LI GOES TO THE VOMITORIUM

It is nice to see that some of the bigfoots – Greider and Krugman, and even the Bushite pinhead, Sebastian Mallaby in the WAPO – are coming out of the shrubbery to denounce the Treasury department’s theft in the offing. The NYT, in contrast, has set Peter Baker to the task of licking up a monument of bubble gum and marble for those two superheroes of this Bushian time, Paulson and Bernanke. Baker is the man for the task: on the Washington Post, he strove mightily to apologize for mass murder and torture, covering President Backbone with the same objectivity that might be expected from one of Nero’s catamites, reviewing Nero’s acting abilities in the Coliseum. His description of the brain (Bernanke) and the man of action (Paulson) is like a Damien Hirst piece, if Hirst took to carving Pierrots out of his own shit: it is kitsch cast in excrement:


“The two men have been working early and working late, tracking Asian markets and fielding calls from their European counterparts, then reconnecting with each other by phone eight or nine times a day, talking so often that they speak in shorthand. Mr. Paulson has powered through the long days with a steady infusion of Diet Coke. Asked twice to testify by the Senate last week, he begged off.

“He told me he had like four hours of sleep,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Banking Committee. But there were limits to Mr. Dodd’s sympathy. “The public wants to know what’s going on,” he said he replied.

Mr. Bernanke (his drink: Diet Dr Pepper) has made a point of leaving the office by midnight to get at least some rest, but friends say the toll on him is clear as well. Alan S. Blinder, a longtime friend and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, recalled seeing Mr. Bernanke at a conference last month in Jackson Hole, Wyo. “He looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” Mr. Blinder said.
And that was before last week.”

Baker, whose effusions about the heroic, surge-right Bush in the NYT Magazine a couple of weeks ago did had a dramatic effect on LI (we wanted to vomit after the first couple of paragraphs) is in the fortunate position of the right sycophant at the right moment, and one can feel him wiggling with excitement. And he has that eye, doesn’t he: diet Dr. Pepper. Don’t you feel his maternal, servile ache as he longs to perhaps bring one of his action heros, a true Batmen out to free Gotham from its bad debts, another can. He understands, as does the NYT, that this huge crisis in the Bandit class can only be assuaged by an obsessive, massive theft that will make our successful and oh so smart masters feel, well, masculine again; one that will exist like a burning yearning brand on the hides of Americanus bovus, all of us lower downs: bought and sold at undermarket prices. But of course, we out here in the fields, we cant understands theft! So hard! Maybe the smarter peoples will figure it all out for us! Then we votes for them!

Of course, in the UK, the New Labourites have already figured this out and have translated it into the ineffable language of toadeating. This is one of the Blairites, explaining, oh so delicately, that we can’t, just can’t, return to cutting into the hides of the wealthy, who are generating our prosperity at a fearful rate. Such genius brains!

“But is an economy which promotes minority wealth and privilege and requires the state to tax the beneficiaries to support those it excludes really the only alternative to the current order? An agenda based on the redistribution of wealth rather than the redistribution of opportunity can only ever deliver justice as compensation; mitigating the worst effects once the damage is done. It is morally unambitious and likely to fail in the long run because by taxing the beneficiaries more heavily, the wealth-generating capacity of an already underemployed economy is further compromised.”

Oh my! Such butter and shit on the tongue, lodged firmly in the City asshole! We have to (sob) redistribute opportunity! We need Blair, with all his evangelical fervor, that wondrous Uriah Heep persona, to intone things like this. Far better to be read by Texas redneck conservatives than the taffee Tartufferie of the “Left” in the Anglosphere state that seems destined to sink the most in the next year.