My dear sister Rose is a school teacher in Fairfax, Virginia. Due to the type of budget problems plaguing even the most affluent public school systems these days, however, the county was not able to offer her employment between June and September. It has in the past, I must quickly note, and it does, in fact, employ many of her colleagues in summer positions this year, but, based on the typical criteria, including seniority, unfortunately, the county could not employ Rose this summer.
As regular readers of this Web log know, Rose is in no position to take an extended vacation of any sort. Being the stalwart and resourceful person she is, Rose saw this coming and made arrangements for a post teaching the summer session a private school. Now, Rose specializes in, and normally teaches Grades One through Six. When necessary, in the past, she has also taught English, Social Studies and various foreign languages to Grades Ten through Twelve. But never, in her entire prior career, has she taught any of the traditional Junior High school grades – which is to say, grades Seven through Nine, nor has she ever taught at a Middle School, which usually include Grades Seven and Eight along with Six. “Middle School sixth graders,” I remember her telling me, “are nothing like Elementary School sixth graders.” Well, you certainly don’t have to ask Rose – ask any experienced school teacher and you’ll find out that, while they’re reasonably cute and obedient until they reach puberty, the first three or four years of it so totally deranges children, only two special kinds of teachers make a career out of teaching them during that interval. One of them is masochists, the other is pedophiles. Any other teacher working Middle or Junior High School has formulated, and is executing a plan to get out; if they have not done so before the day they start, then they most certainly have by no more than a week afterward. Therefore, it’s no small measure of how tough things are, that Rose, for the very first time in her life, is teaching summer school to eighth graders, and not just any eighth graders, either. She’s teaching social studies to eighth graders whose parents all want to get them into Harvard.
“Current events,” Rose sighed to me across the table at Palena, where I had taken her for an early dinner last night, at her request – the restaurant, the time, and, the very meeting itself, actually.
“Current events?” I echoed back as the waiter brought my black bass with Brandade and Rose’s plate of artichoke and fennel.
“They have to complete a project for current events,” she explained, “and the little monsters have decided to do a project on the federal debt ceiling.”
“Where in blue blazes,” I wondered aloud, “did a bunch of eighth graders get the idea to do a current events project on the federal debt ceiling?”
“Why,” Rose informed me with a knowing tone, “from their parents, of course. This is Washington, after all, and it seems that’s the only current event the kids have heard Mom and Dad talking about lately besides the Royals visiting California, NATO bombing Libya, the riots in Greece – and the Casey Anthony verdict, of course. Thursday, at the end of the class, I had them all send me e-mails with their top ten choices for social studies projects. Then I dumped the lists into a spreadsheet that counts and sorts, and those were the top five selections. Then, on Friday, we held an on-line run-off behind the school’s VPN firewall, using the same voting software they use for student council elections. I was hoping to demonstrate how run-off elections work, eliminating the choice which got the least votes and then voting again, continuing until one candidate obtains a majority, but I didn’t get the chance, because among the five top choices, ‘federal budget ceiling’ got more than half the votes on the first ballot.”
“At least,” I consoled, “they didn’t break into stubborn factions, like their parents, and bicker endlessly.”
“True,” Rose agreed. “There’s that, anyway. So, Tom, can you answer some questions for me – about the federal budget ceiling, so none of those little toads manages to catch me making a mistake? So far, it’s been barely tolerable as it is, and I want to finish the summer session with my sanity and reputation intact.”
“You’re qualified,” I reminded her, “to teach social studies to high school students.”
“Yes, I am, and if the current events project subject had been the Royals visit to California, I could handle that. If it had been NATO bombing Libya, or riots in Greece, again, no problem; the Casey Anthony verdict – piece of cake, as a social studies topic,” Rose confidently told me. “But the federal debt ceiling involves economics, and while I’ve had plenty of experience teaching kids about the relative virtues of democracies and monarchies, the flaws of dictatorship, how countries form alliances, why people riot and how Lady Justice is blind as a bat, I’ve never had to explain the bond market or international banking to anyone in a social studies class. Government stuff, sure – taxation, revenue collection, the appropriation process, the Federal Reserve Bank, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, I cover all that – sometimes more quickly than I’d like, but I cover it. But the national debt? I don’t know, maybe it ought to get more attention in social studies. All we usually say is, whenever the federal government borrows money, it has to pay interest on the loan, just like everybody else. Uncle Sam gets his loans by selling government bonds, called Treasury Bills, which are considered very safe investments all over the world, because they are backed by the ‘full faith and credit of the United States.’ Then I usually move on to a definition and discussion of the ‘full faith and credit’ concept, and wind up by showing the class the latest Internet video of the National Debt Clock, on Sixth Avenue near Times Square.”
“It’s closed for renovation,” I let her know.
“Really?” Rose asked in an uncertain tone. “What was wrong with it?”
“It ran out of digits,” I dryly replied. “The new one will have enough digits to display quadrillions. Meanwhile, I suggest you use the one at http://www.usdebtclock.org/ which presents the national debt along with quite a few other interesting figures.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Rose murmured as she tapped the URL into her iPhone. “Let’s see… Oh, my God, it’s information overload!”
“Technically,” I remarked, “it’s the ‘US Public Debt Subject to Limit’ that’s almost the debt ceiling, but not quite. As you can see, the ‘US National Debt’ is a couple hundred billion dollars bigger.”
“How come they’re not the same?” Rose wondered. “Where does the… what… one hundred ninety-eight billion dollar difference come from?”
“Things like Unamortized Discount, the Federal Refinancing Bank, Hope Bonds, the Guaranteed Debt of Agencies Other than the Treasury,” I answered, “cats and dogs, rounding errors.”
“But what if one of the kids asks me about that?” Rose wondered, as the waiter cleared our first course.
“Well,” I shrugged, “Unamortized Bond Discount is the difference between a bond’s par value, meaning the value of the bond at maturity and how much revenue would result from sale of that bond today, less the portion of the bond which as already been amortized.”
“Amortized?” Rose’s face fell. “Oh, Jesus, Tom, that’s accounting, for God’s sake!”
“Exactly,” I concurred. “So when you show them the Debt Clock and explain the difference between the debt ceiling and the national debt, and some little wiseacre starts needling you about a couple hundred billion dollars difference, you just rattle off the names of the components in that difference – I’ll text you a list after dinner – and then, if they ask you what they mean, you just rattle off the definitions, which you can readily look up on the Internet. Hope Bonds were an Obama administration program that allowed ordinary people to buy into the bank bailout money, and by law, they’re not included in the Public Debt Subject to Limitation. It’s all there – just take some notes and read the stuff back at them if they ask, and if some punk insists on pursuing any further questions, say that’s interesting, the composition of the Public Debt Subject to Limit is determined every working day by the Treasury Department, would he or she like to prepare a presentation to the class about it for extra credit? Then you can make sure to include the annoying brat’s material on the next test. I bet that will make them really popular with their classmates, huh? Okay,” I continued, “another important thing you don’t want to let them do is catch you on the fact that the Debt Ceiling is a constant and that the official, legal value of the Public Debt Subject to Limit is, too. The dynamic value you see in the Debt Clock Web page is based on extrapolations of the daily determinations of the Public Debt Subject to Limit made by the Treasury Department. So, the fine point you don’t want to miss here is that Congress has statutorily set values for the Public Debt Subject to Limit and the Debt Ceiling at $14.294 trillion and $14.296 trillion, respectively.”
“Okay,” Rose nodded as the waiter brought my stuffed skate and Rose’s roasted Baja sea scallops, “and what if one of them asks why Congress’ numbers are different from the Treasury Department’s?”
“Tell them it’s an example of the separation of powers between the Legislative and Executive branches,” I advised. “Speaking of which,” Rose mentioned, “what’s this business with the Fourteenth Amendment?”
“Section Four, Clause One,” I recited, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
“Huh?” Rose’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth. “That’s from after the Civil War, one hundred and fifty years ago! It was put in there so the United States wouldn’t be responsible for debts incurred by the Confederacy!”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “and Section One was written to make sure that freed slaves would be US citizens no matter what state or territory they lived in. But it evolved other uses, didn’t it? Today, it’s the part of the Constitution that makes the anchor baby industry possible. So – same idea. The Obama administration points out that it says, right there in the Constitution, that ‘The validity of the debt of the United States… shall not be questioned.’ Therefore, the President has the right to ignore the debt limit and continue borrowing money, no matter what the debt ceiling is.”
“That’s outrageous,” Rose protested. “It smacks of dictatorial powers!”
“Yes,” I smirked, just a bit, “it’s like something a Republican would do.”
“Very funny,” Rose snapped back.
“But don’t worry about it,” I comforted. “His own Treasury Secretary has said Obama needs to include the ‘…authorized by law…’ part.”
“Well,” Rose shot back with an air of defeat mixed with sarcasm, “that’s certainly a relief! All right then, there’s another thing I’m sure I’m going to need to know about for this.”
“Sure!” I cheerfully responded, delighting in having once again gotten the better of my big sister. “Shoot!”
“What happens if they can’t reach an agreement and a day comes in early August that the United States of America can’t borrow any more money?”
“Oh… yeah,” I mused, “…that. Well, the fact is, nobody knows. But there are plenty of opinions.”
“Such as what?” Rose demanded.
“First of all,” I began, “some economists think that the Law of Supply and Demand will prevail. With the supply of T-Bills held constant, in a market facing a rising demand for them, their price will rise, resulting in lower interest rates.”
“Excuse me?” Rose interrupted. “Their prices go up and interest rates go down?”
“Exactly. Treasury Bills are bonds, and that’s how bonds work. If I have a piece of paper representing ten thousand dollars in debt to some corporation at simple annual interest rate of ten percent, for which I paid eight thousand dollars, I can wait a year and collect ten thousand dollars, meaning the bond has an actual market interest rate of twenty-five percent. But if, instead, I sell it to you for nine thousand dollars, you wait a year and collect ten thousand dollars, but your actual market interest rate is only eleven percent. Now the disclaimer – that’s basically why it works like that, but the pros use compound interest and also, my example used prices that made for easy math resulting in big differences so you could easily see the effect and understand the concept.”
“No problem,” Rose assured me, “it’s complicated enough like that. All right, so some economists think that it will make interest rates go down.”
“Yes,” I acknowledged, “theoretically, at least, if the demand for United States debt is sufficiently inelastic and T-Bills don’t become subject to substitution effects with respect to other sovereign debts, and so on and so forth. On the other hand, different economists think that if Uncle Sam hits the debt ceiling, foreigners holding US debt and US dollars will try to dump their dollars and sell the debt…”
“All of which would mean what?” Rose implored, clearly vexed by the amount of complication involved.
“Interest rates go up,” I summarized, “while the dollar plummets. Still others say no, foreigners would dump Treasuries, but keep the greenbacks…”
“Which would do what?” Rose interrupted.
“When it come to borrowing, Uncle Sam would get a worse deal than a high-risk credit card,” I surmised, “and foreigners would have a field day using our own dollars to buy everything we have from us at our national going-out-of-business sale. Then there’s the TEA Party school of economics,” I concluded, “and their theory is very interesting, indeed. They maintain that nothing will happen.”
Roses’ mouth made a tiny O. After a moment, she spoke “Nothing?”
“That’s right – nothing, nada, zero, bupkis, zilch. You see,” I clarified, “they figure all this obsessing about the Debt Ceiling is just another big government conspiracy. They maintain that nothing bad at all will happen to the United States economy, and a lot of the politicians they sent to Washington last year agree with them. They all figure, the only thing that will happen is the US government will have to make the huge spending cuts those folks are so completely convinced will fix everything in a jiffy.”
“Okay, then,” Rose said with a smile as she finished her final scallop. “I think that will do it. Unless… well, those kids are from here in Washington, so I’m sure the issue of a government shutdown will come up. If they can’t cut a deal on raising the Debt Ceiling, will that mean President Obama will have to order a shutdown?”
“Failing to raise the Debt Limit,” I slowly intoned, “is not the same as failing to have a Continuing Resolution to operate the federal government. Therefore, if the Debt Limit is not raised, Obama will only have to cease expenditures for that forty percent of federal government operations which the United States funds with debt.”
“Which ones are those?” Rose asked, clearly mystified.
“Oh, I don’t know…” I pondered, “how about he starts with Congress?”
Now, let’s see what’s in that Quarterly Mailbag!
My post on April 3 concerning a certain vice-presidential aide who wished to remain anonymous – or at least pseudonymous – drew plenty of predictable comments from right-wing types who hate Joe Biden. For most of them, however, proper venting of their vitriol for the Veep was hindered, unfortunately, by their equal or even exceeding scorn for the press. Only a few of them managed what amounted to a rather tricky balancing act. A fellow from Arizona pulled it off best, I think, when he said, “Seldom does fate punish the deserving better than this. In a single incident, a mainstream media reporter was humiliated, a powerful liberal politician was exposed as the complete fool he so obviously is, and the lackey responsible for the farce was reduced to fetching laundry and licking out toilet bowls.” Well, that last bit was a somewhat of an exaggeration, of course – hyperbole, to be sure, but not by much. Biden fans excoriated me for posting anything at all about the incident. “With all the important things about Joe Biden you could write a blog entry on,” one particularly eloquent such correspondent scolded, “you chose instead to focus on the plight of some pathetic nincompoop who inadvertently, I’m sure, made Scott Powers cool his heels in a storage room for a while. Vice President Biden is a great American and deserves better.” Well, I say, in the immortal words of Harry S Truman, if Vice President Biden can’t stand the heat, he should get out of the kitchen – not have his speech writers pose as people who read my blog and send me nasty e-mails.
The story of my encounter with the Commerce Department’s foremost expert on the economics of soybeans – and his sad tale of woe at having been found “not excepted” from layoff during a federal government shut-down drew considerable sympathy for soybeans, if not for bureaucrats. Scores of readers who farm soybeans wrote to tell me that, even as residents of America’s rural heartland, who know that pointy-headed so-and-so’s like my friend Cuthbert all deserve to be tarred, feathered and rode out of Washington on a rail, it was, nevertheless, a big mistake for Commerce to tell the soybean guy to stay home during a federal government shutdown. It is manifestly unfair, they insisted, for the corn, cotton and oil guys to still come in to work while the soybean fellow has to sit at home. Not unfair to Cuthbert, mind you – to hell with him, they said – but unfair to soybean farmers, who, to a man (and they were all men, by the way) are completely convinced that those other commodity experts would seize the opportunity to take money away from the single most essential, vital and important federal program in existence, which is, of course, soybean subsidies.
The e-mails concerning my April 15 post about air traffic controllers were split pretty much right down the middle between folks who bemoaned the FAA’s callous exploitation and over-work of those poor devils and folks who basically assured me that if they had a one hundred and thirty thousand dollar a year job in the middle of the worst recession since Huey Long was shot, they would damn sure stay awake while they were doing it. I doubt that second group has any idea of how boring it is to be an air traffic controller, though. How boring is it? It’s so boring, a career in IT security looks exciting – and pays about the same, too.
Sometimes a minor aspect of a post draws way more mail than the main subject, and such was the case with the story of Marilyn Davenport, member of the Orange County, California Republican Central Committee. Not that I didn’t get plenty of messages from people who (a) were totally incensed by the thought that anyone could portray President Obama as a baby chimpanzee; (b) completely baffled that anyone could possibly be offended by a harmless little sight gag that depicts President Obama as a baby chimpanzee; (c) overcome by umbrage that, while Democrats pitched a self-righteous hissy-fit about a Republican joke that depicted Barack Obama as a chimpanzee, George W. Bush had to endure eight solid years of Democrat jokes about how he looks, acts, thinks and smells like a chimpanzee; (d) seething with ironic anger that, while Barack Obama might have ears that would be the envy of just about any aspiring carnival sideshow attraction, George W. Bush actually looks, acts, thinks and smells like a chimpanzee; (e) absolutely outraged that I would suggest Mrs. Davenport paint her face with burnt cork and hold a news conference to tell the world how much Republicans love black people; or (f) incoherently livid at the suggestion that the only people left in Republican Party these days are unreconstructed white racists, black wing nuts like Alan Lee Keyes and good old-fashioned Negro toadies like Clarence Thomas. But all of them put together didn’t add up to ten percent of the e-mails I got concerning my remarks in that post about the way Californians talk. A multitude of Californians wrote in to let me know that no way, dude, is there anything gnarly about how they talk? “Expressing us and our views verbally is a major part of California culture that has evolved organically since before any of us were born,” one particularly articulate denizen of the Golden State declared. “Nerds like you,” another remarked, “think your [sic] smart when you can find California on a map but maps aren’t everything and I bet you suck at surfing.” “Your [sic] what’s wrong with the rest of the US that don’t understand California, skateboards or gamers,” a third informed me, “and your [sic] all [expletive] up in the head, so [expletive] you in the [expletive], too!” “I’d rather sound like I’m asking questions all the time,” a fourth snarked, “than have a accent like some [expletive] from [expletive] New Jersey and sound like an ignorant dumb-[expletive] like that [expletive] slut Snooki or something.” I got hundreds of e-mails along these lines. Methinks the Californians doth protest too much.
It was pretty much the same situation with my April 30th post, too. In it, I told of a consultation with Khus Dihugami Dadamizo, Special International Policy Emissary of His Excellency President Hamid Karzai for the Embassy of Afghanistan to the United States of America, concerning the policy implications of the Sarposa prison escapes – pretty weighty stuff, I thought, and worthy of some carefully considered responses. But my account of Mr. Dadamizo’s comments about the Royal Wedding, which was occurring that very day, drew far more people to their keyboards to have their say. “Up that goat-[expletive] Pathan’s stinky [expletive],” an Australian suggested, “she’s [expletive] beautiful, as any idiot can see!” An irritated Canadian scolded, “There’s simply nothing mousy about a size nine. Kate’s got all the right stuff in all the right places.” “How dare that nasty Afghan guy,” one truly ticked-off American Anglophile wrote, “criticize Kate’s hooters? Everybody knows English guys are gay anyway, and prefer thin, flat women.” “That ungrateful, boorish, filthy savage,” wrote on correspondent from Old Blighty Itself, “is a perfect example of why every attempt on the part of the British Empire teach the Afghans civilization has been a dismal failure. You can dress those bloody kaffirs up in a bespoke Savile Row suits, but you cannot, under any circumstances, expect them to behave or speak as gentlemen.” The responses I received pertaining to that post’s major subject matter ran about sixty-forty in favor of the idea that the United States should not give the Karzai government another dime, because all they will do is steal it; versus the minority who argued that pouring a few hundred billion down a rat hole like Afghanistan is a small price to pay for things like keeping the Taliban out of power, depriving al-Qaeda of a host country, and providing female Afghan children with the opportunity to attend school. To that I would add, let’s not forget one other important item – paying for Afghan diplomats to receive expert policy consultations.
My next post, on May 7, involved Mr. Dadamizo’s neighbor, Bhadwe Ki-Nasal Bhenchot, First Deputy Under Assistant Embassy Counselor for the Nation of Pakistan in the United States. Predictably, he expressed the expected outrage at US Navy SEALS violating Pakistani sovereignty in order to kill Osama bin Laden in the city of Abbottabad. Boy howdy, did my readers have plenty of advice for him, most of which I won’t bother to print – when I tried to prepare a couple of those e-mails for presentation, it turned out there were so many expletive redactions that the result was pretty much incomprehensible. Bottom line, nobody in America is buying the Pakistani’s story about not knowing that Osama bin Laden was hiding right under their noses in what amounts to the Pakistani version of West Point. My suggestion that the Pakistani government excuse itself on the basis of extreme stupidity was met with general agreement that, yes, there would be few, if any, problems getting the rest of the world to believe that. But quite a few folks wrote in to question the very fundamental basis of that premise itself – how, they demanded to know, could somebody be smart enough to win a Pakistani election and yet still be so stupid they couldn’t figure out that Osama bin Laden was hiding in plain sight, ensconced in a villa, no less, right in the midst of a major Pakistani military town? To them, I would say, you obviously haven’t met very many Pakistanis, have you?
Trump supporters far and wide wrote in to excoriate me for what they evidently felt was an error the subsequent post, where I relate my conversation with The Donald, recounting how I provided him various insights into Washington, political tradition and sundry advice for when (and if) he should deign to allow America to proclaim him President. “Donald Trump don’t need to wear no [expletive] hat to deliver the Inaugral [sic] Address,” one fellow wrote, “becuase [sic] there’s no such thing in the US consititiun [sic] and if it’s not there, then he dont [sic] have to do it.” Many other expressed similar thoughts on the issue. My suggestions concerning the Trump Flag Pole, on the other hand, seem to have met with a certain amount of approval, although, having seen it repeated a number of times, I do feel obligated to point out that the thirteen stripes in the flag do not, in fact, represent the Trump family’s original thirteen ancestral hotel properties. Mr. Trump’s ideas on foreign policy, particularly the part about “going over there to sand monkey land and kicking their butts until they let go of the [expletive] oil,” as one of his supporters so aptly paraphrased it, went over quite well, it seems. His ideas concerning the institution of a Praetorian / Trumponian guard, and their uniforms also both appear to have been a big hit. And nobody raised even the slightest objection to Mr. Trump continuing his career in reality television while serving in the White House. Too bad he’s dropped out of the race, then; perhaps the good reviews he received here will make him reconsider.
Initially, e-mails ran about seven to three against Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn in response to the May 21st post, where I recounted a dinner conversation at my home which included a French friend who expressed some skepticism about the sex crime charges brought against DSK. It stayed that way until earlier this week, when the New York District Attorney announced that there were some serious problems with the credibility of their star witness, the alleged victim. Now they’re running about even, with those still against him seeking to minimize the implications of a prosecution witness who seems to have lied about being raped on her asylum application, as well as a number of other things, and, according to police wiretaps, may also be involved in illegal drug trafficking. Her apologists remain quick to point out that, while all of that might (or might not) be true, that doesn’t necessarily mean that DSK isn’t still a male chauvinist pig pervert how makes hotel maids Do the Big Nasty, as the State of New York currently contends. No, I admit it doesn’t, but I would recommend that my female correspondents (and they are all ladies, by the way) who want to see a philandering man get crucified stop wasting their time watching the DSK debacle (now perhaps, pinning their hopes on Tristane Banon) and start following the John Edwards case instead.
I say that because it appears, compared to John Edwards, DSK is pretty small potatoes. About eighty-three percent of the readers who sent e-mails commenting on the May 28th post about Edwards’ legal problems would, basically, like to convene a lynch mob an hang him. Apparently, one of the best ways to end up in the What the Hell Were You Thinking Hall of Fame is to be a nationally-known politician who gets caught cheating on his wife when she has cancer – in remission or not. And after she dies, buddy, you better get ready for somebody, like the United States Attorneys, for instance, to open a big old honkin’ can of whuppin’ and pour it all over your sorry carcass – while everybody, or at least eight out of ten people, anyway, cheers. The other seventeen percent made as strong a case for Christian, Humanist or some other type of forgiveness, maintaining that we need to remember that John Edwards is on trial for some pretty technical and essentially arcane violations of some very convoluted, intricate and abstruse campaign finance laws that maybe even the people who wrote them (like John Edwards, for example) do not fully understand. They argue that if, hypothetically, John Edwards’ campaign aide was off the clock when he visited Mrs. Mellon, and was just being John’s friend, and if Mrs. Mellon honestly believed she was giving John Edwards a personal gift of a few hundred thousand dollars by writing a personal check paid to the order of that campaign aide, then what does it matter if John Edwards used his campaign finance chairman to funnel the money into the secret support of Edwards’ mistress? All right, then, let me play King Solomon here and say to the first group, that eight out of ten who so obviously want retribution not for the crimes that Edwards may or may not have committed, but, in fact, want it for him being a low, rotten, lying, cheating, callous, selfish, narcissistic and hypocritical spouse, that there is no law against being a low, rotten, lying, cheating, callous, selfish, narcissistic and hypocritical spouse. And there shouldn’t be, either, because, in fact, the woods are full of them, and if every low, rotten, lying, cheating, callous, selfish, narcissistic and hypocritical spouse were locked up in prison, half of America would be rotting in jail. To the remaining two out of ten who point out, as I just did, that it’s not illegal to be a low, rotten, lying, cheating, callous, selfish, narcissistic and hypocritical spouse, and therefore morally indefensible to punish John Edwards for being one, I say – yeah, you’re right. But even though there were, in fact, plenty of a laws against bootlegging, prostitution, extortion, gambling and murder, when they couldn’t nail him for any of those, they got Al Capone on income tax evasion instead, and it seems to me that campaign finance infractions are close enough. And so, apparently, does the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina. As usual, I forwarded all the e-mails asking to meet Veronica directly to her, and noticed that this time, there were several where the fellows who sent them claim to have more money than John Edwards. Okay, guys, just let me warn you though – Veronica will definitely check on that before she hits Reply.
Let me begin my response to the many e-mails I received in support of Sarah Palin regarding the June 4 post, that I heartily concede Palin’s right to do whatever she wants during her vacations; and, furthermore, to remember facts, including historical ones, however she likes. This is America, after all, where it is universally received wisdom that we can behave any way we want and think what we please. Examples of this doctrine abound across our great land, and, although I may not agree with them, or even be able to keep my lunch down at the sight of many of them, I approve of, and stand ready to defend, those rights which make such things possible, even in a supposedly civilized society. Moreover, I readily admit that I cannot prove, to a standard of reasonable doubt, that Sarah Palin was not, in fact, simply engaging in a rather eccentric family vacation. With these things said, I nevertheless steadfastly maintain that there’s more than enough preponderance of evidence to convince a civil jury that Palin was – and is – out there campaigning, and that those trips to New Hampshire and Iowa were obviously intended to intimidate her opponents and deflate the early momentum which they are attempting to build. If it turns out that Sarah Palin does not pursue the Presidency or Vice-Presidency in 2012, I will apologize. The folks who wrote in opposition to Palin, on the other hand, lambasted me for going too easy on her. Most of them also disagreed with my analysis that it’s liberals’ reaction to Palin that creates all the buzz about her. One such correspondent more or less summed it up by saying, “Palin would be just as much a raving, lunatic buffoon, and attract just as much attention by being one, whether sane people expressed their outrage or not.” Perhaps so. It’s not like we can run a controlled experiment, unfortunately, and the current crop of declared Republican presidential hopefuls hardly offers any obvious example of someone who is being ignored because of their consistent manner of insightful rationality.
Liberals took their turn flying off the handle in reaction to the next post, where I recount the contents of a telephone consultation with Nancy Pelosi, wherein we discussed a strategy to obtain a resignation from TweeterMeister Representative Anthony Weiner. Minority Leader Pelosi, they reminded me, had no choice but to seek Weiner’s ouster, despite all the mighty speeches, pithy sound bites and handsome photo opportunities he had produced in support of the Democratic Party. And furthermore, they railed, that three-minute and nineteen-second gap in our conversation is not what it looks like at all. Nancy Pelosi’s mother, they assured me, wanted her to become a nun, and Nancy has never forgotten that. To those folks, I would point out that my suggestion that the Democrats look for underage girls in Weiner’s cache paid off rather handsomely. Do I take credit for the straw that broke the camel’s back? Of course not. But I dare say, it was considerably more like a brick than a straw. And oh, yeah, there was the expected levee-topping flood of murky, sewage-laden prose from conservatives who don’t like Nancy Pelosi. Very little of what they said is worth repeating, but I did note an interesting anomaly – a significant number of them suggested that three-minute and nineteen-second interlude involved the Democratic Party mascot, Jackson, a four year old donkey. So watch for the story on the Internet, ladies and gentlemen, because I suspect it’s a new right-wing meme. And complete fiction, of course – the Democrats don’t even have a live mascot.
My June 17 post regarding a consultation I held with a young lady from the Tim Pawlenty campaign drew a chorus of agreement from a wide cross-section of the political spectrum. Not, I hasten to point out, that Tim Pawlenty is qualified to be elected dog catcher, much less President of the United States, but rather to agree with Your Truly that every American does indeed have three federal programs they hold dear to their hearts and which should never, ever, be touched – except, naturally, to give them more funding. Federal bureaucrats working here inside the Beltway with me will be pleased to know that virtually every federal program in existence is in somebody’s Holy Trinity. That’s right – even the federal programs that fund research to feed monkeys chocolate to determine if it makes them fall in love; or the ones that fund projects to hook giant squid central neurons up to computer interfaces and shoot the whole shebang into outer space have their ardent supporters. Of the few people who wrote in about Tim Pawlenty, on the other hand, nine out of ten think he’s such a tool, were he elected President, they would probably die of embarrassment before being able to pack and drive to Canada. And, needless to say, that last one in ten thinks he’s a genius. Fortunately, as I mentioned, there weren’t that many e-mails about him to begin with.
Would anybody reading this be the least bit surprised that absolutely nobody, anywhere in the world, wrote in to disagree with the statement I made in the June 24 post, where I wrote, “…a bunch of greedy, self-centered, nasty, lying, thieving, money-grubbing, worthless, immoral, criminally inclined sociopaths who produce nothing of value to society and spend all of their time working on Wall Street screwing people have managed to wreck the entire world economy through a shameless prostitution of commodity market concepts, in which those concepts were knowingly applied to entirely inappropriate financial instruments in a premeditated scheme to commit fraud on a global scale.” I must report, however, that a couple of people who work in the financial industry did, in fact, write me to say, “Yes, but…” That “but” being, (and I paraphrase), “But once the circus train began plunging into the Valley of Doom, economically rational individuals in the various financial markets had only two choices. They could follow the clowns who had taken over the train, or they could jump off and bet against those clowns’ assurances that great riches beyond imagination and prosperity beyond belief lay at the valley’s bottom, if only they could get there quickly enough. As it turned out, many who followed the clowns, and many who bet against them did so prudently and made tidy profits, thus, once again, vindicating Capitalism and absolving the capitalist system from any responsibility.” (I guess I might as well get his over with right now instead of after I’ve sifted through a mountain of angry e-mails: I hereby apologize to clowns for the way the previous three sentences compare them to financial market professionals.) Greece, the impending economic implosion of which was the subject of the post, got off pretty lightly in the estimation of most of my correspondents. About seventy percent of them think the Greek people are getting blamed for the evils of financiers, hedge fund managers, derivatives traders, arbitrageurs, bond traders, central banks, investment banks and plain old crooked banks – and sleezy, spineless, hypocritical politicians, of course. So thanks to those folks, and, for my money, as it were, I’d say that if ever there was a time that rounding up the usual suspects would, at least, produce an accurate catch of miscreants, this might be it. The remaining thirty percent assured me that, like Ayn Rand says, the Greeks have nobody but themselves to blame, the same goes for the Spanish, the Irish, the Portuguese and the Italians; and why can’t those lazy, corrupt, drunken, dithering bums get their acts together and be as industrious, as productive, as organized and as technically formidable as the Germans? To which I say, if the Irish were less drunk; if the Portuguese and could make up their minds; if the Spanish were industrious and uncorrupted; and if the Italians were as innovative, as productive and as organized – ahem – as the Germans, then the Allies might very well have lost World War II. Because, despite what you may have been told, we didn’t win it by all that much. So I would advise those who start howling when the rest of the PIGS go down the drain, not to do so too loudly. Because if every country in Europe were to be like Germany, well, that’s pretty much what Old You Know Who had in mind, isn’t it?