Pandering To Losers

On Sunday, 1 February 2008--Day Twelve of Year I of the End of Western Sieve as Wingnut City Knows It--Lord Fairbalance graciously granted an audience to Fedguv Senator Kyl of Arizona, who plays Tonto to the Fabulous Flyboy at the state level and to McConnell-san at Beltway City:

FAIRBALANCE: Senator Kyl, as the Senate begins debate on the economic stimulus plan Monday, how many Republican votes at this point do you count for the Democratic package as it stands right now? KYL: My lord, we haven’t begun our counting yet, but I can tell you that I see support for this legislation eroding. I think the more people around the country see of it, the angrier they get, because it’s very wasteful. It spends way too much money. By the way, if you throw in the interest, it’s over a trillion. It’s about $1.3 trillion. And it’s ineffective. I think the theory of it is if you throw enough money, somehow or other it’ll trickle down to people and that will help stimulate the economy. But the economists that we’ve talked to said that’s not going to work. I think the people understand that. And so I see support in the Senate actually eroding. [0] (...) Senator Kyl, recognizing, as you must, that your side lost the election and the Democrats won, what is the minimum that you would need to see in changes in this package to get significant Republican support? And is there a possibility that if you don’t get that that Republicans will try to filibuster to block this bill? KYL: Well, first of all, of course, Dick Durbin is right, there is a crisis in this country. Republicans fully appreciate that. People are hurting. And that’s why we don’t want to see this opportunity wasted. [1] We’re not talking about little things at the margins. We’re talking about over a trillion dollars here, and it would be a shame to waste that money. In the first place, we don’t have it. So there would be major structural changes that would have to occur. The centerpiece of this is a $500 rebate to folks, about 27 percent of whom don’t even pay federal income tax. That didn’t work last year. It’s not going to work this year. And so that’s not a good place to start. [2] It creates 34 new government programs. It sends $84 billion to the states when about $10 billion would satisfy the so-called FMAP needs that they have. [3] It wastes a ton of money. I mean, there are so many different things that you can make fun of in this bill. Let me just mention one -- millions of dollars to World War II Filipino veterans in the Philippines. Now, that may be a good thing to spend money on, but not in a stimulus bill. It doesn’t stimulate anything. [4] So I think you have to start from scratch and reconstruct this to -- start with the problem that created the entire cascade of events that have occurred here, the housing collapse. And Republicans, I think, will come forward with ideas to start with housing first, let people keep more of their own money, and in that way really provide some stimulus and better hope for the future. [5] FAIRBALANCE: Briefly, Senator Kyl, I want to pick up on one thing you just said and re-press my question. "Start from scratch"? I mean, you’re really talking about rewriting this whole bill? And secondly, if you don’t get those major changes you’re talking about, will Republicans filibuster to try to block this bill? KYL: I think that we would all agree there will be a 60-vote requirement for the bill. That’s the end result of a filibuster. [6] Our effort is not to delay the bill at all. We understand the urgency of the situation. And when I say “start from scratch,” what I mean is that the basic approach of this bill, we believe, is wrong. It may be that there could be some huge amendments that would redirect it, that would be adopted by our friends on the Democratic side. But every amendment in the Finance Committee was defeated. Every amendment we put forth in the Appropriations Committee was defeated. I don’t think there’s a real effort here. As Speaker Pelosi said, "We won the election, we wrote the bill." And I suspect that’s pretty much the way it’s going to end up. [7] (...) FAIRBALANCE: The administration is working on how to spend the $350 billion that’s left in the [TARP] program. And this last week, the president blasted Wall Street for giving out huge bonuses at the same time that the government -- or, rather, that the banks are asking for government bailouts. (...) Senator Kyl, there are reports now that the Administration may not impose tough new restrictions because of concerns that if they do, some of the banks that most need the money won’t end up accepting them. Is that a mistake? [8] KYL: Well, you do have to be careful about the kind of restrictions you put on there. They need to make sense. Nobody supports this -- the kind of bonuses that were given and so on. But I do think we have to be careful that we don’t try to create some kind of a devil out of the business community here. We’re not going to create new jobs unless we have businesses. And so let’s be careful about suggesting that all business folks are bad and they shouldn’t make very much money. The President seemed to suggest that it’s wrong for them to make a profit in these days. Well, businesses won’t stay in business. They won’t create jobs. They won’t hire people unless they think they can make a profit. Only 2.3 percent of the Senate bill actually provides tax relief to businesses in the hope that they can create jobs. That’s anemic. That doesn’t do any good. And the tax relief that Dick Durbin talked about last year that President Bush asked for -- well, it was a combination of Democrats and Republicans. It didn’t do any good. He’s right. And the same thing is not going to do any good in this legislation.

[0] The militant extremist neocomrade shows no sign of knowin’ anythin’ about economics, so it is mildly to his credit that he does not try to bluff. He also knows what he likes, though, and therefore positions his stereotypically Party-of-Grant druthers fair and square and right up front: "It spends way too much money." What public money is spent on scarcely matters (apart from obviously existential aggressions and occupations overseas, naturally): the great thing is simply not to spend so much.

NEVER to spend so much, actually. There is a little humbug about the times bein’ maybe just a little bit out of joint farther on, "there is a crisis in this country" et cætera, but Neocomrade J. Kyl only emits that sort of noise because the Great Hamiltonian Beast would get restless and balky if the GOP geniuses were to grantise and mckinleyate and hoover it with complete frankness. "Who knows not that to save the People one must often oppose them?" Everybody of importance further knows that it is advisable that the ignorant and unwashed savees notice the de haut en bas opposition of the Saviour Classes as little as possible.

Neocomrade J. Kyl handles that front rather well, I’d say, by assumin’ sans peur et sans research that the mob of salvation fodder agree with their betters already and do not need to be persuaded that "Hoover Was Right!" He "think[s] the people understand that." ("Je vous ai compris," observes M. le neo-général.) It would matter in only a minor tactical way, however, if the Great Beast did not understand at all. Indeed, in the light of the election returns, maybe on balance we beastly don’t really understand, and maybe the neocomrade Solon does not really suppose that we do.

The neocomrades over at the Goebbels School of Counterterror and Public Diplomacy are smart enough to have noticed that their Party’s "Hoover Was Right!" product is unmarketable to the mob at present without so much elaborate repackagin’ that they perhaps speak of ‘camouflage’ among themselves when nobody is likely to overhear. Like J. Kyl, the Party of Grant spinsters are tactically clever, or seem so to this keyboard, and they show it by concentratin’ their twistification on tryin’ to get the Great Beast to agree with their Party mammonologists ("the economists that we’ve talked to") that the New Deal was ruinously wrong and misguided, no matter what Dr. Hoover may have been. Presumably after another two or three decades of carefully controlled wombschoolin’ and Niederdümmung, the neocomradely factions will be able to inculcate their spiritual Peruna and Viagra straight-up and in the positive form. Soon enough President Roosevelt and the abominable Mr. Keynes will have passed out of living memory, leaving the world to darkness and to Kyl . . . .

But plainly the Party neocomrades are not quite arrived in Beulah Land yet. One might even paint the present state of our alien and bewildered world so as to make it look very unfavorable to the interests of Big Management. What if the Heimatland Gottes were -- even at this very late date, even after the End of Fukuyama™! -- to stray down some icky vonHayekian road to Psocialism and Pserfdom? It could still happen here!

Res gravis agitur. Neocomrade Dr. Limbaugh down in the gutter may or may not have been well advised to bark and bellow that he would like to see President Obama fail. At a more adult level, there is no doubt that it would be a catastrophe for the Party of Big Management should Keynesianism fail to fail. Neocomrade J. Kyl sneers boldly at the chief enemy of economic OnePercenterdom, "[I]f you throw enough money, somehow or other it’ll trickle down to people and that will help stimulate the economy."

Ah, but what if, contrary to all reasonable expectation and Chicago School dogmatic theology, throw-trickle-stimulate DID help?

NOTE. Student of AEIdeology and the Party of Grant ought to bear in mind that a neocomrade like J. Kyl almost certainly thinks that spendin´ (boo! hissss!!) is one thing, and tax cuts (huzzah!) utterly another. From the standpoint of the evil Fedguv the two can look very similar, but one would have to be evil oneself to look at anythin’ from that observation post. Anythin’ domestic, I mean: as noted, invasions and semiconquests and suchlike excellent adventures abroad somehow do not get counted the same way in neocomradely reckonin’s.


[1] Mr. Rahm said something very like that and got piled on by Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh. Notice that the honourable and gallant does not indicate what the Big Managers suppose their present ‘opportunity’ to consist in, and that he swiftly moves on to cast doubt on the idea that the opportunity really even exists: "In the first place, we don’t have" "that money."

Q. Did not havin’ the money ever impede R. Reagan and Dubya and Dubya’s Daddy?
A. What a silly question, Mr. Pilate!


[2] It looks as if the War on Untaxed Slackers™, originally declared by Rio Limbaugh alone, has now become the common project of all Homelandic reaction and neoreaction. If the Senator will trouble himself to root around in his factional garbage pails a little, I am confident he can do better than a measly twenty-seven percent.


[3] " The Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (FMAPs) are used in determining the amount of Federal matching funds for State expenditures for assistance payments for certain social services, and State medical and medical insurance expenditures."

Scrooge, Esq., wondered if there were no workhouses. J. Kyl, perceivin’ that he cannot be quite that straightforward now that FDR and the abominable Keynes have done their mischief, goes to work like this. Naturally it is not an accident or an oversight that Televisonland and the electorate do not know FMAP from Adam.

It may be statistically eccentric to follow in the wake of the unfabulous non-flyboy from AZ scooping up the Big Party poop for scrutiny, but there are rewards. Here, for example, we find a pretty contradiction with the usual neocomradely anti-health line, indeed, with the "Harry and Louise" line of yore: J. Kyl would never dream of sayin’ in so many words that state governments know better than doctors do what patients need, but he is not so very dogmatically opposed to the public sector that he cannot deploy it, suitably disguised and occluded, in the OnePercenters’ never-endin’ quest for spendin’ less.

Furthermore, one may take for granted that his unsourced ten billion bucks was an estimate somebody made BEFORE Mortgagegate 2008 and the Crawford Crash started puttin’ lots and lots of folks from the beastly mob out of work and out of health insurance.


[4] Nor are any votes lost by insultin’ the Lesser Breeds Without!

On the other hand, I am surprised that the neocomrade does not mention "Buy American" and its slimy heretical contempt for Absolute Free Trade.


[5] I.e., Big Management will think of somethin’ eventually, but has not yet actually done so as of Sunday morning.


[6] Kiddie Konstitutionalism is always fun, but the point of it is a little obscure in this case. I guess the neocomrade is tryin’ to avoid soundin’ too much like Dr. Limbaugh and prefers not to announce that he's prefer the damn thing just plain failed.

[7] More murk, although it is very likely that Neocomrade J. Kyl expects the obvious thig to expect, eventual passage with zero-to-derisory support from the Party of Big Management.

[8] "Leading the witness," that would be called in a Homeland court of law. Lord Fairbalance, though, is to be evaluated by the canons of Outer Murdochstan, with which I am regrettably unfamiliar.

The witness refuses to be led, oddly enough. Less odd is that he sees the political usefulness of grantin’ that Mr. Gordon Gecko really rather overdid his servicin’ of Lord Mammon.

At the bitter end, Neocomrade Senator J. Kyl all but deviated into accuracy, though he speaks cryptically enough that Televisionland probably did not notice anythin’ unusual. Cultivated despisers of the Big Party tend to claim that they never saw a tax cut they did not like, but, above the miserable Limbauvian morass, that is a misunderstanding of neorightism. Unless "tax relief" is relentlessly skewed towards the top five percentiles, at most, it will indeed not "do any good," as economic good is understood by AEIdeologues and Heritagitarians.

J. Kyl cannot afford to be a dogmatic AEIdeologue about the question, naturally, since if the GOP geniuses all did that, about 95% of 95% of the Homelanders would prefer America’s party in elementary self-defense. J. Kyl's crew, mere Big Party pols as opposed to the Owners of America, have to mumble stuff like "let people keep more of their own money" for purposes of their self-defense.

I am not sure whether or not the hacks are distinctly aware that it scarcely matters for the purposes of cocktail-napkin economics whether most people -- "the middle class" -- get to keep their own money or not. Perhaps there is not much distinctness about it, since that way it is easier for hacks like Kyl to believe that they believe what they are sayin’ -- what they indispensably have to say.

But God knows best.