Mark Steyn's Blog, page 54

Planless Dems

Earlier this month, Moody’s downgraded Irish government debt to junk. Which left the Irish somewhat peeved. The Department of Finance pointed out that it had met all the “quantitative fiscal targets” imposed by the European Union, and the National Treasury Management Agency said that Ireland was sufficiently flush “to cover all its financing requirements until the end of 2013.”

Which is more than the government of the United States can say.

#ad# That’s not the only difference between the auld sod and America. In Europe, austerity is in the air, and in the headlines: “Italy Fast-Tracks Austerity Vote.” “Greek Minister Urges Austerity Consensus.” “Portugal to Speed Austerity Measures.” “Even Queen Faces Funding Squeeze in Austerity Britain.” The word has become so instantly ubiquitous that leftie deadbeats are already opposed to it: “Austerity Protest Takes Place in Dublin.” For the rentamob types, “austerity” is to this decade what “Bush” and “Iraq War” were to the last. It can’t be long before grizzled old rockers are organizing some all-star Rock against Austerity gala.

By contrast, nobody seems minded to “speed austerity measures” over here. The word isn’t part of the conversation -- even though we’re broke on a scale way beyond what Ireland or Portugal could ever dream of. The entire Western world is operating on an unsustainable business model: If it were Borders or Blockbuster, it would be hoping to close the Greek and Portuguese branches but maybe hold on to the Norwegian one. In hard reality, like Borders only the other day, it would probably wind up shuttering them all. The problem is structural: Not enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. Developed nations have 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees, and then wonder why the shrunken rump of a “working” population in between can’t make the math add up.

By the way, demographically speaking, these categories -- “adolescents” and “retirees” -- are an invention of our own time: They didn’t exist a century ago. You were a kid till 13 or so. Then you worked. Then you died. As Obama made plain in his threat to Gran’ma last week that the August checks might not go out, funding non-productivity is now the principal purpose of the modern state. Good luck with that at a time when every appliance in your home is manufactured in Asia.

As I said, these are structural problems. In theory, they can be fixed. But, when you look at the nature of them, you’ve got to wonder whether they ever will be this side of societal collapse. Blockbuster went bankrupt because it was wedded to a 1980s technology and distribution system. In government, being merely a quarter-century obsolete would be a major achievement. The ruling party in Washington is wedded to the principle that an 80-year-old social program is inviolable: That’s like Blockbuster insisting in 2011 that there’s no problem with its business model for rentals of silent movies with live orchestral accompaniment. To be sure, there are some problems parking the musicians’ bus in residential streets, but nothing that can’t be worked out.

But “political reality” operates to different rules from humdrum real reality. Thus, the “debt ceiling” debate is regarded by most Democrats and a fair few Republicans as some sort of ghastly social faux pas by boorish conservatives: Why, everyone knows ye olde debt-limit vote is merely a bit of traditional ceremonial, like the Lord Chancellor walking backwards with the Cap of Maintenance and Black Rod shouting “Hats off, strangers!” at Britain’s Opening of Parliament. You hit the debt ceiling, you jack it up a couple trillion, and life goes on -- or so it did until these GOP yahoos came along and decided to treat the vote as if it actually meant something.

Obama has done his best to pretend to take them seriously. He claimed to have a $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan. The court eunuchs of the press corps were impressed, and went off to file pieces hailing the president as “the grown-up in the room.” There is, in fact, no plan. No plan at all. No plan whatsoever, either for a deficit reduction of $4 trillion or $4.73. As is the way in Washington, merely announcing that he had a plan absolved him of the need to have one. So the president’s staff got out the extra-wide teleprompter and wrote a really large number on it, and simply by reading out the really large number the president was deemed to have produced a serious blueprint for trillions of dollars in savings. For his next trick, he’ll walk out on to the stage of Carnegie Hall, announce that he’s going to play Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 2, and, even though there’s no cello in sight and Obama immediately climbs back in his golf cart to head for the links, music critics will hail it as one of the most moving performances they’ve ever heard.

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The only “plan” Barack Obama has put on paper is his February budget. Were there trillions and trillions of savings in that? Er, no. It increased spending and doubled the federal debt.

How about Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader? Has he got a plan? No. The Democrat Senate has shown no interest in producing a budget for two-and-a-half years. Unlike the president, Senator Reid can’t even be bothered pretending he’s interested in spending reductions. But he is interested in spending, and, if that’s your bag, boring things like budgets only get in the way.

#ad# It seems reasonable to conclude from the planlessness and budgetlessness of the Obama/Reid Democrats that their only plan is to carry on spending without limit. Otherwise, someone somewhere would surely have written something down on a piece of paper by now. But no, apparently the Department of Writing Down Plans is the only federal expense the president is willing to cut. You begin to see why the Europeans are a little miffed. They’re passing austerity budgets so austere they’ve spawned an instant anti-austerity movement rioting in the street -- and yet they’re still getting downgraded by the ratings agencies. In Washington, by contrast, the ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more -- and nobody’s downgrading them.

Well, don’t worry. It’s coming. The domestic media coverage of this story has been almost laughably fraudulent: To the court eunuchs, a failure to raise the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion would signal to the world that American government was embarrassingly dysfunctional. In reality, raising the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion without any spending cuts would confirm to the world that American government is terminally dysfunctional.

In the debt-ridden treasuries of Europe, they’re talking “austerity.” In the debt-ridden treasury of Washington, they’re talking about more spending (Kathleen Sebelius is touting new women’s health programs to be made available “without cost.”) At the risk (in Samuel Johnson’s words) of settling the precedence between a louse and a flea, I think Europe’s political discourse is marginally less deranged than ours. The president is said to be “the adult in the room” because he is reported to be in favor of raising the age of Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.

By the year 2036.

If that’s the best offer, there isn’t going to be a 2036, not for America. As the Europeans are beginning to grasp, eventually “political reality” collides with real reality. The message from a delusional Washington these last weeks is that it won’t be a gentle bump.

--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2011 Mark Steyn.

The T Word

One of the depressing features of the Republican Party is the way they get suckered time and again into playing on Democrats' terms. The pathetic spectacle of grown men and women sitting around in meetings trying to agree "grand bargains" to save $43.7 bazillion in federal spending by 2023 before an allegedly looming deadline of August 2nd is almost too perfect a snapshot of Washington stupidity.

The rest of the world isn't looking for a grand bargain by August 2nd. And it knows enough about the decadent state of US law-making to know that any such bargain would be voted through unread and begin to unravel by sun up on the 3rd. And getting Republicans to explain that not to worry, they're not pushing seniors off the cliff immediately - that existing grampas will be grandfathered in - is a way to make the whole debt debate toxic. If we have to pretend that August 2nd is any kind of deadline, why don't we simplify matters?

Here's a newspaper headline from a yellowing cutting I found up in the attic:

U.S. Budget Deficit Hits Record $438 Billion For Year

Boy, those were the days! Flappers in rumble seats, wind-up victrolas, and deficits you could measure in billions. A more innocent age, lost in the mists of time. Gosh, you'd have to be pushing, oh, 12 even to remember it.

$438 billion was the record-breaking federal deficit in 2008. That's all of three years ago. In 2011, it's getting on for four times as big. What's that got to do with anything happening in 2023?

Obama did that. The Democrats did that. "Trillion" is their word. They mainstreamed it, and very effectively, in nothing flat. But it's not a fact of life. It's a fact of their life, and they should be on the defensive about it. What do we have to show for the trillionization of government? The dead-parrot economy, the underwater property market, the flatline jobs market. But lots more bureaucracy and regulation.

Obama wants to demonize "millionaires"? Who's he kidding? He and Harry Reid and Barney Frank are the first trillionaire politicians in American history, and they want us to accept that as the new baseline. Getting Republicans to sit around concocting meaningless plans for a decade hence is a good way to do it.

Gang of Six Bag of Tricks

Americans who care about the solvency of this nation ought to be seriously annoyed at the contempt for them shown by the Gang of Six "plan," which even by the standards of "bipartisan" deal-making is a total joke.

Even if you take seriously their figure of $3.7 trillion in savings over ten years, that represents a clawback across a decade of about two years of current deficits.

If you take Jeff Sessions's figure of $1.2 trillion in savings over ten years as being closer to the mark, that takes a decade to reverse about three-quarters of the 2011 deficit.

Neither of these numbers is sufficient. Both lead to national suicide.

If you take the Gang's figure of half-a-trillion dollars in immediate "aggressive deficit reduction" seriously, that represents about what the U.S. government borrows every four months. What's "aggressive" about that? And what's immediate about it? It's all unspecified "discretionary spending caps" and "process reforms" that will collapse like soufflés ten minutes after the signing ceremony. Obviously it's appealing to Democrats: It accepts their view that 25 percent of GDP should be the new baseline for national ("federal" no longer seems quite the word) government spending. But what's in it for Republicans?

We are sending a consistent message to the world that the political structures of the United States do not allow for meaningful course correction. That does far more damage to the "full faith and credit" of America than failing to hike the debt ceiling.

Dorothy

As Andrew says, there's a danger in reducing the dear departed to a handful of adjectives. I didn't know Dorothy as well as he and others below did, but, aside from all the "kinds" and "sweets", I'd like to say I always found her rather glamorous and tremendous fun. She was very considerate to me in the early days of my association with NR. I didn't know a lot of people in the US political commentariat back then and I was always very cheered, upon entering a roomful of total strangers, to see Dorothy beetling toward me - if somewhat mystified as to what I'd done to warrant the honor. She was grand company, and I shall miss her.  

The Great Charade

There is something surreal and unnerving about the so-called “debt ceiling” negotiations staggering on in Washington. In the real world, negotiations on an increase in one’s debt limit are conducted between the borrower and the lender. Only in Washington is a debt increase negotiated between two groups of borrowers.

Actually, it’s more accurate to call them two groups of spenders. On the one side are Obama and the Democrats, who in a negotiation supposedly intended to reduce American indebtedness are (surprise!) proposing massive increasing in spending (an extra $33 billion for Pell Grants, for example). The Democrat position is: You guys always complain that we spend spend spend like there’s (what’s the phrase again?) no tomorrow, so be grateful that we’re now proposing to spend spend spend spend like there’s no this evening.

#ad# On the other side are the Republicans, who are the closest anybody gets to representing, albeit somewhat tentatively and less than fullthroatedly, the actual borrowers -- that’s to say, you and your children and grandchildren. But in essence the spenders are negotiating among themselves how much debt they’re going to burden you with. It’s like you and your missus announcing you’ve set your new credit limit at $1.3 million, and then telling the bank to send demands for repayment to Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s kindergartner next door.

Nothing good is going to come from these ludicrously protracted negotiations over laughably meaningless accounting sleights-of-hand scheduled to kick in circa 2020. All the charade does is confirm to prudent analysts around the world that the depraved ruling class of the United States cannot self-correct, and, indeed, has no desire to.

When the 44th president took office, he made a decision that it was time for the already unsustainable levels of government spending finally to break the bounds of reality and frolic and gambol in the magical fairy kingdom of Spendaholica: This year, the federal government borrows 43 cents of every dollar it spends, a ratio that is unprecedented. Barack Obama would like this to be, as they say, “the new normal” -- at least until that 43 cents creeps up a nickel or so, and the United States government is spending twice as much as it takes in, year in, year out, now and forever. If the Republicans refuse to go along with that, well, then the negotiations will collapse and, as he told Scott Pelley on CBS the other night, Gran’ma gets it. That monthly Social Security check? Fuhgeddabouddit. “I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven’t resolved this issue,” declared the president. “Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.”

But hang on. I thought the Social Security checks came out of the famous “Social Security trust fund,” whose “trustees” assure us there’s currently $2.6 trillion in there. Which should be enough for the August 3rd check run, shouldn’t it? Golly, to listen to the president, you’d almost get the impression that, by the time you saw the padlock off the old Social Security lockbox, there’s nothing in there but a yellowing IOU and a couple of moths. Indeed, to listen to Obama, one might easily conclude that the whole rotten, stinking edifice of federal government is an accounting trick. And that can’t possibly be so, can it?

For the Most Gifted Orator in Human History, the president these days speaks largely in clichés, most of which he doesn’t seem to be quite on top of. “Eric, don’t call my bluff,” he sternly reprimanded the GOP’s Eric Cantor. Usually, if you’re bluffing, the trick is not to announce it upfront. But, in fact, in his threat to have Granny eating dog food by Labor Day, Obama was calling his own bluff. The giant bluff against the future that is government spending.

How many of “the wealthy” do you require to cover a one-and-a-half trillion-dollar shortfall every single year? When you need this big a fix, there aren’t enough people to stick it to. “We are not broke,” insists Van Jones, Obama’s former “green jobs” czar and bespoke Communist. “We were robbed, we were robbed. And somebody has our money!”

The somebody who has our money is the government. They waste it on self-aggrandizing ideologue nitwits like Van Jones and his “green jobs” racket. How’s the “green jobs” scene in your town? Going gangbusters, is it? Every day these guys burn through so much that they can never bridge the gap. By that, I don’t mean that an American government that raises $2 trillion but spends $4 trillion has outspent America, but that it’s outspent the planet. In my soon to be imminently forthcoming book, I discuss a study published last year by John Kitchen of the U.S. Treasury and Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin. Its very title is a testament to where we’re headed:

“Financing U.S. Debt: Is There Enough Money In The World -- And At What Cost?”

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The authors’ answer is yes, technically, there is enough money in the world -- in the sense that, on current projections, by 2020 all it will take to finance the government of the United States is for the rest of the planet to be willing to sink 19 percent of its GDP into U.S. Treasury debt. Which Kitchen and Chinn say is technically doable. Yeah. In the same sense that me dating Scarlett Johansson is technically doable.

Unfortunately, neither Scarlett nor the rest of the planet is willing to do it. It’s not 2020 and we’re not yet asking the rest of the planet for a fifth of its GDP. But already the world is imposing its own debt ceiling. Most of the debt issued by the Treasury so far this year has been borrowed from the Federal Reserve. That adds another absurd wrinkle to the D.C. charade: Washington is negotiating with itself over how much money to lend itself.

#ad# Meanwhile, the World’s Greatest Orator bemoans the “intransigence” of Republicans. Okay, what’s your plan? Give us one actual program you’re willing to cut, right now. Oh, don’t worry, says Barack Obluffer. To demonstrate how serious he is, he’s offered to put on the table for fiscal year 2012 spending cuts of (stand well back now) $2 billion. That would be a lot in, say, Iceland or even Australia. Once upon a time it would have been a lot even in Washington. But today $2 billion is what the Brokest Nation in History borrows every ten hours. In other words, in less time than he spends sitting across the table negotiating his $2 billion cut, he’s already borrowed it all back. A negotiation with Obama is literally not worth the time.

In order to fund Obamacare and the other opiates of Big Government dependency, the feds need to take 25 percent of GDP, now and forever: The “new normal.” It can’t be done. Look around you. The new normal’s already here: flatline jobs market, negative equity, the dead-parrot economy. What comes next will be profoundly abnormal. His name was Obamandias, King of Kings. Look upon his works, ye mighty, and despair. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.

Do they still teach Shelley in high school? Or just the “diversity manual” about “social justice” the Omaha Public Schools paid for with $130,000 of “stimulus” funding?

--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2011 Mark Steyn.

The Song is Ended, But the Malady Lingers On

From Scandinavia, one small step for Roger Tullgren, one almighty leap for the entitlement state:

A Swedish heavy metal fan has had his musical preferences officially classified as a disability. The results of a psychological analysis enable the metal lover to supplement his income with state benefits...

"I have been trying for ten years to get this classified as a handicap," Tullgren told The Local."I spoke to three psychologists and they finally agreed that I needed this to avoid being discriminated against."

Roger Tullgren first developed an interest in heavy metal when his older brother came home with a Black Sabbath album in 1971. Since then little else has mattered for the 42-year-old, who has long black hair, a collection of tattoos and wears skull and crossbones jewelry.

Great. So, if long hair and tattoos are a disability, we're going to need a lot more handicapped parking spaces. . .

"I signed a form saying: 'Roger feels compelled to show his heavy metal style. This puts him in a difficult situation on the labour market. Therefore he needs extra financial help'. So now I can turn up at a job interview dressed in my normal clothes and just hand the interviewers this piece of paper," he said.

After reading Laura Ingraham's piece yesterday, I'm not averse to the notion that an enthusiasm for contemporary pop culture is a form of mental illness, but it sounds pricey. Even the Swedes are wary: 

Henrietta Stein, deputy employment director for the Skåne region, is also puzzled by the move; "an interest in music" is not usually sufficient to qualify for wage benefits.

And is it only an interest in heavy metal? I mean, if, say, a nice blue-rinsed old lady can't hold down a job because she's an Andy Williams fan and keeps bunking off to Branson every other week, does that qualify? What about Jay? Those first nights at the Met seem to cut into his NR duties. Or is opera operable?

Tahrir Square Comes to Fleet Street

The New York Times has shown an inordinate interest in the demise of Britain's News Of The World, a newspaper 99.99 per cent of Times readers have never read and I'd wager a majority had never heard of until a week ago. By contrast, the paper appears to have absolutely no interest in, say, the use of stimulus funds to murder a US Border Patrol agent. One understands, of course, that the Times is rattled by Rupert Murdoch's revitalization of The Wall Street Journal as a broadsheet with appeal to more than merely the financial world, and so it is in the paper's interest to pile on Mr Murdoch. But, even so, this is ridiculous:

In truth, a kind of British Spring is under way, now that the News Corporation’s tidy system of punishment and reward has crumbled. Members of Parliament, no longer fearful of retribution in Mr. Murdoch’s tabloids, are speaking their minds and giving voice to the anger of their constituents. Meanwhile, social media has roamed wild and free across the story, punching a hole in the tiny clubhouse that had been running the country. Democracy, aided by sunlight, has broken out in Britain.

"British Spring" as in Arab Spring? Ruthless tyrant Rupsi Murdaroch forced into exile at Sharm al-Sheila back in Oz? British MPs, no longer "fearful of retribution", are transformed overnight: Yesterday, they were Claude Rains in Mr Smith Goes To Washington, corrupt toadies doing the bidding of Boss Murdoch. Today, they're getting in touch with their inner Jimmy Stewart.

I would say that, as with the Arab Spring, the British Spring can more or less be guaranteed to turn out the opposite of the Times' sunny predictions. On the whole, I prefer an unrespectable reptilian press sticking its foot in the grieving widow's doorway to, say, a media of portentous over-credentialed unreadable drones with no greater ambition than to serves as court eunuchs to the Obama Administration. If The National Enquirer operated to the high-minded standards of The New York Times, John Edwards might now be Vice-President or Attorney-General. If Murdoch's tabloids "destroy lives", as the Times airily claims, they're at least equal-opportunity destroyers, as willing to plaster a Tory rent-boy over the front page as a Labour one.

By contrast, The New York Times happily colluded in the destruction of the Duke lacrosse players' lives for no reason other than ideological predisposition to a politically correct narrative. I would say that, whether through malice or intellectual torpor, that kind of bias is far more damaging to public discourse. And it's the one Britain's likely to end up with more of if the Times' kindred spirits in London get their way. The actor (and phone-hacking target) Hugh Grant has become, somewhat improbably, a spokesperson for the anti-Murdoch forces. Here's what he said on the BBC:

I’m not for regulating the proper press, the broadsheet press. But we need regulation of the tabloid press.

Ah, right. The papers you read are fine. It's the papers those ghastly oiks read that need regulating because the great unwashed can't be trusted to evaluate this stuff properly anymore that they can be trusted to buy their own light bulbs.

Does Hugh Grant's statement sound like any credo of democracy? Or does it sound more like a smug, patrician elite that would find things more convenient if it could only narrow the parameters of public discourse? "A tiny clubhouse running the country", in the Times' words. And they should know.

Worse and Worser

There is a lot of truth to this:

All Dems want is more taxing and spending. It's who they are. Year in, year out, their response to finding us in a hole is to keep digging.

The Obama Administration spent a trillion dollars of your money on a "stimulus" that stimulated nothing but government, debt, and long-term unemployment. Yet their response is to "keep digging." The problem is Obama made things worse. His solution is to make them worser. The only thing he needs the Republicans for is to provide bipartisan cover for the worseness. Or as the Iranians put it a few years back:

Iran will resume uranium enrichment if the European Union does not recognize its right to do so, two Iranian nuclear negotiators said in an interview published Tuesday.

If you don't let us go nuclear, we'll carry on going nuclear. That's basically the Democrat negotiating position on spending.

Light motif

I think we ought to be harder when minor functionaries of a failed leviathan reveal themselves to have a defective understanding of the role of government in free societies. Steven Chu, the Energy Secretary who came into office saying "we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe", has now offered up another soundbite for our times. On Friday, he defended the ban on Edison's iconic incandescent in economic terms:

We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.

So what? I waste my own money on all kinds of things. If I wanted Steven Chu to have a say in it, I'd get Parson Bloomberg to marry us at Gracie Mansion.

More to the point, I wonder if Secretary Chu has any idea how stupid this argument sounds from an administration that has wasted more of other people's money than anybody else on the planet. Secretary Chu and his colleagues took a trillion dollars of "stimulus" and, for all the stimulating it did, might as well have given it in large bills to Charlie Sheen to snort coke off his hookers' bellies with. (In my weekend column, I touch on only the most lurid and outrageous of the government's many smart investment decisions: its use of stimulus dollars to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry.)

The media are loyally doing their best for the Flatline Administration by insisting that the dead parrot economy is not deceased but merely resting for an "unexpectedly" longer period of time than had been expected. Nevertheless, having nothing to show for blowing a trillion dollars of other people's money does at least make the point in a fairly spectacular way: the distinguishing feature of the west at twilight from Sacramento to Albany to Brussells to Athens is the failure of the Chu class - the People Who Know What's Best For Us. Technocracy is a delusion, and for some developed nations it may yet prove a fatal one. There's a limit to the amount of damage I can do wasting my own money. There are no limits to the damage Chu & Co can do wasting my money. Maybe they should give up the car keys first. 

(By the way, I'm looking for a Presidential candidate who'll pledge to abolish Secretary Chu's Department of Energy, if only on misrepresentation grounds: They've spent their entire three-and-a-half-decade existence as the Department for Obstructing Energy.)

Selective Shaming

Something rather weird happened in London last week. For some time, the Guardian, a liberal, broadsheet, “respectable” newspaper, has been hammering the News of the World, a populist, tabloid, low-life newspaper, over its employees’ penchant for “hacking” the phones of royals and celebrities -- Prince Harry and Hugh Grant, for example. This isn’t as forensic as it sounds: Until recently, most British cellphones were sold with the default password set to either 0000 or 1234, and most customers never bothered to change it.

But last Monday it emerged that the News of the World had also hacked into the telephone of a missing schoolgirl subsequently found dead, as well as those of family members of the July 7 Tube bombing victims and of British servicemen killed in Afghanistan. Nobody much cares if the Aussie supermodel Elle Macpherson and other denizens of the demimonde get their voicemails intercepted, but dead schoolgirls and soldiers changed the nature of the story, and events moved swiftly. On Thursday, Rupert Murdoch’s son and heir announced the entire newspaper would be closed down. The whole thing. Gone.

#ad# The News of the World wasn’t any old fish-wrap. Founded in 1843, it was by the mid–20th century the most-read newspaper in the English-speaking world, selling 9 million copies a week. Even in today’s emaciated market, every week more than 2.6 million Britons bought News of the Screws (as it was affectionately known). Last Sunday, it was the biggest-selling newspaper in the United Kingdom and Europe. This Sunday, it’s history. To put it in American terms, consider those George Soros–funded websites claiming they pressured Fox into “firing” Glenn Beck. This is the equivalent of pressuring Mr. Murdoch into closing down the entire Fox News network.

I confess to feeling a little queasy at the sight of bien pensant liberal opinion gloating at having deprived 4 million people of their preferred reading matter. If one were so inclined, one might be heartened by the swift responsiveness to pressure of the allegedly all-powerful bogeyman Murdoch. But you can’t help but notice that this supposed public shaming is awfully selective. In the week of the News of the World revelations, it was reported that the Atlanta Public Schools system has spent the last decade systemically cheating on its tests. Not the students, but the superintendent, and the union, and 38 principals, and at least 178 teachers -- whoops, pardon me, “educators” -- and some 44 of the 56 school districts. Teachers held “changing parties” at their homes at which they sat around with extra supplies of erasers correcting their students’ test answers in order to improve overall scores and qualify for “No Child Left Behind” federal funding that could be sluiced into maintaining their lavish remuneration. Let’s face it, it’s easier than teaching, right?

The APS Human Resources honcho Millicent Few illegally had an early report into test-tampering destroyed. So APS not only got the federal gravy but was also held up to the nation at large as a heartwarming, inspirational example of how large urban school districts can reform themselves and improve educational opportunities for their children. And its fake test scores got its leader, Beverly Hall, garlanded with the National Superintendent of the Year Award, the Administrator of the Year Award, the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Keystone Award for Leadership in Education, the Concerned Black Clergy Education Award, the American Association of School Administrators Effie H. Jones Humanitarian Award, and a zillion other phony-baloney baubles with which the American edu-fraud cartel scratches its own back.

In reality, Beverly Hall’s Atlanta Public Schools system was in the child-abuse business: It violated the education of its students in order to improve its employees’ cozy sinecures. The whole rotten, stinking school system is systemically corrupt from the superintendent down. But what are the chances of APS being closed down? How many of those fraudulent non-teachers will waft on within the system until their lucrative retirements?

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Or consider “Operation Fast and Furious,” about which nothing is happening terribly fast and over which Americans should be furious. The official explanation is that the federal government used stimulus funding to buy guns from Arizona gun shops for known criminals to funnel to Mexican drug cartels. As I said, that’s the official explanation: As soon as your head stops spinning, we’ll resume the narrative. Supposedly, United States taxpayers were picking up the tab for Mexican drug lords’ weaponry in order that the ATF could identify high-up gun-traffickers. But, as it turns out, these high-up gun-traffickers were already known to other agencies -- FBI, DEA, and other big-spending acronyms in the great fetid ooze of federal alphabet soup in which this republic is drowning. And, indeed, some of those high-ups are said to have been paid informants for those various federal agencies. So, in case you’re wondering why Obama’s second annual Recovery Summer is a wee bit sluggish at your end, relax: Stimulus dollars went to fund one federal agency to buy guns for the paid informants of another federal agency to funnel to foreign criminals in order that the first federal agency might identify the paid informants of the second federal agency.

#ad# Meanwhile, what did the drug cartels, the recipients of the guns, do with them? Well, they used them to kill at least one member of a third federal agency: Brian Terry of the United States Border Patrol. If that doesn’t bother you, well, they also killed not insignificant numbers of Mexican civilians. If, by this stage, you’re wondering why U.S. stimulus dollars are being used to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry, consider the dark suspicion of many American gun owners -- that the real reason the feds embarked on this murderous scheme was to plant the evidence that the increasing lawlessness on the southern border is the fault of the gun industry and the Second Amendment, and thereby advance its ideological agenda of ever greater gun control.

We’re not talking about hacking a schoolgirl’s cellphone here. Real people are dead. Yet nobody’s going to close down any wing of the vast spendaholic DEATFBI hydra-headed security-state turf-war. And while Eric Holder, the buccaneering attorney general at the center of this wilderness of mirrors, doesn’t yet have as many Distinguished Public Servant of the Year awards as Beverly Hall, judging from his cheerfully upfront obstruction of the congressional investigation, he’s not planning on going anywhere soon.

So, at the News of the World, every single employee is clearing out his desk. But, at the Atlantic Public Schools, at the DEATFBI, life goes on. A curious contrast. The striking feature of Big Government, from Athens to Sacramento, is its imperviousness to any kind of accountability -- legal, fiscal, electoral, popular. A media mogul, a bank chairman, an oil executive, a corporate-jet depreciation-claimant are easily demonizable: As President Obama cautioned CEOs a couple of years back, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

More fool us. Our pitchforks are misdirected.   

--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is author of America Alone. © 2011 Mark Steyn.