Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 586

Liberal Democrats Push Puerto Rico Oversight

Liberal Democrats in the House of Representatives introduced legislation on Friday that would subject Puerto Rico’s mutual funds to more stringent federal regulations, with the aim of giving Puerto Rican investors the same protections available to investors in the United States. The move, which comes two months after the fiscally-troubled island officially defaulted on some of its debts, shows that members of Congress are beginning to seriously consider what role, if any, Washington will have in alleviating Puerto Rico’s ongoing fiscal crisis. The WSJ reports:

The proposed law aims to establish federal oversight for Puerto Rico’s mutual-fund industry after investors in Puerto Rico municipal-bond funds sustained heavy losses as the island’s fiscal crisis deepened. Puerto Rico has faced a sluggish economy and high unemployment for years, and Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla in June called the island’s $72 billion debt load unpayable.

“It is outrageous that, when investing their hard-earned money for retirement, Puerto Ricans are not afforded the same transparency requirements and consumer protections that apply in the mainland,” Ms. Velazquez [Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-NY] said in a statement.

It’s clear that there hasn’t been enough supervision of Puerto Rico for some time; ultimately this is on the U.S. Congress, which needs to conduct a thorough review of the policies and laws governing the Commonwealth. Many Democrats will be inclined to offer Puerto Rico a full-fledged bailout, while fiscal hawks in the GOP will want to force the U.S. territory to find a way out of this mess on its own. But if Puerto Rico turns out to be as broke as is feared, then there will have to be tradeoffs, what we’ve before called “relief for reform.” As a U.S. territory, Puerto Ricans are entitled to meaningful assistance from the federal government on the condition that they undertake real, lasting changes to the policies that helped produce the crisis.

Public unions and other vested interests in Puerto Rico may not like the packages that Washington ultimately enacts, but while U.S. taxpayers have some obligations to help a U.S. territory, those obligations aren’t infinite and they don’t extend to enabling irresponsible behavior.

A Night at the Opera

My 2015-2016 opera season began last week at a performance of the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Otello. We’ll have a review up later by staff writer Nick Gallagher; the bottom line is that entire audience was swept away by the cast’s vocal pyrotechnics and the sheer power of Verdi’s music united with Shakespeare’s plot. Rarely does a Met audience rise for a standing ovation the minute the curtain falls; that happened the night we saw Otello, and the powerful emotions unleashed by the story moved more than one listener to tears.

One of our longstanding goals here at The American Interest is to do a better job of covering culture, and opera, the art form that brings instrumental music, the human voice, acting, dance (many operas have ballets in them), and design together, is one of our priorities. Opera has had a bad rap in the Anglo-Saxon world. Many Hanoverian and Victorian critics in Britain sniffily dismissed it as Italian emotionalism without the kind of moral tone and rational grounding in realistic theater that critics from Addison on thought should be part of the artistic experience.There was some truth to that in the way that opera was received in much of the English speaking world. Very few Brits or Americans actually bothered to study foreign languages, and without any understanding of the libretto, opera wasn’t exactly an intellectual pastime for many of those who filled the concert halls to hear it performed. At least until Wagner got his hands on it, opera was more like the pop music of the 19th century than its jazz. Serious People often thought about it the way they think about Broadway musicals today—there were a few good works in the old repertory, perhaps, but silly Disney movie makeovers developed for the mass out-of-town tourist audience are not the best respected art form around.Meanwhile, virtually every 19th-century novelist who wrote about opera performances stressed the degree to which the audiences were more interested in seeing, being seen, and carrying on love affairs than in paying attention to anything happening on the stage. Opera was the classic place where rich Philistines came to bask boorishly in music they neither understood nor respected.In 20th-century America, opera had something else going against it: As a “light” musical form that dealt heavily in emotionalism and spectacle, opera was something that women and gay men were passionate about—and that straight men were supposed to despise. The banker was supposed to snore through the opera that his social climbing wife forced him to attend; gay men, meanwhile, swooned over divas and worshipped at the shrine of Maria Callas. The one exception to the rule that straight men were anti-opera was for the true upper class elite, like Eustace Tilley and a handful of his peers. Loving opera was a sign of an aristocratic background and European tastes.That’s a lot of baggage for an art form to carry, and it does great credit to the Met and the other American opera houses that opera has, if not exactly flourished, at least established a firm foothold in the United States. Today, American opera is at a crossroads. The audience is aging (although there are some young faces to be seen at the Met these days); the cost of putting the “grand” in grand opera is becoming astronomical; and the entire genre of serious music to which opera belongs seems increasingly less engaging to a new generation growing up in schools and colleges where western cultural history is less and less a focus of instruction or concern.On the other hand, there are new opportunities as well. The widespread adoption of supertitles (or, in the Met’s case, those wonderfully inconspicuous back of the seat panels that discreetly flash the libretto in English translation), has changed the relationship of the audience to the drama. More than ever before in its history, opera today is a dramatic performance; audiences chortle, weep, and gasp in response to events on the stage, and singers are under more pressure than ever before to act convincingly. At the same time, the dramatic improvements in sound and video recording quality mean that high-definition broadcast and recorded versions of great opera performances can be enjoyed at a reasonable price by people all over the country. Beyond that, the increasing affluence of American society means that more people have the leisure to cultivate pursuits like the opera—and the income to support the art of their choice.So opera is becoming the kind of “rational entertainment” that Joseph Addison wanted it to be; enjoying it is no longer limited to the rich or to the geographically lucky. The world has never been as full of great singers and inspired instrumentalists as it is today; the level of technical training has never been higher. Not just at the Met, where performance standards have hit an otherworldly level of near-perfection, but even at less lavishly funded opera houses all over the world, the repertory today is routinely performed by better artists to more inspired direction in better halls than opera ever knew in its golden age.All the conditions for a new golden age seem to be present, and in many ways we are in a golden age of opera performance, but there is nothing like a golden age of operatic appreciation among the people at large, nor is there anything like a golden age of new operatic compositions that will give the golden oldies like Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, Wagner, Strauss, and Puccini a run for the money in the century to come.As we review performances and productions and write about the state of opera here at The American Interest, we are going to try to keep our eyes on the prize. We want to make the case for “classic opera” and convince readers that learning to appreciate opera is a vital part of a liberal education and an invaluable part of the good life. We also want to do what we can to encourage new work that holds promise, and see if our criticism in some small way can’t do what criticism really ought to be about: assisting and supporting the artists who seek to enrich human civilization with sublime new work that illuminates the human heart, rattles the cage of the human condition, and glimpses eternal truths and lasting values in the passions and struggles of both the great and the small in the lives of their times.

Get Ready for Abenomics 2.0

After successfully pushing a historic remilitarization effort through parliament, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is refocusing on economics, the Japan Times reports:

Formally re-elected head of the ruling party, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday he has set out three new goals for “Abenomics” and will target a 20 percent increase in gross domestic product to ¥600 trillion.

The three new economic policy goals include: promotion of economic growth, child-rearing assistance to push up the low birth rate and social security measures to increase nursing facilities for the elderly.

Abe has been promising economic growth since he ran for office, but he has had little to show for his efforts lately. From April to June, the Japanese economy contracted by 1.6 percent, dashing previous hopes that a sustained recovery might be taking hold. In an embarrassing turn of events on Thursday, Abe announced an end to deflation just hours before a report came out saying that prices had fallen for the first time since 2013.

Much of the downturn is driven by factors outside of Abe’s control. Japan’s economy has been hit hard by the Chinese slowdown. Furthermore, Abe came into office after decades of stagnation, so it was never realistic to expect a quick turnaround. Still, the United States has a strong interest in seeing Japan, which is the biggest regional counterweight to China, start growing.

Malaysia and China Conclude Military Exercises

In case you missed it, China and Malaysia held joint military exercises last weekend, the largest ever military collaboration between Beijing and an ASEAN country. China is Malaysia’s largest trading partner, and plans for these exercises were announced at the end of August. China’s official media organ, Xinhua, has the story:

Yi Xiaoguang, deputy chief of the General Staff of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, said in an address at the closing ceremony that during the exercise, the two sides have increased mutual understanding through sincere exchanges, enhanced mutual trust through close collaboration and promoted friendship through joint tasks.

Malaysian Deputy Defence Minister Mohd Johari Baharum said that the exercise has demonstrated how the armed forces of Malaysia and China can cooperate to achieve their goals.At a press conference held after the closing ceremony, Yi said China’s armed forces are willing to develop military-to-military relations that are non-confrontational and not directed against any third party.

We shouldn’t read too much into this development. In Asia’s Game of Thrones, Kuala Lumpur has kept Beijing at an arms length where possible, and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has a close, if low-profile, relationship with President Obama—the two men golfed together in Hawaii last December. Additionally, according to a recent report, the countries have been negotiating to give American spy planes use of Malaysian airstrips. Moreover, Japan and Malaysia upgraded ties in May, sending a clear signal to Beijing. Although these China–Malaysia exercises are noteworthy, they don’t appear to indicate a substantive change in Najib’s carefully-hedged strategy.

That could, however, change. Even if its foreign policy appears stable for the moment, Malaysia’s domestic politics are anything but: Najib is struggling to respond to corruption charges, and the United States Justice Department has now joined the intensifying investigation of his personal accounts. If Najib is forced to resign, we’ll be watching carefully to see if his successor (who would probably come from the same right-wing party which has ruled since independence) takes Malaysia’s foreign policy in a different direction.

Thailand May Get Its Own Great Firewall

The Great Firewall of China is an object of envy for authoritarian leaders everywhere, as it successfully controls the flow of information to and from over one billion people. No wonder, then, that the Thai government is looking to copy China with its own firewall. Tech in Asia reports:

Thailand already makes use of web censorship, but a single point of entry for web traffic will make it a lot easier for the country to set up blocks. With legal changes, it could mean that the government would no longer need to request internet service providers (ISPs) to block a site or take out court orders. Instead, it could mandate ISPs to implement a block with no legal recourse left for either the ISPs or citizens.

It is relatively easy for a government to block access to individual websites, but today’s internet carries much more than website data. From emails to messaging apps, a great deal of internet traffic often has no traditional web address. The Great Firewall blocks some messaging apps and encrypted Virtual Private Networks, in addition to thousands of websites like Bloomberg, the New York Times, and Google’s myriad services.

The Thai government’s move to copy that kind of control is of a piece with its other actions. A year after a coup drew the (empty) denunciation of the United States, the ruling military junta continues to trample on human rights. Just this past Tuesday, for instance, the government blocked the printing of the International New York Times because it featured a cover story about the declining health of Thailand’s 87-year-old king.This story is not just a cautionary tale about the future of internet freedom worldwide. It also underscores a point we made in February: Loudly chiding illiberal governments is not the best way to soften them. Stern State Department statements have not persuaded Bangkok to back down, and, with this latest effort to enhance their censorship abilities, Thailand’s leaders are making it clear they have every intention of doubling down on their authoritarian ways.

Reversing Course with Putin

On Thursday, the White House announced that President Obama would meet Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. For the past year, President Obama shunned the Russian strongman in an attempt to isolate him over the Russian occupation of Ukraine. What caused the president to reverse course and agree to a tête-à-tête? Obama’s decision was taken in the shadow of a significant Russian military buildup in support of the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria. By deploying Russian troops, Putin appears to have gotten what he coveted—an opening out of isolation.

Six years into the Obama presidency, the American concession in granting the Obama-Putin meeting is the latest in a long list of Kremlin victories. But the lopsided scorecard of U.S.-Russian relations during the Obama years is no coincidence. It can be explained by a fundamental flaw in President Obama’s worldview, one which Putin has repeatedly exploited: the idea that engaging rather than confronting hostile regimes incentivizes them to improve their behavior.This mindset predates Obama’s presidency. During his first presidential campaign, Obama proposed presidential meetings with even America’s most implacable enemies, as if American foot-dragging was a principal source of global problems. It would be “ridiculous” and “a disgrace,” then-Senator Obama argued, for the United States to refuse to meet our enemies on their terms. With a few carefully placed concessions, so his thinking went, an Obama administration would catalyze international cooperation and transform relationships by reassuring adversaries of our benevolence. The hard realities of power politics, including the temptation to use force in places like Syria, would fade as the mesmerizing attraction of engagement took hold. An era of American paranoia would be replaced by a new period of global cooperation.Tests of this theory with Russia have repeatedly produced less than encouraging results, however. Just a few months into his first term, in April 2009 during a visit to Prague, President Obama argued that the U.S. has “a moral responsibility to act” for the elimination of nuclear weapons because it is “the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon.” Shortly thereafter, the administration negotiated an arms control agreement with Russia that required only American reductions in nuclear warheads and strategic launchers. Today, Russia issues nuclear threats and continues to violate the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.Similarly, in September 2009, the Obama administration canceled missile defense installations in Eastern Europe as part of its much heralded reset with the Kremlin. Less than a year later, in May 2010, the president certified that the Russian invasion of Georgia “need no longer be considered an obstacle” to nuclear cooperation with Moscow. Four years after that? Russian troops invaded Ukraine and Moscow annexed Crimea. (Russian troops remain deployed across large parts of Georgia, creeping forward by the day.)In each instance, Obama has wagered the prestige, resources, and moral authority of the U.S. government on the hope that he can personally bend the arc of history. Time after time, Putin has preyed on Obama’s goodwill, and cleaned his clock. Indeed, beneath all the resets and rhetoric is a fundamental truth: what matter is not just the intentions of the president; the calculations of our competitors and enemies matter, too—and must be taken seriously.The implications are especially bleak for the Middle East. Obama’s commitment to ending the Iraq war helped propel him—perhaps more than any other issue—to the presidency. And his recoil from the assertion of American power and influence has only persisted. Last year, the president dismissed the need for a residual force in Iraq as “bogus” and “wrong” and declared himself undisturbed by the situation in Iraq’s neighbor to the west: “I am not haunted by my decision not to engage in another Middle Eastern war [in Syria].” Instead, he has channeled his energies toward negotiating the Iran nuclear accord, which facilitates Iran’s breakout from international sanctions in the hopes of moderating Iranian behavior.Today, U.S. influence in the Muslim world is at its nadir, not least because the American commitment to the moderate opposition in Syria is the laughingstock of the region, having produced only a handful of fighters. In London last week, Secretary of State John Kerry continued the charade, assuring the world that “we’re not being doctrinaire” on the timing of Assad’s departure—just the opposite, he promised, “we’re open” to “whatever.” By contrast, in conjunction with his Iranian partners, Putin has moved with alacrity and speed to deploy his forces, fill the vacuum, and shore up Assad—in Latakia, the ancestral homeland of the Assad regime, the latest reports are of up to 2,000 Russian troops on the scene, equipped with advanced fighter jets and anti-aircraft systems.This sets up a major showdown in New York on Monday. In Syria, Putin is altering the facts on the ground. Meanwhile, President Obama envisions a grand diplomatic settlement that results in Assad’s departure.If history is any guide, Obama is about to have his clock cleaned, yet again.

Putin: My Goal Is to “Rescue” Assad

In his meeting with President Obama on Monday, Vladmir Putin may press for outright capitulation to the Russian position on Syria. The Times of London reports:

In an interview with the CBS programme 60 Minutes, which is due to be broadcast on Sunday, the Russian president said he was “trying to save the Assad administration” and fight terrorism.

When asked whether Russian military intervention was designed to “rescue” Assad, Mr Putin confirmed: “Well, you’re right. And it’s my deep belief that any actions to the contrary – in order to destroy the legitimate government – will create a situation which you can witness now in the other countries of the region or in other regions, for instance in Libya, where all the state institutions are disintegrated.“We see a similar situation in Iraq. And there is no other solution to the Syrian crisis than strengthening the effective government structures and rendering them help in fighting terrorism, but at the same time urging them to engage in positive dialogue with the rational opposition and conduct reform.”

CBS has released some footage in advance:

We earlier that, despite the West Wing’s suggestions to the press that Putin was eagerly seeking the meeting, President Obama is in fact the one who needs the sit-down, as well as Russia’s help in taking the Syria crisis off his hands. At that time, it seemed Russia might give Obama a way out that saved some face. Now, it looks like Putin is seeking the serial humiliation of the sitting U.S. administration.The question is: Will the president cave again?

The Strategy That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Outlines of a Russian-mediated grand bargain on Syria are slowly emerging, with the deal allowing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to remain in power during a transitional period while a coalition to combat ISIS is put together. Some kind of bargain, whether it looks like Russia’s or not, may get international support. As we noted in yesterday’s morning email, murkily sourced reports suggest that both Saudi Arabia and Iran are guardedly open to some kind of compromise solution. Then yesterday afternoon, Germany’s Angela Merkel broke with the standing European consensus and stated that some kind of negotiated solution to Syria would include Assad, while Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that Ankara was open to Assad remaining in power during a transition phase, as long as the opposition was also included, and Assad stepped down at the end of the process. Now France, too, may be hopping on the bandwagon.

But the biggest question will be what happens when President Obama sits down with President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly on Monday. There, the Administration seems to be pursuing an odd strategy: It is insulting Putin even as it agrees to meet with him. As this NYT story illustrates, the White House is going to great lengths to make it look as if Putin is desperate to meet with Obama. This is probably one more triumph of short-term PR thinking over any kind of strategic approach—an attempt at trying to make President Obama “look” strong.Meanwhile, the West Wing’s core strategy in Syria is looking more and more like an attempt to keep the U.S. out no matter what happens—while making it look as if we care. What that strategy boils down to is letting Iran and Russia do pretty much what they want in the Middle East in the belief that the fight is too dirty for the U.S. to gain anything by participating in it. But because this strategy telegraphs weakness globally and threatens to destabilize the Middle East even more than we’ve already seen, it would go over very poorly in the U.S. if it dared to speak its own name.Perhaps Obama is hoping that Syria will become a quagmire for Iran and Russia that ultimately does to them what Afghanistan did to the Soviet Union. Perhaps he doesn’t think anything the U.S. can do will lead to a better result at an acceptable price, and so he is resigned to letting whatever hellish horrors erupt in Syria take their course. “Let the black flower blossom as it may”, as Hawthorne wrote in The Scarlet Letter.However, it really is Obama who needs the meeting more than Putin. At earlier stages in the crisis, mostly for PR reasons (and to quiet the anguished wails of people like Samantha Power who presumably objected to becoming a bystander in the worst case of mass murder since Rwanda), President Obama and his cabinet, believing that Assad’s regime would soon collapse on its own, unwisely publicly demanded that “Assad must go.” As it turned out, Assad didn’t really have to go. He just kept murdering people by the truckload, and Obama sat passively by. Now the president needs a fig leaf, and it would help Obama a great deal if Putin and the Iranians would do him the favor of getting rid of their Syrian ally.The other half of the president’s Syria dilemma is ISIS. Here again he needs to appear to be doing something, given the effect ISIS has had on American opinion. But his goal appears to be to look busy while doing as little as possible. A few random bombs here, some drone strikes there, a flashy-sounding train-and-equip program (that nevertheless peskily throws some truly embarrassing stories every so often into the daily news flow)—basically a PR effort that keeps the political heat off but doesn’t amount to more than the absolute minimum response.But one can tread water like this for only so long. The Sunni Arabs, who smell a betrayal of historic proportions, want him to concentrate on kicking the Shi’a power out of Syria. If he isn’t doing that, anything he does against ISIS without also taking on Assad underlines the degree to which he seems to be shifting U.S. support from the Sunnis to the Shi’a, enflaming the region in unpredictable ways. If the Russians and Iranians will do Obama the favor of getting rid of Assad—even if it is just setting him up in a lovely dacha outside Moscow for permanent retirement—then Obama has something to show to the Sunnis. He can then continue his desultory campaign against ISIS while hoping that, for reasons of their own, the Russians and Iranians will also help him turn the tide in that fight.So in practical terms, however it looks to the schedulers, yes, Obama needs the meeting more than Putin. The question won’t be what price will Putin pay Obama for help. It is exactly the other way around: How much will Putin charge Obama to help him out of the hole that an incoherent Syria and regional Middle East policies have left him in? One thing we can be fairly sure of, with respect to that question, is that Putin isn’t interested in helping Obama in any serious way. Dividing America’s alliances, undermining its prestige, and weakening its global position remains the pole star of Putin’s foreign policy. Lucy hasn’t asked to see Charlie Brown, that is, to apologize for pulling the football away.

How Long Can OPEC Keep It Together?

These are bad days to be in the business of selling oil. Or, maybe more accurately, they’re worse—much worse—than they were as recently as the summer of 2014. Brent crude, the stand-in benchmark used to describe the “global” price of oil, is trading today just above $48 per barrel, less than half of a high above $117 in June of last year. The price plunge has pinched the budgets of the world’s petrostates, but OPEC—led by its largest producer Saudi Arabia—has chosen not to cut production as it has during tight times in the past. Its strategy this time hinges on non-OPEC producers’ responding to market forces before petrostates run too far into the red, but some of the cartel’s more at-risk members are not pleased, to say the least, with the waiting game. Bloomberg reports:

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said on Sept. 16 that he was making progress on organizing a summit of petroleum exporting countries…OPEC member Algeria is backing the Venezuela-proposed conference—as well as Maduro’s desire for a higher price. Venezuelan officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Maduro’s plans won’t pan out unless Saudi Arabia stops flooding the market. There’s no sign it’ll retreat from that strategy, which is helping it preserve and even gain market share. “OPEC is of no use today,” says former Algerian Prime Minister Ahmed Benbitour. “The war now is about market share, not price, and Algeria is getting no benefit from this organization.” OPEC declined to comment for this story.Venezuela’s and Algeria’s complaints raise the question of why some members stay in OPEC if the Saudis call the shots and ignore pleas for higher prices. Neither Venezuela nor Algeria has made moves to quit. Not only is the group intact, but former member Indonesia is returning, boosting membership to 13 nations.

Saudi Arabia has a sovereign wealth fund worth well over half a trillion dollars that’s set aside to help endure times like these, but poorer OPEC countries like Venezuela and Algeria are in a decidedly different boat. Most petrostates took advantage of the prolonged period of high prices prior to the recent crash to boost social welfare spending to placate restive populaces, and they now face potential instability if they cut expenditures.

How long will OPEC be able to retain its membership if it continues to sit idle in the hope that high-cost producers will cut supply and send prices back up? With shale producers busy finding ways to boost production and increase efficiencies even at sub-$50 crude, there’s little reason to expect prices will rebound to the levels most OPEC members need to balance their budgets.But, then, why haven’t countries like Venezuela or Algeria left already? As IHS analyst Jamie Webster put it, they “don’t leave because they still believe there could be something in the future where the group does make a decision…It’s much easier to just keep OPEC alive than to shut it down, and with it a key communication channel.” The Saudis have locked OPEC in to a game of chicken with America’s shale industry, but members are getting increasingly restive as prices still look unlikely to rise anytime soon.

Speaker Boehner’s Nunc Dimittis

The big news out of Washington today is that Rep. John Boehner, the oft-embattled GOP Speaker of the House, is stepping down. The NYT reports:

Mr. Boehner, who was first elected to Congress in 1990, made the announcement in an emotional meeting with his fellow Republicans on Friday morning.

“The first job of any speaker is to protect this institution that we all love,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement released later. “It was my plan to only serve as speaker until the end of last year, but I stayed on to provide continuity to the Republican conference and the House. It is my view, however, that prolonged leadership turmoil would do irreparable damage to the institution. To that end, I will resign the speakership and my seat in Congress on Oct. 30.”

There will be plenty of loose talk about this news; young guns both right and left will be on it like chickens on a June bug. There will be hot takes and speculation about which GOP faction wins, what this means about the direction of American politics, what it says about the state of the nation, and so on.

Unfortunately, the boring truth is the political impact of this shift is likely to be minimal. In the history of the United States, there have been a lot of House Speakers. How many times do you remember reading historians write about how the departure of one of them led to or represented an important change in American politics. Speakers come and go all the time. They rise, they do their best (however good or bad that might be), and then they turn into filthy rich lobbyists. Boehner is about to move the decimal one point to the right in his salary.But if the move means little in the overall sweep of U.S. political history, Boehner himself is having a kind of Nunc Dimittis moment—an ending to his time as Speaker that is reminiscent of Simeon’s story (Luke 2:29-32) in which an old man, having seen the Messiah, informs God that he can depart this world in peace.The Pope has just concluded a high-profile, highly successful state visit, including an address to a Joint Session of Congress, that the Speaker, a devout Catholic, orchestrated. Boehner hasn’t been beaten, and his party has a majority in both houses of Congress. What better moment to hang out a shingle on K street? And a fascinating short report in the Washington Post by Robert Costas suggests that this is the way Boehner has been seeing things, too.Enoch Powell once said that all political careers end in failure. In America, they don’t have to anymore: You pick the right moment and cash in your chips. Boehner exited on a high note: in control of his caucus, with the Papal visit under his belt. He’s ready to ascend to a higher, happier—and much better-paying—realm.