The Ratchet Effect: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Lieberman

Lieberman. You have to admire his tenacity. He cut himself an admirable deal. Senate leadership lets him run a committee and do whatever he wants, and in exchange, he willingly functions as a convenient scapegoat and target for ineffectual Progressive wrath, as they are constitutionally incapable of understanding that he is not an impediment to the Donk's grand plans, but a primary component. Indeed, if "Republicans apply the torque that turns the thing rightward [and] . . . Democrats are the pawl," then the likes of Lieberman (see also, Ben Nelson, the Blue Dogs, et al) are the teeth on the gear, which is to say, the sharp protrusions against which the Democratic pawl clicks to prevent backsliding. The wheel turns right; the Donk slips in; Lieberman cries "Across this line . . . you do not . . ."; and the Progressive internet goes bonkers and ignores the rest of the machine. Whether health care or the terror war. Doesn't matter. The effect is the same.

Now I am sure that good liberals everywhere will crow about Lieberman's hilariously useless hearings in which various and sundry cable news commentators haul up to Capitol Hill to weight in . . . weightily on Homegrown Terrorism or whatever. But of course everyone's interests are served. The interest of propagating the crackpot nomenclature of Islamofascism and suchlike is advanced. The interest of making the Donk and The Obama appear like reasonable proceduralists is advanced. The interest of giving the Elephant a forum in which to inveigh against the depredations of Political Correctness ("Hello, 1990s? This is Politics calling.") is advanced. Thus ever does the axle turn.

Hope Yet

As I understand it, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi have outlawed mammography and made abortion mandatory.

God Shed His Grace On Thee

Welcome to your country.

The Donkey and the Hippopotamus

I think I am going to side with Republicans on this one. Mais pourquoi ? Because let us hew to the law of least hypocrisy. If we are going to conduct a show trial, let's conduct a show trial. Regrettably, the Obama administration seems firmly dedicated to the rule that if it can be half-assed, it must be half-assed.

Leave aside the fact that these decisions are pure whim and fancy, based on no discernible principle. Leave aside the Attorney General's boilerplate prosecutorial insistence that a conviction with the maximum sentence is not only desirably, but inevitable. Leave aside all the back and forth about who will or will not have the opportunity to grandsand at trial, whatever form that trial takes. Concentrate instead on the Obama régime's ludicrous insistence that it carry through with a legal process whose outcome has no relevance except insofar as it could provide a superficial rationale for killing the defendant. That's what's at stake; it's all that's at stake. For all its insane bluster and hubris, our government is not comfortable simply putting the guy against a wall and shooting him. So. We go to trial. If convicted and sentenced to anything less than death, he will be imprisoned forever. If acquitted and not sentenced, he will be imprisoned forever. But if sentenced to death, well, see you at the party!

The Bush people appear almost admirable by comparison. Their military tribunals got bogged in a morass of internal power struggles and legal quibbling, but no one in that administration pretended that tribunals were anything other than what they were: an administrative sentencing process for the presumed guilty. Now that is a travesty, but at least it's a honest travesty, and certainly not without historic precedent in this and other countries. Indeed, one might even call it the civilized norm in the broad sweep of history. Meanwhile, in the present, we must endure the endless invocation of justice from those who would traduce the most basic, fundamental principles of legal due process even as they extol them.

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations.

This morning on the little hourly NPR newsbreak on the classical station, there was a brief piece on Obama-in-China, which after the usual boilerplate signed off by noting that China had rejected proposals for a "Group of Two" because China does not "enter into alliances." So here we are. Obama is deciding how many more troops to send to a colonial outback, while communist China hews to word and spirit of Washington's farewell address. I just can't stop smiling.

Twenty-Twelve-Step

Well. 2012 is basically the sumnation of everything, a neat package in which Roland Emmerich reenacts Genesis 6-9 in the most hilariously overwrought of all possible ways. What does it say about our society that we can seamlessly create Himalaya-devouring tsunamis with digital magic but putting realistic cracks in the plaster is still beyond Hollywood's set dressers? The end is near, that's what. Anyway, uh, spoilers.

I expected a movie with no plot, but as the reviews have noted, the film suffers from a surfeit of plots. Every character has a back-story-and-a-half, and though it plys the usual American eschatology in which the end of the world plays as the orchestra under the operatic tale of familial reconciliation, there is something gleefully refreshing about the fact that it actually spends a great deal of time with the blended Cusack clan nowhere to be seen.

In the end, the Chinese, at the direction of the rest of the world, have built some big boats. "Arks!" As Oliver Platt says, "Leave it to the Chinese." Only they could build on such a scale. The boats are designed to withstand the force of the world-ending flood, and yet the gear mechanisms that close their doors can be jammed up by a 2" penumatic hose. "We can't engage the engines until we get a hard seal on the door!" cries the captain as they float on collision course toward the North Face of Everest. Did Cusack jam it up in the first place? Will he swim to the rescue? Reader, he will.

With three seconds left before the end, the Noble Black Scientist realizes that the billionaires whose bought admission to the boats he was only moments ago decrying as desperately unfair are going to be left behind to die, and he makes an impassioned plea to save them. Oliver Platt, a chief-of-staff type who's now in charge-ish, reminds him for the ten zillionth time that preserving a nucleus of human subjects is more important than the interest of fairness. This is a reasonable point, and that makes Platt the closest thing to evil, but Emmerich is in a forgiving mood, and no one in the movie is truly bad.

In the end, it turns out that Africa has survived the flood. Africa! Earlier in the film we see a few of the the two-of-every-animal (really!) brought aboard--giraffes, gorillas, rhinos. So, I guess that was a waste of helicopters, eh? I imagine the Africans, upon discovering that they, seemingly alone, have survived the cataclysm, can only respond with a hearty "Fuck yeah!" Until, of course, the boats full of white people show up. "Oh, hell no! Fooled us once, shame on you, but you . . . won't get fooled again!" Or, as my buddy put it on the walk back to the car, "Hello white people. Those are some nice boats. Would you like to see our bullets?"

The Truman Show

You know, a more effective way to encourage the ends sought by E.J. Dionne would be to legalize patronage.

No. Woo peed on my rug.

The Krugster really hates those damn Red Chinese.

So picture this: month after month of headlines juxtaposing soaring U.S. trade deficits and Chinese trade surpluses with the suffering of unemployed American workers. If I were the Chinese government, I’d be really worried about that prospect.

Unfortunately, the Chinese don’t seem to get it: rather than face up to the need to change their currency policy, they’ve taken to lecturing the United States, telling us to raise interest rates and curb fiscal deficits — that is, to make our unemployment problem even worse.

Oh, the suffering of America's unemployed. The humanity!

Turnabout is fair play, and after years as a middling economic power enduring lectures from first-world free-traders, let me advance the following: China owes us a lecture or two in return. (And spare us, please, the irony of couching complaints about Chinese pedantry in a schoolmarmish column predicated on the notion that no one on the Central Committee ever took intro to macro.) The Chinese have a manufacturing economy, and the US remains giant net importer of goods. Also, there is the rest of the world: perfectly happy to buy Chinese.

And of course, the Chinese worry that they may shave a point off of growth, down to 7%, perhaps. We should only be so lucky. One quarter with stats like China's at its worst would get The Obama declared dictator-for-life by Mitch McConnell.