Mark Steyn's Blog, page 9

Re The Bigger Picture

Mario, you're correct that the TSA is a prime example of the broader insanity of the precautionary principle applied without regard to cost-benefit analysis. I wasn't joking, by the way, about the federal bureaucracy policing pumpkin pie consistency. It's now part of a grand holiday tradition reflected in headlines that ought to be deeply embarrassing to a supposedly free people:

A Thanksgiving Meal, With The TSA's Blessing

Meanwhile, Canadians, Mexicans, Britons, Australians, Indians, Swedes, Slovenes, Zambians, Papuans and just about everybody else except Saudis and North Koreans are free to eat Kinder Eggs, but in the United States at least three federal agencies are needed to prevent this life-threatening scourge from falling into the hands of the American people.

Even if this precautionary principle were entirely successful, even if - to use the Joe Biden test - it were to prevent one single death, what kind of functioning citizenry is likely to emerge from a government cocoon that treats them like a dimwitted, terrified, risk-averse ovine herd?

Re re re re re: TSA and Nude Scanners

I'm with Kevin and Mario on this one, Wesley. Civilized air travel within the United States is an ever dimmer memory. As I wrote in The Spectator after my last Australian tour:

Returned to the tender mercies of America’s hideous Transport Security Administration, I pine for the (literally) lighter touch of Aussie airports — no coat removal, no shoe removal, no digital imaging of one’s genitalia. From Brisbane to Perth, the screening areas are spacious and organised; in the US, it looks as if 9/11 happened last week, and they’re improvising with some trestle tables from the discount warehouse.

Sane systems go to some lengths to reduce "false positives": A cancer-screening system that gave false tumor readings to 47 percent of patients would not be regarded as satisfactory. But the TSA is nothing but false positives: In over a decade, it has caught not a single terrorist, but merely thousands of law-abiding grannies, children, the chronically ill, persons with prostheses, returning servicemen from Iraq with traces of gun powder on their boots, and one unfortunate chap at O'Hare flying off on vacation with a penis pump. One hundred percent false positives. On New Year's Day, my son fell victim at Burlington Airport, Vt., which is a prime al-Qa'eda target. He's at that tender age where he's not partial to a trio of middle-aged men with latex gloves inspecting his genitals, and, having aced civics class, he found it hard to believe that the United States Government can put its fingers in your crotch without probable cause. I sighed airily, "After two-and-a-third centuries, this is what it's come to" -- at which the supervisor threatened to kick me off the flight, too, for "disrespecting" the process.

Nobody will ever need to hijack an American plane ever again. A generation or two hence, the last al-Qaeda member will die of old age in a Yemeni old folks' home, but cowed, compliant Americans will still be shuffling shoeless through ever more decrepit airports waiting for the obergropinfuhrer to determine whether the pumpkin mix in their Thanksgiving pie is sufficiently soft to be confiscated as an illegal liquid.

Trillion-Dollar-Coin Fever

I was out of the country for a few days and news from this great republic reached me only fitfully. I have learned to be wary of foreign reporting of U.S. events, since America can come off sounding faintly deranged. Much of what reached me didn’t sound entirely plausible: Did the entire U.S. media really fall for the imaginary dead girlfriend of a star football player? Did the president of the United States really announce 23 executive orders by reading out the policy views of carefully pre-screened grade-schoolers (“I want everybody to be happy and safe”)? Clearly, these vicious rumors were merely planted in the foreign press to make the United States appear ridiculous.

And indeed, upon my return, it seemed to be business as usual. ABC News revealed that in 2007 President Bush’s secretary of the interior -- oh, come on, it’s on the citizenship test: “Name a secretary of the interior. Any secretary of the interior.” Anyway, ABC revealed that Bush’s secretary of the interior spent 220,000 taxpayer dollars remodeling his (or her, as the case may be) office bathroom. Who knew the gig was really secretary of the interior design? I’ll bet the guy who made Saddam’s solid-gold toilets was delighted to get a new customer. But what can be done? If we changed the name to secretary of the exterior, he’d have blown a quarter-million on a new outhouse.

Meanwhile, hot from the fiscal-cliff fiasco, the media are already eagerly anticipating the next in the series of monthly capitulations by Republicans, this time on the debt ceiling. While I was abroad, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, a Harvard professor of constitutional law, a prominent congressman, and various other American eminencies apparently had a sober and serious discussion on whether the United States Treasury could circumvent the debt constraints by minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin. Although Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider called the trillion-dollar coin “the most important fiscal policy debate you’ll ever see in your life,” most Democrat pundits appeared to favor the idea for the more straightforward joy it affords in sticking it to the House Republicans. No more tedious whining about spending from GOP congressmen. Next time Paul Ryan shows up in committee demanding to know about deficit-reduction plans, all the treasury secretary has to do is pull out a handful of trillion-dollar coins from down the back of the sofa and tell him to keep the change.

#ad#The trillion-dollar-groat fever rang a vague bell with me. Way back in 1893, Mark Twain wrote a short story called “The Million Pound Bank Note,” which in the Fifties Ronald Neame made into a rather droll film. A penniless American down and out in London (Gregory Peck) is presented by two eccentric Englishmen (Ronald Squire and Wilfrid Hyde-White) with a million-pound note which they have persuaded the Bank of England to print in order to settle a wager. One of the English chaps believes that simple possession of the note will allow the destitute Yank to live the high life without ever having to spend a shilling. And so it proves. He goes to the pub for lunch, offers the note, and the innkeeper explains that he’s unable to make change for a million pounds, but is honored to feed him anyway. He then goes to be fitted for a suit, and again the tailor regrets that he can’t provide change for a million pounds but delightedly measures him for dress suits, silk shirts, and all the rest. I always liked the line Mark Twain’s protagonist uses on a duke’s niece he’s sweet on: He tells her “I hadn’t a cent in the world but just the million pound note.”

That’s Paul Krugman’s solution for America as it prepares to bust through another laughably named “debt limit”: We’d be a nation that hasn’t a cent in the world but just a trillion-dollar coin -- and what more do we need? As with Gregory Peck in the movie, the mere fact of the coin’s existence would ensure we could go on living large. Indeed, aside from inflating a million quid to a trillion bucks, Professor Krugman’s proposal economically prunes the sprawling cast of the film down to an off-Broadway one-man show with Uncle Sam playing every part: A penniless Yank (Uncle Sam) runs into a wealthy benefactor (Uncle Sam) who has persuaded the banking authorities (Uncle Sam) to mint a trillion-dollar coin that will allow Uncle Sam (played by Uncle Sam) to extend an unending line of credit to Uncle Sam (also played by Uncle Sam).

This seems likely to work. As for the love interest, in the final scene, Paul Krugman takes his fake dead girlfriend (played by Barack Obama’s composite girlfriend) to a swank restaurant and buys her the world’s most expensive bottle of champagne (played by Lance Armstrong’s urine sample).

#page#Do you ever get the feeling America’s choo-choo has jumped the tracks? Joe Weisenthal says that the trillion-dollar coin is the most serious adult proposal put forward in our lifetime, “because it gets right to the nature of what is money.” As Weisenthal argues, “we’re still shackled with a gold-standard mentality where we think of money as a scarce natural resource that we need to husband carefully.” Ha! Every time it rains it rains trillion-dollar pennies from heaven. I believe Robert Mugabe made a similar observation on January 16, 2009, when he introduced Zimbabwe’s first one hundred–trillion–dollar bank note. In that one dramatic month, the Zimbabwean dollar declined from 0.0000000072 of a U.S. dollar to 0.0000000003 of a U.S. dollar. But that’s what’s so great about being American. Because, when you’re American, one U.S. dollar will always be worth one U.S. dollar, no matter how many trillion-dollar coins you mint. Eat your heart out, you Zimbabwean losers. As Joe Weisenthal asks, what is money? Money is American: Everybody knows that.#ad#

Whether the world feels this way is another matter. For Paul Krugman, the issue is the insanity of the Republican party, as manifested in their opposition to automatic debt-ceiling increases. By contrast, the contrarian Democrat Mickey Kaus thinks Republicans ought to be in favor of the trillion-dollar coin as an easy short-term fix to prevent them from getting screwed over by Obama and the media for the second time in a month. But out there, in what the State Department maps quaintly call the rest of the world, nobody cares about Democrats or Republicans, and the issue is not the debt ceiling but the debt. Forty-four nations voted at Bretton Woods to make the dollar the world’s reserve currency. If they were meeting today, I doubt they’d give that status to a nation piling on over a trillion in federal debt per year, 70 percent of which its left hand (the U.S. Treasury) borrows from its right hand (the Federal Reserve) through the Nigerian-e-mail equivalent of Paul Krugman’s trillion-dollar groat.

Meanwhile, I see the Bundesbank has decided to move 300 tons of German gold from the Federal Reserve in New York back to Frankfurt. It’s probably nothing. And what’s to stop the Fed replacing it with 300 tons of Boston cream donuts and declaring them of equivalent value? Or maybe 300 imaginary dead football girlfriends, all platinum blondes.

Memo to John Boehner and Paul Ryan: No one will take you seriously until you find some photogenic second-graders and read out their cute letters. “I want everybody to be happy and safe and fithcally tholvent.” They may have to practice.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

Context Is Everything

I see Mohamed Morsi, poster boy for the Arab Spring, has now fallen back on the old defense that these touchy over-sensitive Jews have to learn to distinguish between anti-Semitism and legitimate and thoughtful criticism of Israeli policies. Presidential spokesman Yasser Ali now says that Mr. Morsi's remarks that Jews are "bloodsuckers" and "descendants of apes and pigs" and that Egyptian children must be "breastfed hatred" for them were "taken out of context." It was just a thoughtful call for a moratorium on settlements, or an expression of concern about disproportionate response, or a vague feeling that that Netanyahu guy is a bit extreme or something. Whatever.

I wonder what the context for this is:

A mother and her seven children have been jailed for 15 years for converting back to Christianity from Islam in Egypt.

Oh, well. Senators McCain and Graham say give Mo the money anyway.

Context is Everything

I see Mohammed Morsi, poster boy for the Arab Spring, has now fallen back on the old defense that these touchy over-sensitive Jews have to learn to distinguish between anti-Semitism and legitimate and thoughtful criticism of Israeli policies. Presidential spokesman Yasser Ali now says that Mr Morsi's remarks that Jews are "bloodsuckers" and "descendants of apes and pigs" and that Egyptian children must be "breastfed hatred" for them were "taken out of context". It was just a thoughtful call for a moratorium on settlements, or an expression of concern about disproportionate response, or a vague feeling that that Netanyahu guy is a bit extreme or something. Whatever.

I wonder what the context for this is:

A mother and her seven children have been jailed for 15 years for converting back to Christianity from Islam in Egypt.

Oh, well. Senators McCain and Graham say give Mo the money anyway.

Obamacare’s Other Shoe

If you had buttonholed me in the Senate men’s room circa 2003 and told me that a decade hence Joe Biden would be America’s vice president, John Kerry secretary of state, and Chuck Hagel secretary of defense, I’d have laughed and waited for the punch line: The Leahy administration? President Lautenberg? Celebrate lack of diversity! But even in the republic’s descent into a Blowhardocracy staffed by a Zombie House of Lords, there are distinctions to be drawn. Senator Kerry having been reliably wrong on every foreign-policy issue of the last 40 years, it would seem likely that at this stage in his life he will be content merely to be in office, jetting hither and yon boring the pants off whichever presidents and prime ministers are foolish enough to grant him an audience. Beyond the photo-ops, the world will drift on toward the post-American era: Beijing will carry on gobbling up resources around the planet, Czar Putin will flex his moobs across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Arab Spring “democracies” will see impressive growth in the critical clitoridectomy sector of the economy, Iran will go nuclear, and John Kerry will go to black-tie banquets in Europe. But Chuck Hagel is a different kettle of senatorial huffenpuffer. And not because of what appears to be a certain antipathy toward Jews and gays. That would be awkward at the Tony Awards, but at the Arab League the post-summit locker-room schmoozing should be a breeze. Since his celebrated “evolution” on marriage last year, President Obama is famously partial to one of those constituencies, so presumably he didn’t nominate an obscure forgotten senator because of his fascinating insights into the appropriate level of “obviousness” the differently oriented should adopt. So why Hagel? Why now?

My comrade Jonah Goldberg says this nomination is a “petty pick” made by Obama “out of spite.” I’m not so sure. If the signature accomplishment of the president’s first term was Obamacare (I’m using “signature accomplishment” in the Washington sense of “ruinously expensive bureaucratic sinkhole”), what would he be looking to pull off in his second (aside from the repeal of the 22nd Amendment)? Hagel isn’t being nominated to the Department of Zionist and Homosexual Regulatory Oversight but to the Department of Defense. Which he calls “bloated.”#ad#

“The Pentagon,” he said a year ago, “needs to be pared down.” Unlike the current secretary, Leon Panetta, who’s strongly opposed to the mandated “sequestration” cuts to the defense budget, Hagel thinks they’re merely a good start.

That’s why Obama’s offered him the gig. Because Obamacare at home leads inevitably to Obamacuts abroad. In that sense, America will be doing no more than following the same glum trajectory of every other great power in the postwar era. I feel only a wee bit sheepish about quoting my book After America two weeks running, since it’s hardly my fault Obama’s using it as the operating manual for his second term (I may sue for breach of copyright and retire to Tahiti). At any rate, somewhere around Chapter Five, I suggest that, having succeeded Britain as the dominant power, America may follow the old country in decline, too:

“In what other ways might the mighty eagle emulate the tattered old lion? First comes reorientation, and the shrinking of the horizon. After empire, Britain turned inward: Between 1951 and 1997 the proportion of government expenditure on defense fell from 24 percent to seven, while the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 percent to 53. And that’s before New Labour came along to widen the gap further.

“Those British numbers are a bald statement of reality: You can have Euro-sized entitlements or a global military, but not both. What’s easier to do if you’re a democratic government that’s made promises it can’t afford -- cut back on nanny-state lollipops, or shrug off thankless military commitments for which the electorate has minimal appetite?”

Democrats put it slightly differently: In 2004 John Kerry demanded to know why we were building firehouses in Iraq but closing them in America (the municipal fire department apparently falling, like everything else, under the federal government). Barack Obama prefers to say that it’s time for the United States to do some nation-building at home -- the pilot program in Afghanistan having worked out so well. Either line will do, and, like Britain’s inverted budget priorities, both implicitly acknowledge that a military-industrial complex and a dependency-bureaucrat complex are incompatible. And that’s before you factor in Washington-size borrowing, under which, within this decade, the interest payments on the debt will be covering the entire cost of the Chinese military. America can fund the Pentagon or the People’s Liberation Army, but not both, not for long. Having gotten the citizenry to accept a supersized welfare bureaucracy, Obama reasonably enough figures he can just as easily get them used to a shrunken American presence in the wider world.

So the president is looking for his equivalent of Denis Healey, the Labour cabinet minister who in the 1968 defense review announced an all but total withdrawal of British forces from “east of Suez” -- a phrase that in the imperial imagination is less geographic than psychological.

Kipling’s English Tommy on the road to Mandalay: “Ship me somewheres east of Suez #...#” And then a cheeseparing defense minister says: No, we won’t. Not now, not ever again. It’s over.

Who would you hire for the Pentagon’s east-of-Suez moment? According to the Washington Post, Obama picked Hagel to “bridge the partisan divide.”#page#

Even for the court eunuchs of the palace media, that must be hard to type with a straight face: He seems to be all but entirely loathed by his own party. Nevertheless, he is technically a Republican, not to mention a bona fide war hero. Only Nixon can go to China, and only a pro-life, pro-gun, climate-denialist, homophobic, Strom Thurmond–loving, medal-draped Republican can go to the Pentagon and tell them to start clearing out their desks. Obama has picked a guy whose rhetoric is more anti-Pentagon than his own, and who, unlike most of the cabinet senators, has a record of executive experience that suggests he may well live up to it.

If he pulls it off, it’ll be a big part of Obama’s legacy. And, if he doesn’t, I’m sure the media will be happy to remind everyone that, oh well, Hagel was a Republican.#ad#

But beyond the politics is a real question. He’s not wrong to raise the question of Pentagon “bloat.” The United States has the most lavishly funded military on the planet, and what does it buy you? In the Hindu Kush, we’re taking twelve years to lose to goatherds with fertilizer.

Something is wrong with this picture. Indeed, something is badly wrong with the American way of war. And no one could seriously argue that, in the latest in the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll call of America’s un-won wars, the problem is a lack of money or resources. Given its track record, why shouldn’t the Pentagon get a top-to-toe overhaul -- or at least a cost-benefit analysis?

Just to be clear: I disagree with Hagel on Israel, on Iran, and on most everything else. But my colleagues on the right are in denial if they don’t think there are some very basic questions that need to be asked about the too-big-to-fail Department of Defense. Obama would like the U.S. military to do less. Some of us would like it to do more with less -- more nimbly, more artfully. But, if the national-security establishment won’t acknowledge there’s even a problem, they’re unlikely to like the solutions imposed by others. “Petty” and “spiteful”? No. Obamacare’s other shoe.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

There Were Thirteen Men and Me, the Only Gal in Town . . .

The headline comes from a post-nuclear novelty song by Ann-Margret. The scenario worked out well for Annie, as I recall. In real life, it's more problematic. In a post on the state of play in the culture of death, the Pundette dusts off some remarks I made here in 2008 -- on how, in India, China and many immigrant communities in the west, a "woman's right to choose" is, in practice, the right to choose not to have any women:

By midcentury, when today’s millions of surplus boys will be entering middle age, India and China are expected to account for a combined 50 percent of global GDP. On present trends, they will be the most male-heavy societies that have ever existed. As I wrote in my book America Alone, unless China’s planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what’s going to happen to all those excess men? As a general rule, large numbers of excitable lads who can’t get any action are not a recipe for societal stability. Unless the Japanese have invented amazingly lifelike sex robots by then (think Austin Powers’s “fembots”), we’re likely to be in a planet-wide rape epidemic and a world of globalized industrial-scale sex slavery.

But why take it from a fringe kook alarmist like me? Half a decade later, the respectable types at Time magazine are now on the case:

Growing evidence suggests that in countries like India and China, where the ratio of men to women is unnaturally high due to the selective abortion of female fetuses and neglect of girl children, the rates of violence towards women increase. “The sex ratio imbalance directly leads to more sex trafficking and bride buying,” says Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. A scarce resource is generally considered precious, but the lack of women also leaves many young men without marriage partners. In 2011, the number of cases of women raped rose by 9.2 percent; kidnapping and abductions of women were up 19.4 percent. “At this point, we’re talking correlation, not causation. More studies need to be done….[But] it is clear from historical cases and from studies looking at testosterone levels that a large proportion of unmarried men in the population is not a good thing,” says Hvistendahl.

Indeed. The dearth of chicks will be one of the most important and consequential features of the global scene a couple of decades on, and, as I write in After America, "a world full of male frustrations will always find a market for sex slavery." If American feminists wished to raise awareness of the issues Time is now addressing, they might give it an arresting name like, oh, "the war on women." But I gather that title's taken.

Ed Koch's Mayor Culpa

Nathaniel, that quote from the Ed Koch interview - I knew Obama would screw us over, but I thought he'd wait until maybe after the inauguration - isn't even the choicest bit:

Koch explained to The Algemeiner why he decided to back the President’s re-election even though he says he suspected that Obama would backtrack on his pro-Israel overtures. “I did what I thought was warranted and intelligent,” he said, “He was going to win! There was no question about it. I thought it would be helpful to have a Jewish voice there, being able to communicate.”

The Mayor says he has no regrets, “it’s wouldn’t make any difference. The Jews were going to vote for him no matter what. And that’s the nature of the Jews. They are always very solicitous of everybody else except their own needs and community.”

I voted for Obama because he was going to win anyway, and all the other Jews vote against their own interest, so why not join them?

That's putting it a little different from the way he phrased it in his official endorsement:

I’m confident President Obama will continue his unambiguous commitment to the Jewish state in his second term.

Now Koch tells us, a mere two months later, that he never believed a word of that.

So why does anybody pay any attention to anything that comes out of his mouth?

At least the other Koch brothers mean what they say.

Performance-Related Bonus

Once the state swells to a certain size, reversing even minor excesses is exhausting, and a long shot. Here's a small example from my home town.

The Toronto District School Board relies for its maintenance of its facilities on something called the Maintenance and Construction Skilled Trades Council, a union that finds helping "the children" so rewarding that it works exclusively for the school board.

They're not exactly a bargain: For installing one electrical outlet, they charge $3,000. A new sign on the school lawn? $19,000.

The local media noticed this, and began investigating. Undercover reporters tracked "workers" clocking in at schools, and then bunking off for the day to drink at the local bar, chow down on maple creme donuts at Tim Horton's, or make out in cars.

These routine abuses weren't exposed by some easily demonized right-wing fringe figure, but by the Toronto Star, which is not only Canada's biggest-selling newspaper but impeccably lefty.

In the glare of the publicity, the school board (which had initially demanded an administration fee of $3.6 million merely for releasing public documents relating to the union contract) felt obliged to start burbling about maybe contracting out some services in the interests of "better value for taxpayers".

And yet, after all this, the Education Minister went ahead and renewed the union's contract anyway, in the interests of "stability."

And so taxpayers will enjoy the stability of $3,000 electrical outlets for a few more years at least.

My favorite line in the story is:

The Star was unable to reach trades council head Jimmy Hazel.

Perhaps because he's at his vacation paradise.

The Fiscal-Cliff Mirage

The politics of the “fiscal cliff” deal is debatable: On the one hand, Boehner got the “Bush tax cuts” made permanent for most Americans; Obama was forced to abandon his goal of increasing rates for those earning $250,000. On the other, on taxes Republicans caved to the same class-warfare premises (the rich need to pay their “fair share”) they’d successfully fought off a mere two years ago; while on spending the Democrats not only refused to make cuts, they refused to make cuts even part of the discussion.

Which of the above is correct? Who cares? As I said, the politics is debatable. But the reality isn’t. I hate to keep plugging my book After America in this space, but if you buy multiple copies they’ll come in very useful for insulating your cabin after the power grid collapses. At any rate, right up there at the front -- page six -- I write as follows:

“The prevailing political realities of the United States do not allow for any meaningful course correction. And, without meaningful course correction, America is doomed.”#ad#

Washington keeps proving the point. The political class has just spent two months on a down-to-the-wire nail-biting white-knuckle thrill-ride negotiation the result of which is more business as usual. At the end, as always, Dr. Obama and Dr. Boehner emerge in white coats, surgical masks around their necks, bloody scalpels in hand, and announce that it was touch and go for a while but the operation was a complete success -- and all they’ve done is applied another temporary band-aid that’s peeling off even as they speak. They’re already prepping the OR for the next life-or-death surgery on the debt ceiling, tentatively scheduled for next Tuesday or a week on Thursday or the third Sunday after Epiphany.

No epiphanies in Washington: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the latest triumphant deal includes $2 billion of cuts for fiscal year 2013. Wow! That’s what the government of the United States borrows every ten hours and 38 minutes. Spending two months negotiating ten hours of savings is like driving to a supermarket three states away to save a nickel on your grocery bill.

A space alien on Planet Zongo whose cable package includes Meet the Press could watch ten minutes of these pseudo-cliffhangers and figure out how they always end, every time: Spending goes up, and the revenue gap widens. This latest painstakingly negotiated bipartisan deal to restore fiscal responsibility actually includes a third of a trillion dollars in new spending. A third of a trillion! $330,000,000,000! Fancy that! In most countries, a third of a trillion would be a lot of money. But in the U.S. it’s chump change so footling it’s barely mentioned in the news reports. Then there’s the usual sweetheart deals for those with Washington’s ear: $59 million for algae producers, a $20 million tax break if a Hollywood producer shoots part of a movie in a “depressed area” as opposed to a non-depressed area, like Canada. I’m pitching a script to Paramount called “The Algae That Ate Detroit.”

In all the “fiscal cliff” debate, I don’t recall a lot of discussion of algae. But apparently it’s essential to the deal. And don’t worry, it’s paid for by all the new revenue -- an estimated $620 billion over a decade, or about $62 billion a year, which is what the government of the United States borrows every 13 days. But don’t worry, that’s a lot of algae.

We’re already broker than anyone has ever been ever. But this is America, where we can always do better -- or anyway bigger, and broker: Under the “deal,” the federal debt of the United States in 2022 is officially projected to be $23.9 trillion. That’s in today’s dollars, as opposed to whatever we’ll be loading up the wheelbarrow with in 2022. With “deals” like this, who needs total societal collapse? By 2050, the federal debt will be $58 trillion. But you won’t have to worry about a United States of America by then: It’ll just be one big abandoned Chevy Algaerado plant.

Around the world, the only interest of friends and enemies alike in this third-rate Beltway hokum is (to return to the theme of my book) the question of whether America is capable of serious course correction -- and, from debt ceiling to supercommittee to fiscal cliff and now back to debt ceiling, the political class keeps sending back the answer: No, we’re not. For a good example of how Washington drives even the greatest minds round the bend, consider Charles Krauthammer’s analysis on Fox News the other night:

“I would actually commend Boehner and Paul Ryan, who in the end voted ‘yes’ for a bad deal. But they had to do it.”

If courage is the willingness to take a stand and vote for a bad deal because you’ve been painted into a corner and want Obama to fly back to Hawaii at the cost of another $3 million in public funds that could have gone to algae subsidies so he’ll stop tormenting you for a week or two, then truly we are led by giants.

But is that all there is? As the old song says: What’s it all about -- algae? Is it just for the moment we live? What’s it all about when you sort it out -- algae? Are we meant to take more than we give?

If you think politics is a make-work project for the otherwise unemployable, then the system worked just fine. And I don’t mean only the numbers: On Monday, 300 million Americans did not know what their tax rates would be on Tuesday. That’s ridiculous.

Then the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell spent the night alone in a room with Joe Biden (which admittedly few of us would have the stomach for). And when they emerged they informed those 300 million Americans what their tax rates now were. That’s unseemly.#page#

Then, in the small hours of the morning, the legislature rubber-stamped it. That’s repulsive.

There’s a term for societies where power brokers stitch up the people’s business in back rooms and their pseudo-parliaments sign off on it at 3 a.m., and it isn’t a “republic of limited government by citizen-representatives.”#ad#

There are arguments to be made in favor of small government: My comrades and I have done our best over the years, with results that, alas, in November were plain to see. There are arguments to be made in favor of big government: The Scandinavians make them rather well. But there is absolutely nothing to be said for what is now the standard operating procedure of the Brokest Nation in History: a government that spends without limit and makes no good-faith effort even to attempt to balance the books. That’s profoundly wicked. At a minimum, the opposition, to use a quaint term, should keep the people’s business out in the sunlight and not holed up in a seedy motel room with Joe Biden all night.

The fiscal cliff was a mirage. If Washington was obliged to use the same accounting procedures as your local hardware store, the real national debt would be at least ten times greater than the meaningless number they’re now going to spend the next two months arguing over. That’s to say, we’re already over the fiscal cliff but, like Wile E. Coyote, haven’t yet glanced down at our feet and seen there’s nothing holding us up. In a two-party system, there surely ought to be room for one party that still believes in solid ground.

But hey, maybe we can thread all that algae into a climbing rope#...#

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn