| Dear Reader (here's my reaction to those of you who rushed to this parenthetical hoping to find something really clever), I don't want you to be alarmed, but I have found exclusive video of what you can expect when night falls on Day One of the Sequestergeddon. Obviously, if forced to choose, your humble correspondent will opt to stop typing in order to protect himself and his family from the C.H.U.Ds, who've apparently been kept at bay only by ever increasing borrowing from China. Now that the rate of increase in the growth of government is imperceptibly smaller, who knows how long it will be before all of us start eating human flesh and burning the great books for just a little warmth? Speaking of warmth, just this morning I told my daughter that all that hate was gonna burn her up. She looked up at me, shotgun in hand, and said, "But it keeps me warm, Daddy." I'd go on but basically all the really good apocalypse jokes were used up on Twitter by 6:00 a.m. When I looked at my iPhone this morning, I simply dropped to my knees and shouted "You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! Damn you all to Hell!" And then I resumed tweeting. The Bushian Sequestdammerung I've long said that asking "What if this was Bush?" is the lowest form of punditry. But A) What is the G-File for if not to indulge from time to time in the lowest forms of punditry? 2) Wouldn't an even lower form of punditry involve smoking crack while writing barely literate observations on a bathroom wall? III.) Wouldn't an even lower form of punditry involve singing the praises of a corrupt murderous regime over and over and over again with no originality or moral awareness? iv.) Yes, that was a reference to Tom Friedman. (I guess literally the lowest form of punditry would involve offering a soundbite about, say, filibuster reform while floating in the Dead Sea or submerged at the bottom of the Marianas Trench -- in a really deep voice.) I'm getting the feeling that I've gotten off track. Oh right, "What if this was Bush?" I don't think it's the lowest form of punditry to ask this question because it's a bad question. I think it's the lowest form of punditry because it's such an obvious question you don't need a fancy-pants degree in punditry to ask it. Any remotely sane person ("I guess that leaves you out" -- The Couch) can see the double standard for Obama. Even most liberals see the double standard, they just think Obama deserves a different standard because the god-who-golfs-with-creased-pants (his Elizabeth Warren name, by the way) is so frick'n awesome. But just imagine if Bush -- or any Republican -- insisted that the sequester would have devastating results for the American people and then promised to veto any bill that let him diminish the harm if it didn't include tax cuts? How MEOW Now? Many readers may recall that "i" comes before "e" except after "c." But that's not important right now. Many readers of my oeuvre might recall that I believe that the fundamental ethos (come to think of it, I think heard The Fundamental Ethos open for the Indigo Girls in '97) of liberalism is the Moral Equivalent of War (MEOW for short). Conceived by William James, the idea is that liberals crave something that gets everyone to drop what they're doing and fall in line the way war does, but without the war. The New Deal was explicitly and proudly touted as a moral-equivalent-of-war endeavor. So were the New Frontier, the Great Society, the War on Poverty, and vast swaths of the environmental movement. Obama has spent much of his presidency trying to gin up a moral-equivalent-of-war atmosphere in America. Personally, I find most of it pathetic and disgusting, as when he said in a State of the Union Address that America needed to become more like the military: "At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They're not consumed with personal ambition. They don't obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach." Later he went on to say we should follow the example of SEAL Team Six. They "only succeeded . . . because every single member of that unit did their job. . . . More than that, the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other -- because you can't charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there's somebody behind you, watching your back. So it is with America. This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other's backs." Among the myriad problems with this sort of thinking is that it confuses the fundamental reason we have a military in the first place. We have a military so Americans don't have to live militaristically -- i.e., take orders, march in step, etc. We rely on the collective endeavor known as the military so that the rest of us can enjoy our individual endeavors. That is what the pursuit of happiness is about. We do not have a military so it can provide a good example of how we can more productively abandon our freedoms. (In a related peeve, I absolutely hate it when civilians refer to Obama, or any president, as "our" commander-in-chief. No, he's the commander-in-chief of the military, but he's our president. The commander-in-chief gets to command the military; he doesn't get to command the rest of us, because we are neither his soldiers nor his subjects. It's a huge category error.) Anyway, the interesting thing about the sequester is how it exposes the shallowness of his moral-equivalent-of-war rhetoric (or, if you prefer, his equally ridiculous elision of "community" or "family" with "government"). When military units have a hardship, they make do. When communities come up short of money, everyone pitches in. When families fall on bad times, they make sacrifices. But what none of them do is make things as bad as possible just to prove a point. A commanding officer facing the equivalent of a 2 percent -- or 20 percent -- budget cut doesn't go straight to confiscating everyone's rifles right before a battle. A real community doesn't close the fire department first. If Lowry finally had his way and cut my pay in half, my first response wouldn't be to stop buying food for my kid, medicine for my dog, or brown liquor for me. Obama's approach to the sequester is the exact opposite of a real moral equivalent of war, where everybody makes necessary sacrifices for the greater good. Obama wants unnecessary sacrifices in order to punish his political enemies, and, in the process, demonize them. Various & Sundry Okay, this was a pretty sparse G-File today, but in my defense I had too much to drink last night. It was at the party celebrating Rich Lowry's 15th year at the helm of National Review and Bob Costa's new gig as the Washington Editor of NR. I'm still going through the kaboodles of e-mail from you guys about technology and culture. It's great stuff. Thank you. In the meantime, here's my column on CPAC, Chris Christie, and the gays. One response I've already heard a lot is that CPAC should be allowed to stand on principle. I agree. No one is saying otherwise. But just as they are free to do what they want, so am I. As for them standing on principle, I'm all for that, too. But there are many principles in play here. Choosing, say, the principle of zero tolerance for groups that support gay marriage means violating the principle of free and open debate. A big part of the problem is the way CPAC has gotten itself stuck in a bind of equating tolerance for endorsement. Thanks again for all the suggestions for technology and culture. I'm still working through them all. I'd planned to discuss it all more at length here, but things got away from me. Anyway, as I've been saying for quite some time, we can't let the Brits beat us in the race to enumerate our cat populations. But seriously, don't try to run a census on dogs. They're armed. By which I mean we should all see ourselves as zombies. Because, as we all know, narcissists have bigger signatures. Everything you need to know about napping. This is a pretty awesome compilation of real, Onionlike, headlines. Speaking of awesome. | 
Megyn Kelly -> Pete Hegseth responds to 2017 rape accusation. 🔥 vol. 3, issue 13 | December 6, 2024 Quick Hits All the news you need in...
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