Mark Steyn's Blog, page 55

Re: Moody's Blues

Andrew, that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard column had a bunch of important points packed into a short space, not least the notion that nation-states that are members of a multinational currency union should as a rule have a lower credit rating than those with their own currencies. And he's certainly right that all you need to know about rating agencies is that in May 2010 Moody's still rated Greece triple-A.

But it's fascinating to see the Eurocrats' barely veiled threats and outrage at the Big Three raters' essentially post-facto gestures toward a realignment with sanity. As with the ECB's decision to jettison the minimum credit-rating threshold for Portugal, as with the US Treasury's not so subtle hints that Obama can raise the debt ceiling all on his own, the technocrats who manage the western economy seem to have concluded that, if only they're institutionally assertive enough, they can define their own reality. That doesn't seem likely to end well. 

Re: The Credentialed Society

I agree with you, Michael. Americans currently have over a trillion dollars' worth of college debt. They've managed to spend half an entire G7 economy (Britain's or France's) not on debt in general but merely on one bizarrely fetishized niche market of debt. For what? Passing a leisurely half-decade toying with a mélange of pseudo-disciplines is a very expensive way to acquire a piece of paper assuring US businesses you're safe for white-collar employment.

The "education" system is one of the biggest structural deformities in America today. It leads to later workforce participation and later family formation, both of which factor into our existentially catastrophic entitlement liabilities. And yet Obama wants every American child to go to college. What sort of "education" do you think they'll be getting once that happens? And what value do you think that sheepskin will hold in the wider world?

The justification for this absurd prolongation of adolescence is that it opens up opportunities for the disadvantaged. But credential-fetishization has the opposite effect. Remember Ronald Reagan, alumnus of Eureka College, Illinois? Since then, for the first time in its history, America has lived under continuous rule by Ivy League - Yale (Bush I), Yale Law (Clinton), Harvard Business (Bush II), Harvard Law (Obama). In 2009, over a quarter of Obama’s political appointees had ties to Harvard; over 90 per cent had “advanced degrees”. How's that working out for you? In my soon to be imminently forthcomingly imminent book, I point out that once upon a time America was the land where guys without degrees (Truman) or only 18 months of formal education (Lincoln) or no schooling at all (Zachary Taylor) could become president. Credentialization is shrinking what was America's advantage - a far greater social mobility than Europe. We're decaying into a society where 40 per cent of the population do minimal-skill service jobs and the rest run up a trillion dollars of debt in order to avoid that fate, and ne'er the twain shall meet, except for perfunctory social pleasantries in the drive-thru lane.

We're looking at education upside down: We should be telescoping it, not extending it.

Full disclosure: I am myself an "uneducated former disc-jockey", in the words of (drumroll, please) Johann Hari. 

Liberty and Loss

I'm afraid my Fourth of July column this year casts a bit of a damper on the fireworks. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of Obama's speech last week was one so obvious it was barely remarked upon. As spokesperson for the spendaholic class, the President essentially told the world: Nothing's gonna change. We're gonna spend spend spend the republic into the abyss.

In my soon to be imminently forthcoming book, I quote one of the most poignant lines from the Declaration of Independence, one that never made it into the final text – Thomas Jefferson’s parting words to his fellow British subjects across the seas: “We might have been a free and great people together.” There is a sense both of regret at the separation yet also of its inevitability. Today America is divided between those who see no problem with a bloated, wasteful four-trillion-bucks-a-year behemoth, and those who understand it’s killing the country. A betting man might wonder how long this “free and great people” will wish to remain “together”, especially when the spendaholics' policies seem consciously designed to fracture the citizenry: The old vs the young, the latter crippled by debt run up by the former. Government union workers vs a beleaguered small-business class, working till it dies to pay for the lavish pensions of those who retire in their 50s. Poor Hispanics vs poor whites, both chasing jobs that no longer exist. Young Hispanics vs old whites: 83 per cent of Medicare beneficiaries are white; 70 per cent of births in Dallas' biggest hospital are Hispanic. In a post-prosperity America, that would seem an unlikely recipe for social tranquility. Feckless bankrupt states like California vs comparatively prudent, solvent states like New Hampshire: How many of the non-spendaholic jurisdictions are prepared to pick up the tab for Sacramento, Albany and the rest for the privilege of keeping 50 stars in Old Glory?

This is not an age favorable to big, centralized entities that outlive their raison d'être - ask the Soviets and the Yugoslavs. I wonder if a 21st century Jefferson will have cause to modify the original's farewell to his compatriots: "We might have stayed a free and great people together."

Not the happiest thought but Happy Independence Day nevertheless. And enjoy it while you can.

The Kahnback Kid

Andrew, if l'affaire Strauss-Kahn continues to develop in the way it's been doing in the last couple of days, we may be in for a remarkable denouement. Throughout the story, even before the maid's account began unraveling, French public opinion has been overwhelmingly supportive of DSK -- to the point that Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, professed mystification as to why the sophisticated Continental statists he and his readers admire so much were not "ideologically empathetic to an African hotel maid." Any man who could write that sentence will have difficulty, as I wager Mr. Keller will, in understanding why Bernard-Henri Lévy regards the argument as repugnantly Dreyfussian.

As I say, Dominque's numbers were boffo when the empathetic African maid was credible. If she's not, they're only going to go up. Sarko, on the other hand, is in the doldrums poll-wise, and you'd have to be an optimist to figure there's anything in the Euro-economic offing this next year to perk him up. Some polls show him being beaten by Marine Le Pen, the new gal strongman of the Front National. If that trend continues, the French left will want their strongest candidate back in the game. Suppose the maid's story is a crock, or it was consensual, or she was turning tricks (as some reports suggest): None of these versions would disqualify a man from public office in France, and in this case, after Gallic revulsion at what they regard as a grotesque New York judicial circus, they'd probably be a plus.

So in a year or so's time the president of France could be sitting across the G7/NATO/Security Council table from the president of the United States whose cops (foreigners care naught for state-federal niceties) put him through the perp walk and whose judges tossed him in Riker's Island for the best part of a week. Dunno what that portends for Franco-American relations . . .

(Full disclosure, since Andrew did so: Here was my take that first week.)

Obama's Declaration of Dependence

Dozens of countries have “Independence Days.” November 25th, for example: Independence Day in Suriname. In that instance as in most others, the designation signifies nothing more than transfer of de jure sovereignty and de facto operational control from a distant European capital to a more local regime. 1975 in Suriname’s case. They had the first military coup seven years later.

But in America “Independence” seemed as much a statement about the character of a people as a designation of jurisdictional status. The first Americans were British subjects who had outgrown a British king as benign and enlightened as any ruler on the planet. They demanded “independence” not from foreign rulers of another ethnicity but from their own compatriots with whom they had a disagreement about the nature of government. Long before the Revolutionary War, small New England townships governed themselves to a degree no old England towns did. “Independence” is not about the replacement of a king in London with a president in Washington but about the republican virtues of a self-reliant citizenry free to exploit its own potential.

#ad# Please, no snickering. The self-reliant citizen? In the damning formulation of contemporary American vernacular, he’s history -- as in over and done with, fuhgeddabouttim. What’s left of that founding vision on this less than Glorious Fourth of July 2011 in the Brokest Nation in History? “You go talk to your constituents,” President Obama taunted Republicans on Wednesday, “and ask them, are they willing to compromise their kids’ safety so that some corporate-jet owner continues to get a tax break?”

In the Republic of Brokistan, that’s the choice, is it? Give me safe kids or give me corporate jets! No corporate aviation without safe kiddification! In his bizarre press conference on Wednesday, Obama made no fewer than six references to corporate-jet owners. Just for the record, the tax break for corporate jets was part of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” -- i.e., the stimulus. The Obama stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Democratic-party stimulus that every single Republican House member and all but three Republican senators voted against. The Obama–Corporate Jet stimulus that some guy called Obama ostentatiously signed into law in Denver after jetting in to host an “economic forum.”

Charles Krauthammer did the math. If you eliminate the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Corporate Jet Tax Break, you would save so much dough that, after 5,000 years, you would have clawed back enough money to cover one year of Obama’s debt. Five thousand years is the year 7011. Boy, our kids’ll really be safe by then. I see some leftie at MSNBC has just been suspended for characterizing the president’s performance on Wednesday as that of a demotic synonym for the male reproductive organ. So I shall be more circumspect and say only that even being a hollow unprincipled demagogue requires a certain lightness of touch Obama can’t seem to find.

Speaking of corporate jets, did the president fly commercial to Denver? Oh, but that’s different! He’s in “public service.” A couple of weeks before he flew Air Force One to Denver, he flew Air Force One to Williamsburg, Va. From the White House (well, via Andrews Air Force Base). That’s 150 miles, a 30-minute flight. He took a 747, a wide-bodied jet designed to carry 500 people to the other side of the planet, for a puddle-jump across the Potomac.

#page#

Oh, but it was for another “economic forum.” This time with House Democrats -- the ones who voted for the Obama Corporate Jet Tax Break. “Economic forums” are what we have instead of an economy these days.

Aside from the Sultan of Brunei and one or two similar potentates, no other head of state goes around like this. In a self-governing republic, it ought to be unbecoming. But in the Brokest Nation in History it’s ridiculous. And the least the beneficiary of such decadence could do is not condescendingly lecture those who pay for their own transportation. America’s debt is an existential crisis, and playing shell games with shriveled peas of demonizable irrelevancies only advertises your contempt for the citizenry.

#ad# By the way, one way to cut back on corporate jettage would be to restore civilized standards of behavior in American commercial flight. Two weeks ago, a wheelchair-bound 95-year-old woman at Northwest Florida Regional Airport flying to Michigan to be with her family for the final stage of her terminal leukemia was made to remove her adult diaper by the crack agents of the Transport Stupidity Administration. George III wouldn’t have done this to her.

Oh, c’mon, do you want to compromise your kids’ safety in order to give grope breaks to dying nonagenarians? A spokesgroper for the Transport Stupidity Administration explained that security procedures have to be “the same for everyone” -- because it would be totally unreasonable to expect timeserving government bureaucrats to exercise individual human judgment. Oddly enough, it’s not “the same for everyone” if you’re Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi from Nigeria, who on June 24 got on a flight at JFK with a college ID and an expired boarding pass in somebody else’s name. Why, that slippery devil! If only he’d been three-quarters of a century older, in a wheelchair, and dying of leukemia, we’d have got him! He was arrested upon landing at LAX, and we’re now going to spend millions of dollars prosecuting him. Why? We should thank him for his invaluable exposé of America’s revolting security theater, and make him head of the TSA.

What else isn’t “the same for everyone”? A lot of things, these days. The president has a point about “tax breaks.” We have too many. And on the scale of the present tax code that’s a dagger at the heart of one of the most basic principles of free societies -- equality before the law. But, of course, the president is not opposed to exemptions and exceptions and special privileges on principle: After all, he’s issued -- what is it now? -- over a thousand “waivers” for his own Obamacare law. If you knew who to call in Washington, maybe you got one. If you didn’t, tough.

But that’s the point. Big Government on America’s unprecedented money-no-object scale will always be profoundly wasteful (as on that Williamsburg flight), stupid (as at the TSA), and arbitrary (as in those waivers). But it’s not republican in any sense the Founders would recognize. If (like Obama) you’re a lifetime member of the government class, you can survive it. For the rest, it ought to be a source of shame to today’s Americans that this will be the first generation in U.S. history to bequeath its children the certainty of poorer, meaner lives -- if not a broader decay into a fetid swamp divided between a well-connected Latin American–style elite enjoying their waivers and a vast downwardly mobile morass. On Independence Day 2011, debt-ridden America is now dependent, not on far-off kings but on global bond and currency markets, which fulfill the same role the cliff edge does in a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. At some point, Wile looks down and realizes he’s outrun solid ground. You know what happens next.

That’s all, folks!

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

Compelling Logic

David Harsanyi draws attention to what ought to be the biggest laugh line of Nannytollah Bloomberg’s career – his rationale for supporting gay marriage:

Government should not tell you what to do unless there’s a compelling public purpose.

Thank goodness for Mike Bloomberg. Give me Bloomery or give me death! Because, without that clarion cry for liberty, deranged control-freak mayors might start regulating smoking on private property, or cooking in transfats, or the right of welfare recipients to drink carbonated beverages.

I chanced to attend a graduation ceremony a few weeks ago and the speaker decided to pander to the students by retailing a little braggadocio from the gritty streets of New York: “Who’s better than you? Nobody.” To give it a bit more swagger, he did it in a Sopranos accent: “Hoo’s beddah dan yoo?”

And I thought it was kind of sad. Because it’s hard to see what’s so tough and attitudinal about living in a city where almost every individual activity is expensively micro-regulated by a ludicrous control-freak.

By the way, doesn't government have a compelling public purpose in keeping the streets free of snow? Too boring for Bloomberg, who flew off to his weekend pad in Bermuda and left New Yorkers without second homes offshore to make the best of it. That’s the very model of a can-do technocrat in the age of Big Government: He can regulate the salt out of your cheeseburger but he can’t regulate it on to Seventh Avenue.  

“Government should not tell you what to do unless there’s a compelling public purpose” sounds like a restraint but in practice boils down to “Government should not tell you what to do unless it decides to tell you what to do.” Once upon a time, it told homosexuals to cut it out. Now it tells smokers to cut it out. That’s a change in fashion, not an advance for a principled worldview. As Harsanyi puts it:

If you’re a non-smoking, svelte gay couple you’re in luck, but otherwise Bloomberg sees human existence as one big fat smoke-sodden compelling public interest.

Just so. Big Nanny statists talk up liberty in one area only: sex. Or, more precisely, sexual identity. And the expansion of sexual liberty has provided a cover for its shriveling in almost every other sphere, from property rights to freedom of expression. As I say somewhere in my soon to be imminently forthcoming book, in a world ever more micro-regulated by the likes of Bloomberg, sexual license is one of the few things you don’t need a license for. For some of us, that’s not enough.

Mittle Ground

I've mentioned before Mitt Romney's weird tone-deaf penchant for conventional wisdom way past its sell-by date. So here's today's Los Angeles Times:

Romney Says He Can Work With Democrats

Gee, I know that's what I'm looking for in a Republican candidate these days.

Last time round, Mitt spend a ton of money and got nowhere. This time, he seems determined not to learn from last time's fiasco. So today he's going around "touting his record of working with Democrats". Er, we already have a president whose record of "working with Democrats" is pretty impressive.

Look, it's not very difficult. Nixon had it all figured out: You tack to your party's base during the primaries and then to the center during the general. If you're already reaching across the aisle come primary season, it's not a good sign, and even less so when you're boasting about your ability to work with Ted Kennedy:

"I worked with [former Massachusetts Sen.] Ted Kennedy, for Pete's sakes," Romney said in Concord, noting that they disagreed on "almost everything."One issue that Kennedy and Romney worked closely on was legislation expanding healthcare coverage in Massachusetts. He recalled, to laughter, that at the ceremonial signing of the Massachusetts healthcare law, the Democrat had joked that when he and Romney agreed on a piece of legislation "it proves only one thing – one of us didn't read it."

Are you sure Ted was joking?

According to the photo caption, Mitt "faced questions from voters that reflected frustration with the gridlock in Washington". The correct answer to that isn't to boast about getting rolled by Ted Kennedy but to explain politely to the voter that, say what one will about Washington, any government that runs up multi-trillion-dollar annual budgets, half of which is borrowed out of thin air, and then carelessly tosses ObamaCare and a ton of "stimulus" into the great sucking maw as a bonus, isn't suffering from any kind of "gridlock". 

TSA Obergropinfuhrer of the Day

At a small airport the other day, I saw a passenger with a popular attitudinal T-shirt slogan patiently submitting to an enhanced gropedown from the TSA. It was a poignant image of the republic at twilight: a man in a "Don't Tread On Me" T-shirt being trod all over. I wonder why more Americans aren't outraged by this:

Her 95-year-old mother was detained and extensively searched last Saturday while trying to board a plane to fly to Michigan to be with family members during the final stages of her battle with leukemia.

Her mother, who was in a wheelchair, was asked to remove an adult diaper in order to complete a pat-down search.

There is a term for regimes that submit law-abiding wheelchair-bound dying nonagenarians to public humiliations without probable cause and it isn't "republic of limited government." Given everybody's touchiness over Kathryn's North Korean comparisons, I'll say only this: George III wouldn't have done this to you.

Amy Alkon posts a response from a bureaucratic bozo to her own experience at the airport. Caution for sensitive types: The word "labia" is included. But that's because in 21st century America the anatomical feature "labia" are included in a trip to the airport - and that's what should concern you. As the crack TSA agent informs Miss Alkon, "We go thru sensitive areas with back of hand."

That's great news! Somewhere on page 273 of the handbook, there's a graphic detailing the precise point on the upper thigh where the licensed state groper is obliged to invert his paw.

My weekend column concluded with some thoughts on American government's culture of excess. Big Government - more-more-more money-no-object government -- will by definition be profoundly stupid government. Lean, constrained government would not only be affordable but smarter. The bloated moronic airport security regime is a particularly ugly example. In a decade of existence, it has never stopped a single terrorist, but it can successfully cow a dying woman born during the Wilson Administration into removing her diaper.

We can all sleep easier knowing that.

The Reincarceration of Conrad Black

I am overseas at the moment and have just caught up on the coverage of Judge Amy St Eve's decision yesterday to send my old boss (and now NRO colleague) Conrad Black back to jail. Following the Supreme Court's overturning of the "honest services" basis of his conviction, Conrad was released from prison in Florida, after serving two years, to await re-sentencing. Given that he was, in effect, improperly convicted on the majority of charges, a civilized and humane justice system would have concluded that it was both absurd and vindictive to return him to his cell for the one shred of the United States Government's case that has not been tossed out along the way in Conrad's seven year battle.

But the Department of Justice is not civilized and humane. As I wrote here:

The federal justice system is a bit like one of those unmanned drones President Obama is so fond of using on the unfortunate villagers of Waziristan. Once it’s locked on to you and your coordinates are in the system, it’s hard to get it called off. Three years ago, during his trial in Chicago, I suggested to the defendant he’d be better off saving his gazillions in legal fees and instead climbing under the tarp in the bed of my truck and letting me drive him over the minimally enforced Pittsburg-La Patrie border crossing to Quebec and thence by fishing boat to a remote landing strip on Miquelon where a waiting plane could spirit him somewhere beyond the reach of the U.S. Attorney. Estimated cost: about a thousandth of what he’d spent on lawyers to date. P’shaw, scoffed Conrad, or ejaculations to that effect. He was not a fugitive but an innocent man, and eventually he would be vindicated by the justice system of this great republic.

But that's not possible - because, with a system that relies on  multiple charges and an ability to pressure everybody else in the case to switch sides, you can win (as Conrad did) nineteen-twentieths of the battles and still lose the war. He's a wealthy businessman, and nobody has any sympathy for those. But it's even worse if you're a nobody. A New Hampshire neighbor of mine had the misfortune to attract the attention of federal prosecutors for one of those white-collar "crimes" no one can explain in English. The jury acquitted him in a couple of hours. Great news! The system worked! Not really. By then, the feds had spent a half-decade demolishing his life, exhausting his savings, wrecking his marriage, and driving him to attempt suicide. He's not a big scary businessman like Conrad, just a small-town nobody. And he'll never get his life back. Because, regardless of the verdict, the process is the punishment - which is the hallmark of unjust justice systems around the world.

As to white-collar crime, what about the one type of white-collar crime that goes entirely unpunished? For an accounting fraud of $567 million, Enron’s executives went to jail, and its head guy died there. For an accounting fraud ten times that size, the two Democrat hacks who headed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, walked away with a combined taxpayer-funded payout of $116.4 million.  Fannie and Freddie are two of the largest businesses in America, but they’re exempt from SEC disclosure rules and Sarbanes-Oxley “corporate governance” burdens, and so in 2008, unlike Enron, WorldCom or any of the other reviled private-sector bogeymen, they came close to taking down the entire global economy. Yes, yes, I know two wrongs don't make a right (unless you're Jamie Gorelick), but what then is the point of the SEC?

Judge St Eve's decision is appalling. In my weekend column, I write about "nation-building" at home and abroad. Federal justice shares with those subjects what is the defining characteristic of US Government in the early 21st century - grotesque excess and an utter lack of proportion. 

Speechworld vs. Realworld

The Democrats seem to have given up on budgets. Hey, who can blame them? They’ve got a ballpark figure: Let’s raise $2 trillion in revenue every year, and then spend $4 trillion. That seems to work pretty well, so why get hung up on a lot of fine print? Harry Reid says the Senate has no plans to produce a budget, but in April the president did give a speech about “a new budget framework” that he said would save $4 trillion over the next twelve years.

That would be 2023, if you’re minded to take him seriously. Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, did. Last week he asked Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, if he’d “estimated the budget impact of this framework.”

#ad# “No, Mr. Chairman,” replied Director Elmendorf, deadpan. “We don’t estimate speeches. We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech.”

“We don’t estimate speeches”: There’s an epitaph to chisel on the tombstone of the republic. Unfortunately for those of us on the receiving end, giving speeches is what Obama does. Indeed, having no other accomplishments to his name (as Hillary Clinton pointed out), giving speeches is what got the president his job. You remember -- the stuff about “hope” and “change.” Were the CBO in the business of “estimating speeches,” they’d have run the numbers and concluded that under the Obama plan, vague abstract nouns would be generating 87 percent of GDP by 2016.

For whatever reason, it didn’t work out quite like that. But that’s no reason not to give another speech. So there he was the other night expounding on Afghanistan. Unlike Douglas Elmendorf, the Taliban do estimate speeches, and they correctly concluded from the president’s 2009 speech that all they need to do is run out the clock and all or most of the country will be theirs once more. Last week’s update confirmed their estimate. “Winning” is not in Obama’s vocabulary. Oh, wait. That’s not true. In an earlier unestimated speech, he declared he was committed to “winning the future,” “winning the future” at some unspecified time in the future being a lot easier than winning the war. In fairness, it’s been two-thirds of a century since America has unambiguously won a war, but throughout that period most presidents were at least notionally committed to the possibility of victory. Obama seems to regard the very concept as something boorish and vulgar that would cause him embarrassment if it came up at dinner parties. So place your bets on how long it will be before Mullah Omar’s back in town. And then ask yourself if America will have anything to show for its decade in Afghanistan that it wouldn’t have had if it had just quit two weeks after toppling the Taliban in the fall of 2001 and left the mullahs, warlords, poppy barons, and pederasts to have at each other without the distraction of extravagant NATO reconstruction projects littering their beautiful land of charmingly unspoilt rubble.

That’s not how the president put it, of course. But then the delightful appeal of an Obama speech is the ever wider gulf between Speechworld and Reality. So in this instance he framed our retreat from the Hindu Kush as an excellent opportunity to stop wasting money overseas and start wasting even more in Washington. Or in his words:

“America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.”

Gee, thanks. If America were a Kandahar wedding, that would be the cue to fire your rifle in the air and grab the cutest nine-year-old boy. Naturally, not everyone sees eye to eye. Like Afghanistan, ours is a fractious land. But as Obama said:

“Our nation draws strength from our differences, and when our union is strong, no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach.”

Climb ev’ry mountain. Ford ev’ry stream.

Are you sure we can afford ev’ry stream? Yes, it’s far less rugged than it sounds. In compliance with EPA regulations, no real hills and dales were harmed in the making of this glib rhetorical imagery.

“At his best,” wrote the New York Times of Obama’s speech, “the president can be hugely persuasive.”

#page#

Er, if you say so. He’s mostly persuasive in persuading you there’s no urgency about anything: All that stuff about Americans sweating and straining for the most distant horizon is his way of saying you can go back to sleep for another couple of decades.

If we hadn’t been assured by the New York Times that this man is the Greatest Orator of All Time, there would be something offensive in the leader of the Brokest Nation in History bragging that we’re not the guys to shirk a challenge, however grueling and demanding it may be, no sirree. The salient feature of America in the Age of Obama is a failed government class institutionally committed to living beyond its means, and a citizenry too many of whom are content to string along. Remember Peggy Joseph of Sarasota, Fla.? “I never thought this day would ever happen,” she gushed after an Obama rally in 2008. “I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.” Is Peggy really the gal you’d want to hike a steep hill with?

#ad# In Speechworld, nation-building can be done through flatulent rhetoric. In Realworld, nations are built by people, and in America the productive class is battered and reeling. Obama wasted a trillion dollars on a phony stimulus that stimulated nothing but government, and wants to try it one mo’ time. That’s what yokes “nation-building” near and far. According to the World Bank, the Western military/aid presence now accounts for 97 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP. The bit that’s left doesn’t function, not least because it doesn’t need to. How can, say, Helmand develop an economic base when everybody with a whit of sense is making massively inflated salaries as a translator for the Yanks or a security guard for some EU outreach project? When the 97 percent revenue tide recedes with the American withdrawal, what’s left will be the same old 3 percent ugly tribal dump Afghanistan was a decade ago. It will leave as little trace as the Obama stimulus.

The sheer waste is appalling, immoral, and deeply destructive. In Kandahar as in California, all that matters is excess: It’s not working? Then you need to spend more. More more more. What does it matter? You’re not spending anything real. America would have to find $15 trillion just to get back to having nothing in its pocket. But who cares? As long as we’re united in our commitment to excess, no CBO debt-to-GDP ratio graph is too steep for us to take to the next level, and no horizon -- 2060, 2080, 2104 -- is too distant to serve as a plausible estimate for significant deficit reduction.

In Realworld, political speeches would be about closing down unnecessary federal bureaucracies, dramatically downsizing or merging others, and ending makework projects and mission creep. The culture of excess that distinguishes the hyperpower at twilight would be reviled at every turn. But instead the “hugely persuasive” orator declares that there’s nothing to worry about that even more government can’t cure. In Speechworld, “no hill is too steep, no horizon is beyond our reach.” In Realworld, that’s mainly because we’re going downhill. And the horizon is a cliff edge.

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