Sundries

So, I read a two-line blip in TIME yesterday:

"$34,023: Amount of self-employment taxes Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner failed to pay on time from 2001 to 2004. The Senate confirmed him anyway, 60 to 34."

Well, hey, it's a time of trouble and crisis, and he's no doubt a smart guy, and President Obama wants him to help right our country, so expediency and better judgement once more trump tradition, and, I don't know, the law. Whatever, they know what they're doing, they're in charge!

The difference between our country and your average African governance cesspot used to be the Rule of Law. So what is it now?

Hey, also, this is cool:



(h/t clusterflock)

Which leads me to my final point--the chief difficulty with good governance in the states is that it takes so much time. William F. Buckley pointed out last year that we don't require anything more of our politicians than weak sentiment enshrined as law, instead of carefully thought out, highly descriptive legislation. We are, as a nation, routinely legislating "shoulds" that are then left up to professional bureaucrats to interpret and then apply in the form of crafting institutions and policy. How many of us have read the bailout package? How many of us know where to go to read the bailout package? No. I certainly haven't. Who has the time? There are a myriad of other, more entertaining things to do with my time. As long as it's titled "Stimulus Package," and discussed as such in sixty-second soundbites, we assume that's what it's supposed to do. If it works, we will praise President Obama, and if it fails, we will vilify...someone...and then demand change...in the form of someone else...who we will then ignore until he screws up or makes us angry. I mean, that's how we got into two wars and started torturing people without any form of due process and nationalized our banking system...all under a "conservative" "pro-business" president.

Yeah, the nation that used to celebrate heroes who would die rather than dishonor their country now cowers behind some sort of possible terrorism justification. "Who knows how many acts of terror would be committed if we didn't make some mistakes or violate our ethical boundaries in the pursuit of our enemies." Oh, I don't know, but I'd rather have terrorist attacks on our soil than commit our country to policies that violate our national morality. Our country will not fail if a few thousand citizens die horribly, or we lose an entire city to an epic disaster. We certainly made it through Hurricane Katrina without any abatement of our growth economy. And in an economic recession, dudes can still whip out cool YouTube content via their own creativity. The American dream can survive terrorist attacks--what it cannot survive is the death of it's commitment to human rights, liberties, and the rule of law that protects them.