According to Steve Scalise (R-La.), every other impeachment inquiry in the House has had bipartisan participation, and had made room for responses by the target of the impeachment.
None of that is happening now.
Now, Republicans generally are decrying the ‘unfairness’ of Adam Schiff’s efforts. But I do not see in the Constitution any real direction for how an impeachment should proceed. The complaint seems to be just about tradition. Surely the Democrats are within their bounds to proceed as they are — as foolish as that may be.
The question of ‘unfairness’ is especially idiotic, it seems to me. The place for a defense from the President is in the Senate trial, not in the House impeachment.
Were I a Republican, I’d drop the umbrage and take up laughter. The House Democrats are doing this wrong — IF (and that ‘if’ could not be bigger in iffiness were Facebook to allow me 122-point type) they want to get rid of the President. But that is almost certainly not what they are trying to do. They have to save their reputations, especially after the debacle of RussiaGate and the inanity of The Ukrainian Phone Call charge. Perhaps more importantly, they are desperate, considering the pathetic nature of their presidential hopefuls — Elizabeth Warren in the lead!!! The very idea!!!!
But we will see.
Incidentally, every time the Prez tweets about ‘unfairness’ I wince. Winners don’t bitch about unfairness. Losers do.
The sophisms of statism are fairly easy to understand. They come from the common errors and biases of limited human perspectives.
One of the most important of these is the problem of dispersed costs and concentrated benefits. Others include opportunity cost (in which we cannot see what was not chosen in any act or policy, no matter how important the given-up opportunity was in leading to the choice), the social science equivalent of the pathetic fallacy (in which we impute all social order to society-wide intentionality and planning), and over-reliance upon handy-dandy cognitive categories (which we then reify, treating as operative in the real world as causal agents that explain social events rather than as patterns of results that need to be explained). The superficial sense that statism makes is a matter of limited perspective, and the illusions of those limited relations. Think of it as parallax.
Statism is akin to the Flat Earth doctrine. We cannot see the roundness of the Earth from where we normally walk and sit or stand. Just so, piecemeal statist policies have the everyday common sense that the Flat Earth explanation has.
But, just as there is something worse than mere statism, there is something stupider than Flat Eartherism.
And that is Flat Moonism.
The three-dimensional roundness of the Moon is shown during its phases, by the curved shadow on its surface — while it might seem a flat disk during its Full phase, in all other phases but the New the spheroid is quite evident. Only rarely, when in eclipse, is the round-edged nature of the Earth evident in the same perspective — and only after one has watched lunar eclipses from different locations and at different times is the three-dimensionality of the Earth’s roundness directly observable, for ease of extrapolation.
So while Flat Eartherism should be seen as a tolerable error among the naive and unlearned, Flat Moonism is just stupid.
And what is the Flat Moonism of social thought?
Socialism. The doctrine of the Total State. Communism, if you prefer.
If statism be the Flat Earth fallacy, socialism is Flat Moonism — the evidence of socialism’s failure being ready-at-hand at almost any moment. There is no excuse for a careful observer of social life to be a socialist.
Lunacy!
How do you define “government bloat”?
It’s easy for someone like J.H. Levy, the fin de siècle economist from Britain. He argued that there should be no more government than is required for “freedom to be at a maximum.”
But how can a person who thinks there are no natural limits to government regard bloat?
Bloat is more than is necessary for good operations. But if everything and anything may be done, what is bloat?
You see, it is commonplace, in our time of barely restrained government, to pass new laws and erect new government programs not only without destroying old ones, but also without specificying what success or failure may be. Any program or law that gains a constituency of beneficiaries is therefore “necessary,” because no metric has been advanced to judge them. And since every program benefits SOMEONE, what is bloat?
What are the biggest, most neglected stories right now?
My nominations:
1. Deficit growth and debt ballooning. Trump and the Republicans somehow prove once again how much Republicans like spending.
2. Google caught admitting (behind closed doors) to working to hack the next election. An astounding attempt to game the system by rigging Google’s market dominance in search and online video. Yet almost no one talks about this.
3. Two branches of the U.S. military have admitted that military craft almost routinely encounter astounding physical craft not of any publicly known design or technology — that is, UFOs that are truly U for Unknown or Unidentified. These admissions mark a new turn in how our government handles UFOs. It is almost certainly the biggest story of our time, for whatever the explanation is, it tells us something that transcends normalcy. Something VERY WEIRD is going on. It could mark a civilizational moment. Yet people treat it as a curiosity at best. Sheesh. It solidifies my suspicion that humans are programmed irrational creatures, or at least beings of such limited intelligence and courage and astounding commitment to maintaining ideological stasis.
All in all, these three stories show that moderns in general and Americans in particular are quite narrow-minded, incurious fools.
So what stories compare?
My first nomination for a Fourth Big Story would probably have something to do with America’s relentless warfare posture, despite policy incoherence and repeated negative outcomes.
Another nomination is the possibility that our planet goes through repeated, cyclical catastrophes of an extraordinary violence . . . and we may be nearing one that HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ‘MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING. My deepest suspicion is that Anthropogenic Climate Catastrophism of the “global warming” variety is a psy-op designed to distract us from the science that is accumulating to demonstrate such catastrophes.
Wirkman Comment 