Now, Tracy, you had a good point about, what are the bullet points that I want? Number one, it's got to be deficit-neutral. This has to be paid for, because in the past some of the health care plans that we've put forward have not been paid for. A good example of this was the prescription drug benefit for seniors. That was an important thing to do, but we never actually figured out how to pay for it. That just went directly into the deficit and the national debt. We can't afford to do that. So that would be point number one." (O-4) "Number four is, I want to make sure that we have a health exchange, as I just described, that is similar to what members of Congress have, where you will have a set of options. If you're a small business, if you're an individual, self-employed, you have trouble getting health insurance right now, you can go and look at a bunch of options, and we've got to make it affordable for middle-class families. So part of the plan has to be that, if you can't afford a market-based premium, that we're giving you a little bit of help and you're able to get health insurance."

I daresay President Summers feels quite as passionately about "deficit-neutrality" as Mr. Poster feels about "Death to obesity!" But, life being unfair, it is Larry who gets to set the agenda.

Mr. Obama's fourth bullet is admittedly not as clear and crisp as one would wish. "A health exchange" may or may not be the same thing as "a public option that people could sign up for." It may or may not be the same thing as "a coöperative." (The first quoted scrap is from Mr. Obama, the second, from Neocomrade M. A. Smerconish.)

Mr. O. never mentioned coöps at all, which falls in with my own guess that the Administration is not really much interested in that particular gimmick. But I could be wrong. If avoiding the subject was intended as another wingnut-management technique, why Mr. Obama should think coöperatives particularly obnoxious to Rio Limbaugh would be a puzzle: the GOP base and vile would, I think, need a stiff course of agitprop before they grasp how monstrous a threat to the blessèd AEIdeology coöperative medical insurance would be. At the moment the typical neocomradely response would be along the lines of "Huh?"

Hearing Mr. Obama live, I thought it plain that he did not have his bullet points written down in advance of Neocomradess ‘Tracy’ askin’ him to set them forth. (Mr. Obama has been getting better at ex tempore lately, I am happy to imagine.)

In context it sounded as if the phrase "health exchange" came in as a description of the current program for (civilian) Fedguv employees, Neocomrade ‘Ernie’ havin’ set the stage for it as follows:

"Congress has voted, to my understanding, not to join the public plan once it passes, because they want to keep their good federal plan. Would you be willing to either urge Congress to have the federal employees join the public plan or would you be willing to urge Congress to somehow open up the federal health plan to all Americans?"

Now strictly speaking, USAID is beside the point for the same reasons that Medicare and Medicaid are beside the point. Probably the Veterans Administration can be tossed in as well, to make four parts of the existing system (or ‘system’) that do not urgently need to be fixed because they are not obviously broke. Mr. Obama was perhaps alluding vaguely to the non-brokenness of USAID when he promoted "a health exchange" to the status of an ad hoc bullet point. He gave the Smerconishian dittohead (what I thought) rather a good exposition of how and why USAID works, culminating as follows,

"Now, what we have said is, let's make a public option one choice of many choices that are available to people who are joining the exchange. And I see nothing wrong with potentially having that public option as one option for federal employees, as well."

I am not entirely sure what is going on here, although it does look as if Mr. Obama thinks a longer menu to choose from is always eo ipso a better menu. Call it ‘diversity’! Maybe. [1]

But God knows best.

Happy days.


___
[1] President Summers is not likely to be quite so great a fan of diversity. With him, "bend the cost curve" is, as befits a past master of Chicagonomics, pretty well the whole megillah. Presented with an immensely long menu of options, I betcha the first thing Larry would do is click to sort them by "Price: Low to High" just as we humble do over Chez Amazon.

(But God knows best about President Summers!)

"Wow! There is a real American Neo-Fascist Movement abroad."

Picking on other people's epiphanies is a dubious game. It is awfully likely that one will just make them angry when they figure out that one is not really impressed by, say,

There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.

That little gem happens to be the late Mr. James of H*rv*rd self-intoxicated with nitrous oxide [1].

A critic might plausibly crititicize that the N2O tale gets even funnier when wild Bill, restored to cold blood, more or less, attempts to discredit poor Herr Prof. Dr. Hegel with a Jamesocentric pseudepiphany. Tastes may, however, vary on such funninesses.

***

Meanwhile, back at the ranch,

"Do you think people should be able to bring a loaded gun and sit in the first row of a President Obama event? And the gun owners flack says --"Yes."

Not quite on the same level as literature, is it? But perhaps to weigh it against the laughin’ gas would not be too imbalanced and unfair? Let's try it a little and see what happens, shall we?

I have to wonder, myself, what Dr. Taplin thinks Neocomrade G. O. Flack might have said, had he said anythin’ other than YES. There might be something to be said, of course, if there existed a municipal or state or Fedguv law against how these alleged ‘people’ behaved in the presence of their POTUS. Yet if the seer has omitted that small point when he rehearses the revelatory narrative, we could safely ignore the Visions of Taplin now and forever.

More to the point, militant extremist Republicans will, as I conjecture, take the line that if the gun-totin’ was not illegal, there is simply nothin’ more to be said.

As usual, I’d take the sweet puppies of the Right to be perfectly sincere subjectively when they take that line. Sincere or not, most of ’em are far from clever enough to notice, let alone exploit, the fact that they could put decent political grown-ups on the defensive by snappin’ right back with "And just what the [expletive] do you think was wrong with it, if it's not illegal, Mister?"

Not a hard question! One can think of the answer in a flash. The trouble is that, having thought of it, one does not much want to say it out loud. So excuse me if I try to hush it up in a footnote. [2] Wink, wink, nod, nod!

(...)

Reverting to the Visions of Taplin, I maintain that he cannot have beheld Fascism proper, only something that maybe looked a little like it to him.

The F-word gets squabbled over endlessly by boobs and loons, but if we try to apprehend it at the level of a Prussian-style graduate school instead, it is pretty safe to say that Fascism, taken as a generalized brain disease and not just Prime Minister Mussolini, was an Old Euro phenomenon. As Yank-style gun-totin’ and the smelly orthodoxies of the National Rifle Association are not.

The whole ethos is different. For one thing, in Italy and Germany and Hungary and Roumania &c. -- even in France and Britain -- if you did spot a 1930’s Fascist toting a gun, the odds were about ten thousand to one that she would be wearing a uniform as well. Very likely a private- or secret-sector uniform rather than a State uniform, but a uniform all the same. Portsmouth NH is not much like that.

In Germany, furthermore, there was a lot of "street fighting." All the books say so. On the other hand, the books never make this street fighting sound much like Al Capone on St. Valentine's day. Presumably the petty heroes of the proletariat and of the Kleinbürgertum went at one another with clubs and daggers and tomahawks -- or possibly Junker swords, inherited or fresh from the pawnshop -- rather than with semiautomatic firearms. The old joke about revolution being impossible in Germany "because the police would never stand for it" cannot be defended by any ideologue who wants his ‘Fascism’ to be ‘revolutionary’, but there is a little something to it all the same. Above a certain level, quite a low one by NRA standards, a State monopoly on the means of violence was successfully maintained from 30 January 1933 all the way down to 8 May 1945.

Italy, and especially Spain, were somewhat less completely devoted to Sicherheit durch Recht und Ordnung, but let's face it, they were Old Euros too -- meaning sad-sack wimps in the eyes of Rancho Crawford and John Galt wannabes. Venereal rather than martial, like Neocomrade Dr. Whoziz put the point.

Five Glocks, two Uzis and one Kalashnikov per household is a scheme that has no connection worth mentioning with Fascism. I should guess off-hand that it is a frontier or settler-colonialist phenomenon at bottom, a provincial and peripheral nastiness whose roots would be far better sought at Johannisberg and Tel Avîv and Alice Springs and the Alamo and the O.K. Corral rather than at Rome, Madrid and Berlin.

If, that is, one is looking for roots in the spirit of a Prussian graduate school seminar room, and not just for some blunt verbal object to throw at the enemies of one's Big Party or one’s tiny factionette.

Mais que sçay-je?

Happy days.


___
[1] The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Psychology, p. 294.

... With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the [laughing-gas] experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. (...) [A]s sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand....

Read Bill's whole NOTE -- it's a hoot any time, but especially suitable for the Silly Season.


[2] Here goes, with emphasis added for the sake of discussion: "NICE people do not gratuitously bring it to an interlocutor’s attention that they could ASSASSINATE her if they chose."

Should they ever stumble across that formulation, no doubt the sweet puppies will bark loudest at me about my crudely saying ‘assassinate’ when that is what I mean. Inevitably they will "know in their heart" (like their late Party neocomrade, B. Goldwater of AZ) that Mr. McCloskey takes for granted that bloody murder is what they crave and that they are thinkin’ of it all the time.

It would avail me not at all to protest--to them--that I take most of their crew to be no worse than rabid self-servicin’ impeachsters left over from ’98. And some not even that.

Which is why I think NICE is even more of a key word than ASSASSINATE. It was not nice for gun-toters to behave like that, but to point out unmistakably that that is how they are behavin’ is an offense against civility as well. If Neocomrade G. O. Flack was five times smarter, he would have thought this ploy up consciously as a way to embarrass such a cultivated despiser of Party and AEIdeology as myself. That idea is merely ridiculous, given the sweet puppies’ average level of mental evolvedness.

All the same, I betcha they knew in their hearts that puttin’ on a show like that one would embarrass liberals and democrats and Democrats generally, and Barák Husáyn Obáma specifically. Exactly how the embarrassment process works few neocomrades will have calculated. Perhaps they did not get much beyond figurin’ that BHO would not think ostentatious gun-totin’ is very nice -- and that it was therefore it would be the perfect thing to do. The Party of Grant and Hoover (of Goldwater! and of ATWATER!!!) have been positively wallowin’ in "No more Mr. Nice Guy" for years, after all. Why, without his I-hate-niceness shtyk, Neocomrade Dr. R. Limbaugh would be out of business in six weeks. (The puppies often bark "politically correct" when we would say ‘nice’. That, too, they’ve been doin’ for years.)

In the small part of the Stupid Party iceberg that is visible above the water, there are a few bright neo-whippersnappers who could consciously think of ASSASSINATE. But doubtless they would tone the thought down and tart it up, even for their own private mental consumption, along traditional holy-Homelandic™ lines of "the people's right to rebel" and A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State ... and so forth and so on. The whippersnapper element will not have intended the fiend Obama to worry about his personal safety, only about maybe finding his régime changed out from under him if he does not start showing Them the People of Wingnut City the respect and deference that they deserve for bein’, like Citizen Rush, infallibly right more than 99.1% of the time. (Not to mention bein’ the only TRUE holy-Homelanders™!)

The whole circus ought to please Prof. MacLuhan down there below where it is always too warm. Gun-totin’ is what a certain specialized kind of wicked elitist would call "symbolic speech." Or call it "picture think." It allows your run-of-the-mill wingnutettes and wingnuts, as opposed to a few señorito-class clevers, to look at the pictures without, I think, EVER formulatin’ anythin’ clearly and distinctly to themselves in old-fashioned words. (Certainly not in icky words like ‘assassinate’!) When the sweet puppies bark offendedly that they certainly never intended to send any message of that sort, they bark honestly enough -- PROVIDED that there cannot be intention without clear and distinct verbal formulation. However a study of the behavior and psychology of lower animals, "dumb beasts" in the narrow sense of wordless beasts, makes this a very questionable proviso.

Be that as it may, picture-think makes analytical difficulties insofar as one can never know for sure what a frog, or a chimpanzee, or a militant extremist Republican, sees in the pictures that she is lookin’ at.

In the case at hand, perhaps the picture thought was (to crystalize it in mere words) that all those bulgin’ pockets visible in the front row of the auditorium reflect great credit on Neocomrade So-and-So for makin’ sure that the citizens with the best politics also got the best seats. How the fiend Obama or the "drive-by media" would react to the bulges may have been quite secondary, although I do not find it easy to imagine that it was absent altogether.

The Jingos’ Big Fight

The preamble to this morning’s unsigned rupertorial is worthy of your attention, Dr. Bones:

The Public Option Goes Over The big fight over ObamaCare is far from finished. So it looks as if the public option has been sent to the death panel—so to speak. (...)

To gloss each precious line of it briefly:

(1) The slaves of Murdoch really do seem to be tryin’ to emulate Their Master's voice. In Chicagoland English, "X goes over" can only mean "X has been successfully marketed." In Austrobrittic, or call it Middle High Rupertesque, it evidently means "X has been jettisoned." Once they get all their neocommunities gated foolproofly, the language of OnePercenters will no doubt diverge more and more from that of their predestinate inferiors. [0]

(2) This will be our main scribble in a moment. Since the jingos wanna fly it way up their flagpole, though, I presume they think that vast popular movement, the ’Óh'vei Beitûah G'dôláh, "Lovers of Big Insurance™" may start their gloatin’ too soon.

(3) The relationship between Jingo-class OnePercenters and their dupes and marks and Party base ’n’ vile is nicely hit off by "sent to the death panel--so to speak." That relation contains a large element of "wink, wink, nod, nod" -- as it were. The neogentry know better than to believe in death panels, but "Hey, it worked, dinnit?"


OK, now that that's out of the way, what fight do the jingos wanna pick next?

Not a hard question, Dr. Bones. In fact, you and I have already guessed it. But here it is, straight from the keyboard of the professional twistifier:

The idea of creating member-owned co-ops in the states ... isn't necessarily harmful. But if regulated as advertised by Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid, they'd be satellites of Washington and have 50 open checks drawn on the Treasury, creating the insurance industry equivalents of Fannie Mae. Another path may be to ... regulate who the insurers must cover, how generous the benefits must be and how much they can charge, including a limit on out-of-pocket spending. If Democrats decide to centrally plan the insurance market, in what sense is that different from a public option?

I have stigmatized the devil word, which is unnecessary between us and the Muses but may assist casual passers-by.

Neocomradess I. Twist here will, I suppose, be in a similar position vis-à-vis her own OnePercenterly neocomrades. Many or most paper-totin’ Jingos do not need to be warned of the evils of 1930's-style regulation. They are well aware that the only True Freedom is the freedom to bigmanage, which of course makes Fedguv Regulation not only icky and bad for the bottom line, but the veritable Road to Serfdom. Yet I. Twist cannot preach to the AEIdeological choir alone, for the ranks of the economic OnePercenters have never consisted entirely of neocomrades with hands-on experience of the practice of Big Management. There are still, no doubt, a number of coupon clippers left, though I doubt they actually clip coupons any more, plus spouses and kiddies. Also M. Georges du Soros and the whole phalanx of class traitors, though I daresay they are beyond the reach of any agitprop that His Presslordship disseminates.

Managée I. Twist continues in her WWNN mode as already noted: she could explain with ease why icky Regulation "is that different from a public option" if she chose. But no doubt it is better for the Kiddie Konservative Kause as a whole that she not do this. She may even be runnin’ a risk her by havin’ just mentioned one significant difference herself: "50 open checks drawn on the Treasury" is quite unnecessary. The Evil Regulators can do their dirty business very cheaply indeed, with or without "member-owned co-ops in the states," because that dirty business is overwhelmingly a matter of JUST SAY NO. [1]

To be sure, if zealot disciples of R*nd and N*z*ck were to start dodgin’ regulation of medical insurance the same way purveyors of cocaine and heroin are complled to, enforcement costs might rise alarmingly. Considering the nature of the commodity to be bootlegged, though, that is no likely scenario.

"If health insurance is regulated, only Evil Regulators will have guns."

But Father Zeus knows best about dotty scenarios.

Closer to home, Neocomradess I. Twist is only slightly coy about what strategy Their Master's voice prefers: "Or drop the scheme entirely and focus on improving the economy."

But as you see, Mr. Bones, formally, that is only the Jingo's Plan B. Here's the whole Big Picture, as viewed from the bigmanagerial penthouse:

[The 2008] election was not a call for larger government or a return to 1970s-era entitlement liberalism a la Henry Waxman or Pete Stark. Rather, it was in favor of the amorphous change—"change we can believe in"—to clean up the Beltway mess and toss out an exhausted GOP. The best health-care option now is to attempt a truly bipartisan reform, likely one built on individual tax credits for private health insurance. Or drop the scheme entirely and focus on improving the economy. The Democratic walk-back on the public option is just a few steps. This fight is a long way from over.

Comrade Frank of Kansas might want to snip that little gem for his scrapbook. The neocomradess of undisclosed name nicely illustrates how his "wrecking crew" wanna reduce their own Fedguv to an ‘amorphous’ ‘mess’ and then run against it for bein’ exactly what they made it.

As for change that WE can believe in, Dr. Bones, the Muses and you and I, that will happen when the militant extremist GOP stops bein’ able to get away with that self-servicin’ scam.

Meanwhile, even I. Twist and her Proprietor deem it advisable to pretend (at least a little) to want to do somethin’ about the Amorphous Medical Mess. I suspect it will be a hoot to examine the OnePercenters’ "individual tax credits for private health insurance," should they ever trouble to work up a detailed proposal. Unfortunately at this point the Twist gang have no reason to brighten other folks’ lives with a little free entertainment by doin’ so. If they ever get back in the saddle, they would have a reason to make a serious stab at it.

But at that point they would have to fudge it up with tripe and baloney about supposedly benefittin’ "the middle class" the same way Master Dubya did in 2000. So probably our gratification must be put on hold indefinitely. ¡Qué lástima!

Happy days.

___
[0] There are other un-Yankee linguistic activities that ought to be deposed and cross-examined, like ‘fisc’.


[1] The sweet puppies of Endarkenment dearly love that JSN phrase, so Neocomradess I. Twist should make sure never to use it when speakin’ of operations by the Jingo’s class enemy.

If I may wander over to the better side of the barricades for a moment, Dr. Bones, I continue to think that our own best bet is to try to get sweetpuppiedom to reflect how they will be feelin’ themselves after they get a stiff dose of JUST SAY NO from UnitedHealth or WellPoint or Ætna. BFZKB.

Neocomrade F. Hiatt on Taxpayer-Funded Medicine

Because the profounder interests of The Demographic, ‘existential’ or this-worldly, are not obviously at stake in the current troubles, Master Freddy of Fox-on-Fifteenth-Street™ manages to be almost glacially detached about Governess S. Heath-Paling’s trendy brand of thanatopsis. And about all the rest of it as well.

I think that's what is goin’ on here, Dr. Bones, but there may also be a certain underdoggism vis-à-vis the New York Times Company left over from when the Baní WaPo used to be liberals and democrats and Democrats. Nitsy herself happens to be in an Eleanor Roosevelt frame of mind for the nonce-- "it is easy to lose sight of the human dimensions of the crisis" and so on. Maybe we can talk about that later on or separately. But we must begin with Freddy, who lays it all out on the gurney with impeccable detachment. Nothin’ here to indicate that F. Hiatt belongs to the human race himself.

Broadly speaking, there are three sides to the debate ... (1) Advocates of universal access, mostly liberal Democrats, can explain why everyone, even the insured, should be on their side ... (2) Then there's the Bend the Curve Camp, the Blue Dog Democrats and deficit hawks in the administration and the Senate for whom health reform is a way to control costs ... (3) [T]hose [militant extremist Republicans] who do put forward ideas mostly belong in the Let the Market Work Camp, the idea being that if consumers could see the true costs of their health care, they would make wiser decisions.

Before I pick on Master Freddy's preferred nonsolution, sir, I would have you decide for yourself about that tripartition. As often happens, it collapses into a bipartition under slight pressure. The first pigeon-hole contains all us "reactionary liberal" bird brains who don't worry about meetin’ payrolls and gratifyin’ our betters of the Concord Coalition the way every rational creature damnwell ought to. (2) and (3), by contrast, form a sort of Fiscal Responsibility Suite, with only a gauzy curtain, not a brick firewall, between those who admit that Public Administration might conceivably help control costs and those true believers who do not.

A guesser could have guessed in advance that Master Freddy would locate himself in the middle of the road, without even knowing what road it is. And that is just where the Washin’ton Neotimes has been editorializin’ from for quite a while now, even though Freddy, writin’ under his own name here, does not remind us of it, or award a gilded apple to any of his pulchritudinous competitors. I.e., Mr. Hiatt is a left-wing plutocrat, a demoplutocrat of that thoroughly orthodox holy-Homelandic™ school that has never understood why The Market should not accept the occasional favor from Uncle Sam. Or, indeed, lots of favors all the time. If land grants for railroads, why not policyholder grants for insurance corporations?

Even here there are faint signs that this neocomrade thinks demoplutocratic true believers who wander off lustin’ after Miss Rand of Petersburg and Mr. Nozick of H*rv*rd and the more steel-claptrap-minded Chicagonomists are a bit infra dig.:

It almost gives them too much credit to put Republicans in any camp, because many of them have decided that their best strategy is to hang back and carp.

That seems to mean that Master Freddy was tempted to erect a conceptual ghetto or ghettino out on the far side of "the Let the Market Work Camp," a "The Market Has ALREADY Worked Perfectly" camp, as it were, in which to concentrate those of his neocomrades who rush to unseemly economic extremes. Since Freddy himself has been degeneratin’ from left to right, it is natural enough that he still finds that crew a bit much for his taste and decided to expunge them from his classification. [1]

There may even be five pigeon camps here: the three enumerated, a camp labeled "Whatever Sells, Is RIGHT!" as just outlined, and yet another that would cater directly to Master Freddy’s "middle class," the pigeons who possess health insurance policies at the moment (and tell that nice Dr. Rasmussen they love them dearly whenever he calls), but who may nevertheless be unpleasantly surprised should they ever need to convert them into medical attention. President Summers and Mr. Obama have shown signs in the last couple of days of zeroing in on that group, which would be an excellent idea no matter whether it ever crossed the WaPo/Hiattoid corporate mind. In fact it looks as if it did cross and promptly got slapped down:

[T]he administration has shifted to calling its program health insurance reform, and implying that one of its big advantages will be to pry annoying claims adjusters off everyone's back. This was never the main point, and in a world of controlling costs, those adjusters aren't going away. But it's one of the misdirections of August.

To translate that as "Freddy is not interested" may be incomplete, but it seems accurate as far as it goes. You can safely take for granted, Dr. Bones, that Neocomrade F. Hiatt is (A) not worried personally about his own medical arrangements, (B) not heavily invested in drug companies or insurance companies or even in the historic lustre of the Republican Party and the American medical profession, and (C) not exactly Florence Nightingale when it comes to his inferiors’ portfolios and pancreases. "I'm all right, Jack," says Freddy.

Freddy’s is not a genuinely Martian impartiality, no doubt, but I betcha Jack, whoever he is, would find it hard to tell the difference.

As to that ‘nonsolution’ I promised you above, sir, looking back through the wilderness I cannot make out that there is any. But then, given Master Freddy's modus operandi, why should there be? For reasons of publicism and politics, mostly publicism, a demoplutocratic señorito cannot just deny there is any problem. But havin' acknowledged the existence of a problem is as far as he absolutely needs to go, and accordin’ly that is where Freddy stops.

Hiattstán, you see, Dr. Bones, is not unlike the Department of Wehrner von Braun.

Happy days.

____
[1] Q. Then why mention them at all?

A. Not a hard question: Master Freddy does not wish to be recognized as a neocomrade. His influence and his organ’s would drop steeply if they did not keep on bein’ accounted liberal and democratic and Democratic by the sheer inertia of other people's minds. Hence an indication that there may actually still exist des enemis à gauche props up that inertia and wards off the dreadful Day of Reckonin’ when pretty well everybody will think "Fox on Fifteenth Street" whenever they hear about Fred Hiatt’s latest.

But you will notice, Dr. Bones, that he carefully does not say anythin’ the least bit offensive about the zealots for Political Capitalism. "[T]heir best strategy is to hang back and carp" makes it sound as if Freddy disagrees with his more vigorous neocomrades only because they are more devoted than he is to the Party of Grant and Hoover and Goldwater and Atwater quâ institutional Party. As long as Freddy can get his demoplutocratic fix, he does see any reason to insist that there be a picture of an elephant on the needle.

It is (perhaps) faintly hinted in this scribble that after the hangers-back and carpers have brough their POTUS to his Waterloo, some sort of ‘reasonable’ or ‘moderate’ neocomradely consensus will arise to make "consumers ... see the true costs of their health care" and do about it what the Washington Post Company wants them to do about it -- mainly smashin’ Social Security and scrappin’ Medicare. To the extent that Master Freddy cares about such dismal science stuff seriously, his heart and his hormones are no doubt with the Concord Coalition. But as I said at the outset, Dr. Bones, the cause of The Demographic does not seem to most of its partisans to have a great deal to do with the condition of medical and pharmaceutical and insurance corporations in central North America.

You or I can imagine a linkage without too much effort, sir, -- say, money wasted on pensions and public health in the holy Homeland™ must (?) mean fewer resources will be available for invasions and occupations and whatnot overseas. If Neocomrade F. Hiatt thinks any thoughts like those, however, he covers them up admirably. I'd guess he does not think any, myself, and just has a mild sentimental/ideological preference for the Concord Coalition sentimentalities. Not far from his Uncle Polonius and "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" is Master Freddy, me judice.

But Father Zeus knows best.

Also sprach K. Priestap!

To sink much below the level of Neocomradess K. Priestap [1] would seem to be impossible.

Yet look closely, Mr. Bones, at what the estimable wingnutette is doin' as she slums: unless she is recitin' her favourite bits from recent sermons of the Rev. Dr. Limbaugh merely to pleasure herself, which would not be very public-spirited, she must consider that some of the weaker siblin’s of the Big Management Party can not take in HIMSELF's profundities on the first pass.

That is to say, "K. Priestap" takes for granted that these lower levels and depths below the deep exist, that there is a market down there in the abyss somewhere for a CliffsNotes or Readers-Digest-condensed-book version of Citizen Rush. Or, if not a ‘market’, exactly, at least a window of opportunity for charitable visitation of the Good Poor [2] by their ideological betters.

Can wombschoolin’ and Niederdümmung really have come so far, so fast?

Though the thought be appalling, Mr. Bones, I fear we must think it. Take a gander at the K. Priestap peanut gallery, where the neokiddies scramble to get their sarcasm detectors synchronised on some very elementary examples. [3]

Happy days.


___
[1] It's a acronym, right?


[2] Beati pauperes intellectû, quoniam "Be good, sweet maid, / And let who will be clever!"

(( Mr. Kingsley's poetic flight of fancy could be used to emblemize, if not exactly explain, a good deal of what has been goin’ on in America's Otherparty lately. ))



[3] That is the obvious primâ facie account, but it occurs to me, Mr. Bones, that it might not be the right account. A neospecimen like #19 may only be shammin’ dumb, so to speak. It may realize clearly enough that #2 is an authentic "Democrat Party" fiend, whereas #3 is the fruit of a thoroughly respectable home in the Rio Limbaugh quarter of Wingnut City, but eccentrically happens to like wearin’ a Halloween mask in August. (Perhaps it is attemptin’ to terrorise its congresscritter? Father Zeus knows best.)

I am only guessing from outside the asylum grounds, of course, but would it not make a sort of Big Management Party neo-sense to ignore the distinction, or even, ideally, to prefer fake liberals and democrats and Democrats to the real thing. You must know yourself, Mr. Bones, how disappointing the real thing can be at times. Reverse the colours here, sir, and reflect whether unquestionably genuine illiberals and antidemocrats do not let us decent political grown-ups down sadly from time to time. Being indeed real, they often forget, or fail for some other reason, to live down to their own Party-’n’-Ideology weekly-standardised new criteria. No straw wingnutette or wingnut would ever dare behave so uncharacteristically in a spoof scenario where thee and I conduct the ‘narrative’.

"Every man is dictator in his own book," said their belovèd St. Jack: of course we would dictate that Professor Anthrax and Miss Diphtheria and "K. Priestap" and the rest of our cast of wind-up-toy zombie rightists be so relentlessly illiberal and antidemocratic that everybody this side of Wombschool Normal University would perceive in a flash that they must be dealing with a fiction even though we would have titled the performance something like The Memoirs of Rabbi Ben Trovato. (That feeble gesture of pretending to attempt to deceive is itself part of the genre and has been since at least Defoe.)

Specimen #19 is unlikely to have thought this plan through as far as I expound, but he may be settin’ out in that general direction. Or he may not be.

Setting present company aside altogether, Mr. Bones, and re-reversing the colours, don't you think this direction ought to be especially congenial to the neocomradely community and the Wingnut City mindset? Neocomrade Karl, Lord Rove, may have gone a trifle too far with his "' That is not the way the world really works anymore. WE are an Empire now, and when WE act, WE create OUR OWN reality...." &c. &c.. Plus of course there are logical and physical limits to how far anybody merely human can hope to advance in that make-up-one's-own-facts direction.

Nevertheless, don't you see why I think that subscribers to CommonTerror magazine, and weekly standardisers, and neocriterionmongers, and pajamatarians (both lay and clerical), and AEIdeologues, and Hoovervillains, and Catoholics, and ... -- indeed, pretty well all the GOP geniuses and much of the Big Party base ’n’ vile as well is what it comes to -- .. would not such folks LIKE to live in the Rovan Empire? If the militant extremist neocomrades could find an airline that flies to it, wouldn't they all be gone rovin’ in a couple of months?

To be sure, there is no such airline. Yet in a certain sense there need not to be. In theory the wingnutettes and wingnuts could simply emigrate internally, and that seems to be what scads and scads of ’em are actually doin’ in practice.

Consider this late flash from Neocomrade M. Drudge, Mr. Bones:

CABLE NEWS RACE NITE (( ahem! )) OF AUG 10, 2009 FOXNEWS O'REILLY 3,814,000 FOXNEWS HANNITY 3,118,000 FOXNEWS BECK 2,417,000 FOXNEWS GRETA 2,388,000 FOXNEWS BAIER 1,988,000 FOXNEWS SHEP SMITH 1,833,000

Though the kiddie konservatives cannot ever build a proper Rovan Empire, as far as I can see, they may, without clinical insanity, propose to innovate themselves a Foxcuckooland™ product that would offer many of the same advantages. And one of the chief advantages, apparent even from outside the factional monkey-house, is just what we have been discussing: in Foxcuckooland™, the ideosky will never, ever be cloudy all day, but that does not mean that the occasional discouragin’ word won't be heard. What it does mean is that the discouragin' word will never, or hardly ever, be heard directly. The sweet puppies of Endarkement could always go look at some other network if they were interested in that.

Most of them are not the least bit interested, though, and thus the management and staff of Foxcuckooland™ must add some value to the product before marketin’ it. Naturally that plan requires that the Discouragin’ Word product be presented indirectly. Even if the DW fills the whole canvas, there is always a hefty frame of Murdochoid gildin’ around it. More often, the DW proper is only a small part of the total composition. Exactly what sort of neovalue gets added to the product will vary from case to case, though I daresay "Look what idiots they are!" is a formula that will cover an immense number of instances.

At the extreme tippy-top of Wingnut City, up around Castle Podhóretz, the neogentry have been caterin’ to that taste for years. One might almost venture to say that the Foxcuckooland™ shtyk is only a vast vulgarisation of a select up-market shtyk from The New Criterion, the one called Notes and Comments. There is no reason why middle- and low-brow neocomrades should not have a "Worst-Liberal-Abomination-Ever of the Month Club" of their own, though naturally the selections and the bonus WLAE's cannot be identical.

But Father Zeus knows best.