Many Happy Returns

Recall if you will. It was a bright, warm day in September, and the clocks were striking thirteen. In the busy East of the country, trains, planes, and automobiles disgorge lines of still-sleepy workers. Across the Great Plains and into the Rockies, men and women wake slowly to their coffee. Out West, children yet dream of three-picture deals as the moon wanes over MGM. 19 Saudis fly three jets into three buildings.

Now, in a warm, humid July six years later, "The Bush administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve an arms sale package for Saudi Arabia and its neighbors that is expected to eventually total $20 billion at a time when some United States officials contend that the Saudis are playing a counterproductive role in Iraq." (That's not actually the biggest cut of the côte du boeuf either. It's over $30 billion to Israel. But that's another post, another day.)

I seem to recall a conservative adage that you can't fix a problem by throwing money at it, but like so many others, that maxim went out a convenient window as soon as the money was theirs to throw. Plus ça change.

Anyway, this all falls under my own maxim: Don't listen to what they say; look at what they do. In this case, category Say is "prevent a wider regional war" and category Do is "pour billions of dollars worth of arms into the fragile, quarrelsome, precarious neighbors of an escalating civil war ever percolating under an American occupation. The Congresscrats make oppositional noises on this one, but like their howler monkey counterparts, they're much smaller than their voices. Never dangerous. Timid. Easily spooked.