If you wore the sunglasses from ‘They Live.’
And the winner, following President Pat Robertson, Mike Huckabee and Bob Dole:
The Imperial City And The World
If you wore the sunglasses from ‘They Live.’
And the winner, following President Pat Robertson, Mike Huckabee and Bob Dole:
When matters are bleak one can only expect Tom Friedman to rise (or sink) to the occasion. His endorsement of the nebulous ‘politically centrist Internet alternative Americans Elect’ plumbs new depths of unblinking vacuity. Harsh? In the maestro’s own words:
Our goal is to open up what has been an anticompetitive process to people in the middle who are unsatisfied with the choices of the two parties,” said Kahlil Byrd, the C.E.O. of Americans Elect, speaking from its swank offices, financed with some serious hedge-fund money, a stone’s throw from the White House.
Adding to the fin de stupide, McConnell and Reid embrace decadence by declaring the Congress unable to function as a co-equal branch of government. Dear Reader, naturally, you might say ‘of course’. Didn’t they willingly devolve into a hapless Duma under the Warlord, with Rockefeller writing letters to his desk drawer and the like? Abandoning oversight for fealty and so on? All true. Our intrepid Remus and Romulus propose a new ‘super Congress’, a formal gang of 12 from each chamber, and each party. These Supremos would be entrusted to make the hard choices that elude the merely elected.
It’s funny how it’s exactly the same idea and language that Bob Walker tried to float around D.C. in 2005. Walker was trying to solve Bush’s dysfunction. The Administration clearly couldn’t govern, oversee or make hard choices. Walker proposed creating ‘Super Secretaries’. They would be entrusted with larger portfolios to empower coordination.
We (happily) broke D.C. code by pointing out how dim it all was. Bluntly we told Walker (in an evening bull session of 12 or so organized at the D.C. offices of a performance car company) he missed the point. The institutions are fine. Hire competent secretaries and appointees, fire the incompetent. More to the point, since the Republican/Movement apparat has spent generations attacking the efficiency of government, what can one expect when they man an administration with people who loathe functioning government in the first place. The ideology and recruitment were both proximate causes. Why not have Republicans in public embrace good government, sound non-PR-wedge issue management?
That was a lead zeppelin. A-w-k-w-a-r-d.
We weren’t invited back. Best for all involved. We’d have been twice as impatient and even less sense of lèse majesté over a congresscritter turned lobbyist. (But he’s a friend of Newt’s! Look at his clients!).
The point is that Reid and McConnell have succumbed to the same imbecility. The institutions — House and Senate — have not failed. Article I has not failed. The people in those positions are failures. The solution is not some extra-constitutional, ever more baroque organizational legerdemain. Organizational change (with incumbents staying) is passing the buck.
It’s not all Reid or even McConnell’s fault in one sense. Many of the institutional problems and people are there because of Obama. Or more precisely by Obama’s refusal to act as president. He wouldn’t stoop to use the presidency for political effect in the years before Nov. 2010 (and does so now). Remember Gibb’s laughing on national TV in August 2010 that the House might ‘go.’ Hilarious. Perhaps no one could have saved the House. We’ll leave the counterfactual stuff for Newt’s novels. Just note: Obama never tried.
We’ll close by making an observation. Political systems historically devolve into greater baroque complexity seeking ad hoc, temporary solutions not because of weakness from below but at the top. Expect more of these ‘solutions’ to come.
Words have the power we invest in them. This one, almost a decade old and celebrated in the finest episodes of Doctor Who (in our opinion), is causing a bit of a stir. Aside from centuries of class division supported by social complexes ranging from accents to red bricks, one little word summons potential unseemliness.
Maybe some of our friends across the pond can sort it out. Here it is.
Poor Old Blighty. Once again a Yank (really Canadian born) “is over-hyped, overpaid and over here.” David Brooks is the darling of what passes for the British political smart set; his new book is so hot that both David Cameron and Ed Miliband are meeting him this week. Steve Hilton, Cameron’s top strategist, has invited him to hold a seminar at No 10 on Friday.
Other Brits across the political and social firmament are tripping over themselves to apply Brooksian thought to everything from clogged drains to dry skin. At last, America has revenge for the Arctic Monkeys.
Why the adulation? Like Gertrude Himmelfarb, wife of Irving Kristol and mother of Willie, Brooks’ book seeks to reinterpret the Enlightenment so as to turn it inside out as it were. Rather than a period of ascending rationality, both Himmelfarb and Brooks focus on certain British thinkers of the era who urged the supremacy of the irrational, emotive essence of mankind. Brooks approvingly quotes Hume “Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions.”
“When we invaded Iraq we were blind to the social problems that would be involved. We didn’t realise they didn’t trust us.” Hold on – didn’t he write a New York Times column urging invasion? “I did. I was so blind about it. In that column I wondered what Michael Oakeshott [the British conservative political philosopher] would have said. He would have said: this society is very complicated and you should be circumspect in thinking about what you can achieve, and that invading to install democracy without trust is doomed. And then I wrote: ‘Having said that, I think we should invade.'”
Brooks apparently thinks the problem with Iraq was that America was insufficiently irrational with ‘street smarts’ and too rational. And his message to the UK is add some irrationality and street smarts to the government along with vague communal spirits. Don’t the Brits realize they can get all this penetrating insight for free weekly on PBS? In mercifully short 10 minute doses, too.
Remember when there was a difference? People knew and understood? Great times. We blame Yoko.