GOP Applies the O'Rourke Circumcision Precept

"You can take 10% off the Top of Anything."

It would be nice if they were going to slice everything quickly. It would also be nice if they were ready to slice whole departments from the executive branch. But I'll take half a loaf.

If you don't get the reference, you need to read Parliament of Whores. Or any O'Rourke for that matter.

Corrections and Other Failures of Prophecy -- My Self-Criticism Session

Anyone who presumes to pontificate on the subject of politics runs the risk of sending the Rake of Truth right into their lying face. So, going over what's been going on of late, I'm noticing these things that I have been dead smacking wrong about:

1. I probably overreacted to the news of Obama's quiet burial at sea. We don't want to have a known  burial spot after all. And the Islamic world seems perfectly willing to believe that we did what we said we did. I still think giving him full Muslim burial is excessive, but I'm not going to jump up and down about it.
2. The Bloom has been dusted off and put right back on the Rose. Apparently the Media Industrial Complex has only been looking for a reason to rediscover their fond adoration of Fearless Leader. Wacking Bin Laden seems to have given all the major talking heads in the Democratic Party a raging assassination boner profound appreciation of Obama's Leadership.
3. Donald Trump is not going to go away anytime soon. Going all High Noon on Obama has put him right in the spotlight, which is right where Trumpy likes to be. I'm pretty sure its not going to matter, electorally speaking, but that's a subject for a different blog post, wherein I shall denounce not merely Trump but Trumpism. Just as soon as I define it.
4. P.J. O'Rourke is not only not decrepit, he's lost none of his old Parliament of Whores rage at our mountebank aristocracy. Behold the opening paragraph of his latest philippic:

Wipe that smirk off your face, Mister President. “We cannot afford $1 trillion worth of tax cuts for every millionaire and billionaire in our society.” Is there some Sidwell Friends night school class liberal politicians take to perfect an expression of smug disdain? When Teddy Roosevelt was demagogue-in-chief he at least had the nerve to come right out and call the successful people he despised “malefactors of great wealth.” He didn’t simper and moue at his audience. Go ahead and say it, President Obama: Let’s steal from the rich and give to the poor. Never mind that we’re doing a pretty good job of it already. The top 5 percent of the nation’s earners are being soaked for almost 60 percent of America’s tax revenue.

Read the whole thing.

P.J. O'Rourke on Atlas Shrugged.

I had begun to consider ol' P.J. a bit of a relic, semi-retired like Lord Kitchner before WWI. But of late he's been doing yeoman's service, first deftly cutting Amy Chua off at the knees:

You might think that Amy Chua is a fascist pig. She wrote a previous book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, so she is.

And now, he updates Ayn Rand more successfully in a few sentences than, one suspects, the filmmakers will two movies:

An update is needed, and not just because train buffs, New Deal economics and the miracle of the Bessemer converter are inexplicable to people under 50, not to mention boring. The anti-individualist enemies that Ayn Rand battled are still the enemy, but they’ve shifted their line of attack. Political collectivists are no longer much interested in taking things away from the wealthy and creative. Even the most left-wing politicians worship wealth creation—as the political-action-committee collection plate is passed. Partners at Goldman Sachs go forth with their billions. Steve Jobs walks on water. Jay-Z and Beyoncé are rich enough to buy God. Progressive Robin Hoods have turned their attention to robbing ordinary individuals. It’s the plain folks, not a Taggart/Rearden elite, whose prospects and opportunities are stolen by corrupt school systems, health-care rationing, public employee union extortions, carbon-emissions payola and deficit-debt burden graft. Today’s collectivists are going after malefactors of moderate means.

The Inner Party always has privileges. This is a point that we wingnuts need to make louder over the coming year: that progressivism primarily benefits those who can afford to pay for it.

There's life in the old boy yet.

I Love the Smell of Disco in the Evening. It Smells Like Victory.

One of the standing lines from the Right since Obama's rise has been that he is Carter in blackface. Instapundit, and myself, have long been of the opinion that Carter II is about the best we could expect from Obama. But he might mean something different from what I mean.

Carter's great virtue from a conservative point of view was his complete impotence, an almost adorable inability to come to terms with the challenges of his time. This had nothing whatever to do with his intellect. James Earl Carter, Jr. graduated from Annapolis and studied nuclear physics; such men are not without grey matter. Rather, he persistently misconcieved what the country the times needed and wanted.

And why was this good? Because by 1978 it was arguable, and by 1980, obvious. A sea change could and did occur in the American political landscape because the country had percieved that the New Class had failed to provide what it had promised. Conservative success in 2012 depends in no small part on a similar perception.

As P.J. O'Rourke once put it, after we get Carter, we get Reagan.

Blah blah Washington blah blah sex blah blah gadgetry

P.J. delivers a gentle smack-down upon Wonkette's novel. Typical bon mots:

I won't spoil the plot. There isn't one

and

Cox has wit and sense. Occasionally she uses them.

I don't know what it is about Wankette that makes me want to so render her nom de plum, but I suspect it has to do with the fact that she herself represents what her novel appears to be about. Her blog is fun for a day or two until you realize that she doesn't have anything to say. It's all schoolgirl giggling and taking joy in the word "tits". Nothing wrong with that in small doses, but absent anything of greater substance it becomes as interesting as bathroom stall graffiti; if one didn't know otherwise, one would swear it was scripted. I can't be the only one who made the "how appropriate" eye-roll when I discovered that her last name was Cox.

I mean, really, what shocking about there being sex, betrayal, and the banally vicious rythmns of the Circle of Access in Washington? Is this really making the scales drop from anyone's eyes? What is this, the Fifties?

Comfortably Numb

P.J. O'Rourke once described an XTC hangover as feeling like "I was in the other room and I couldn't quite hear me." It's one of those phrases I've thrown in to relevant conversation, confident that most haven't read O'Rourke's early stuff and so I'll get the clever award (this is one of my worst habits, but I'm pretty sure I'm not alone). At any rate, that's largely how I feel today: wiped, hollow, bloodless. Unlike yesterday, however, I can probably make it through the end of the school day, and from thence rush home to enjoy chicken soup and I, Claudius with Derek Jacobi. So that gives me some time to blog.

Swimming With Squid

P.J. O'Rourke once postulated that the most intelligent thing anyone could say about the government was that it was like taking a bath in a tubful of squid, so complete was it's sliminess. I generally find such arguments to be an exaggeration, if not a palpable untruth. I suspect that 90% of the "slimes" in Washington are utterly unaware of the fact that they are slimes, except in the most sardonic manner. There's very little that our federal government debates that is not, one way or another, that doesn't have to do with money: inlays and outlays. So one man's tax relief is another man's fiscal irresponsibility, and one man's progressive charity is another man's counterproductive waste of public wealth. Everybody fights the other guy as dirty as possible, because you can't accomplish your tax relief, fiscal responsibility, or progressive charity if you lose. But you still believe in tax relief, fiscal responsibility, or progressive charity.


With that in mind, take a gander at this (link via NRO).


Now I've never heard of Insight Magazine, but guessing from their home page, they seem like a right-leaning job to me. So you can expect the spin of Bush' budget numbers. Nevertheless, it's the only piece I've read this year that talks in any detail about the programs being cut or the overall structure of the budget. I also find it interesting that no one on the right seems to have bothered making these arguments before now, but have bought into the "Hey, Big Spender" meme.


So here we have the progressives and the traditionalists scourging each other over money spent here, money spent there, help not given here, burden not being lifted there. And as I said, most of them are honest, and most of them are arguing according to the facts that follow their philosophy (where they get their philosophy is another matter). But once again, as Tom Daschle pointed out, we could cut all discretionary spending and still have a deficit. I'm not hearing anything from either campaign on Social Security reform, despite what Greenspan said last week and despite today's statement by the Medicare trustees that it too will go broke if nothing is done. The conclusion that the political class is so interested in its Great Game that it refuses to see the coming deluge is easy to arrive at. Perhaps that's what P.J. meant.