Let's Make a Deal

So Congressman Rangel is now thinking about making a deal. His previous offer was to admit being just a little bit corrupt, but not very much. The usual inside sources now say he's thinking of admitting he is quite a bit corrupt, but that, really now,  he did not steal quite as much as he is accused of stealing. This would permit the attention span of the voting public -- such as it is -- to be diverted before the re-election campaigns heat up.

Laboring the obvious, the  victim of whatever theft he committed was the Republic he has sworn to serve, term after term after term.

One of the questions this raises is how this opportunistic octogenarian got away with it for so long. I'm sure it could have nothing to do with a New York (et al.) press corps slavishly devoted to any politician adored by a substantial and monolithic sub-culture satisfied to be, economically, little more than well-slopped hogs.

In case you missed a recent little essay here, this is the fellow who thinks he is qualified to write a law ordering your children into two years of lightly sugar-coated slavery.

The American Brown Shirt Act of 2010

This perennial  is back under the name of the  "Universal National Service Act" of 2010.  As usual its time has not yet come, but that doesn't keep our home-grown authoritarians from trying. When they get their way, every young American (up to the somewhat un-young age of 42) will be conscripted for service to The American Crown. It restores the military draft, and adds a novel feature -- erasing that language of the 14th Amendment barring involuntary servitude.

If you can't or won't pick up a gun,  Uncle Sam will put you to work enforcing the law, rooting out terrorists  (a term conveniently undefined in the bill), or laboring on public works projects.

It is a relic of the enchantment of our senior elected statists for the1920s and 30s when the  USSR persuaded our intellectual elite of the beauty of an entire national population marching in lockstep toward a glorious future under a Glorious Leader. Skeptics, and especially individualists,  were not excepted, and the posters of the period continue to inspire the likes of Charlie  (I didn't steal nothin') Rangel.

Congressman Rangel, Democrat of Harlem, heir to the toolbox of Adam Clayton Powell, is the sponsor of this bill, just as was been for  its 2006 and 2008 incarnations. His co-sponsors in previous years have included congress critter Yvette Clark who is widely known as the Democrat from Flatbush who has a great deal of trouble remembering if she graduated from college and, if so, which one,  Oberlin or Medgar Evers.  (The answers are "no" and "neither one.")


Another earlier sponsor is our old pal James Mc Dermott, Democrat from the twee side of Seattle.  You may know him as Baghdad Jim for his 2002 trip to Iraq where Babylonian delights were said to paid for by Saddam Hussein's spies.

Look, there are 535 men and women in Congress, and only a handful are mentioned here in relationship to the universal service scheme which serves as the factual basis for accusations  that His Obamaness wants a massive corps of civilians under his personal command. In fact, not enough of the 535 buy into this putative New American Order enough to pry the bills out of committee.

But there are enough of them to frighten any thinking citizen out of his wits.

Rangel  -- this year's lone sponsor of H.R. 5741 -- may,  but probably won't,  be booted for public  malfeasance beyond the tolerance of even his Capitol colleagues. He may leave voluntarily when the heat is turned up.  But even if he somehow departs,  the statist dream remains alive and well on the miasmic Potomac banks.

It may be that we are just one more economic implosion away from having universal serfdom start looking pretty good to the folks who want a chicken in the pot and the trains to run on time.

Adventure in Breakfast

I'm making a stuffed pepper for  breakfast* and needed only a half-can of diced tomatoes for the  filling. I dumped the other half into the blender  for  juice. Then my eye fell on a few leftover bacon slices from last night's snack. Hmmm. Tossed them  in.

I am here to tell you, friends and neighbors, that this is well worth doing, a sort of bacon and tomato sandwich in  glass. Next time I will see what happens if I add ice, the tiniest dribble of Tabasco, celery salt, and an adequate  measure of vodka.

--

*Because there's was a nice fresh one ready to pick, that's why.

The First Casualty

We should  always applaud the men and women who make it harder for governments to lie through  their teeth,  but I find no sympathetic characters in the leak of classified documents on the Afghanistan cluster up.

Assange and his whistle blowers seem to belong to that  gentle school of tender souls who want us all to believe that casualties are an unnecessary result of war.

They would think it peachy keen if  each SOF squad included a lawyer, a sociologist, a cultural anthropologist, and an ethicist in general practice to determine if our riflemen have a moral justification for shooting back.  Plus, of course,  Geraldo Rivera with a camera crew to make sure everyone is an honest as he is about what really happened in the firefight.

On the other hand, why is it immoral or unpatriotic for Americans to learn that our presumptive  ally, Pakistan, and our putative enemy, the Taliban, seem to be spending a good deal of time conspiring against us? Or that the government we are propping up with young American lives is studded with moral cretinism?

Does the American Republic fall dead of shock to learn that  its high military command is occasionally guilty of asinine  decisions?  Is there any chance at all that if political administratons leveled with their people that fewer idiocies would be committed in the peoples' name?

Pistol to my head and ordered to cheer one side or another, I guess it would be: "Go Wikileak."

(But, Mr. Assange, hire a good retired Marine Corps gunny to vet your releases and keep yourself from sounding quite so Disneyesque.)